Well hey there and welcome back to
Heimler’s History. We’ve been going through Unit 4 of the AP U.S. History
curriculum and in this video we’re going to talk about all the reform movements
that sprang up in the first half of the 19th century. So if you’re ready to get
them brain cows milked, let’s get to it. So in this video we’re basically trying to
answer the following question: How and why did various reform movements develop and expand
from 1800 to 1848. Easy peesy, lemon squeezy. Now the thing you need to remember about all
of these movements is that they were largely occasioned by the profound cultural and economic
shifts resulting from the Market Revolution, on which see the two videos I made on it. But
the short version is that the Market Revolution really embedded the idea into many Americans’
minds that economic improvement was largely in their hands by virtue of hard work and industry.
Additionally, with the movement of expanding democracy sweeping the nation, more and more
people felt that they had agency in the affairs of their nation. And this gospel of improvement
wasn’t hard to apply to social reform as well. So let’s consider these reform movements under
four headings. We’re going to talk about religious reform, temperance, abolitionism, and women’s
rights. So first, let’s get down to religious reform movements. Now in the last video we
talked about utopian communities like the Shakers and the Oneida community, so I’ll leave
them out of this discussion. But instead let’s look at a movement begun in the 1840s which
sought to reform Christianity. It was a new church established called the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, or for shortsies, the Mormons. The founder of Mormonism was a guy
by the name of Joseph Smith and as the story goes, he began receiving revelations from God one
day in Palmyra, New York. He was instructed in these visions to dig up some gold plates,
and with the help of a seer stone, to translate these tablets. Now it won’t be important for
you to know the content of all these visions, but the summary is basically this: the church of
Jess Christ had strayed from the true teachings and witness of CHrist, and Joseph Smith was
God’s appointed prophet to bring the church back into its true form. So he wrote these visions
down in what became known as the Book of Mormon. And as Smith preached to the folks in New York
and elsewhere, he gathered some devotees. But trouble began when he received subsequent visions
and instructions from God commanding polygamy, which in case you don’t know, is marriage
to multiple partners. The folks in Illinois, where Smith and his followers had migrated,
thought that multiple wives was a reform too far, so they subsequently arrested and lynched the
prophet. And so it was that the next prophet of the church, Brigham Young, took up leadership
of the Mormons and led them to migrate yet again, this time to the Utah territory,
where they hoped to be far enough into the frontier to avoid any
further anti-Mormon sentiment. Okay, now let’s turn our attention to the reform
movements centered around temperance. Temperance, when being defined, means the avoidance of
alcoholic beverages. In the first half of the 19th century, it’s not too much to say that
many people were deep in their cups. In fact, the general estimate is that for those who
drank, the average consumption was something like five gallons of hard liquor per person, and
that is a LOT of liquor. It’s like my grandpappy used to say, “Some people say the glass is half
empty. Others say it’s half full. And frankly I don’t care as long as it’s got whiskey in it.”
Now the temperance movement was induced by the Second Great Awakening. It really began
as a movement in the Protestant church through moral exhortation to cure social
ills by abandoning alcohol. To that end, the American Temperance Society was founded in
1826 by an association of clergy and businessmen. They directed most of their teetotalling efforts
at working class men who, by any measure, drank more than anyone. And because of the intensifying
moral influence of the Second Great Awakening, over 5000 chapters of the American Temperance
Society were established across the country. This movement eventually found supporters in the
halls of power and that’s when factory owners and politicians started enacting measures to crack
down on drinking. It was an especially attractive proposal to them since reformers claimed
that temperance could increase productivity and reduce crime. Now, Irish and German
immigrants rejected this movement, but at the end of the day, they didn’t have nearly
enough political clout to do anything about it. Okay, now let’s have a look at reform with respect
to abolitionism. Abolitionism was a movement to bring an end to slavery, and the folks who made up
this movement fell along a spectrum of those who wanted to bring a gradual end to the institution
all the way to those who wanted to end slavery immediately, no matter the cost to slave owners.
Again, the Second Great Awakening had a lot of influence here, especially convincing a lot of
folks that slavery was a sinful institution, and when understood that way, it made
any compromise very diffictul to reach. One of the main voices of this movement
was William Lloyd Garrison who published an abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator.
He argued that white folks needed to take a stand against slavery by means of moral
persuasion, not violence. And to that end, Garrison established the American Anti-Slavery
Society in 1833 which spread rapidly across the North. But even though Garrison argued for
persuasive means of ending slavery, that didn’t mean he wasn’t pretty radical. He believed that
slavery had to come to an immediate end and went so far as to publicly burn the Constitution,
claiming it was a pro-slavery document. Another sector of the abolitionist movement was
comprised of free blacks and escaped slaves, the most famous of which was the magnificent
orator Frederick Douglass. Douglass was himself an escaped slave who taught himself to read and write
after his master forbade such education. After escaping to the North, he found his way under
Garrison’s influence, but eventually broke away from him to establish his own movement. Douglass
published an exceedingly important book on his own experience with slavery called Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass. In it he emphasized the dehumanization that occurred not only in the
person who was enslaved, but also the simultaneous dehumanization that had to occur in the slave
holder in order to perpetuate the institution. And finally, let’s have a look at women’s
rights during this period. This movement grew up right alongside the abolitionist movement.
And many women who were members of the American Anti-Slavery Society found within themselves a
growing frustration that although they wanted to advocate for abolitionism, their status as women
made that difficult. Remember in the last period we talked about the cult of domesticity and the
idea of separate spheres for men and women in society. Under that scheme, the moral reformation
of society was man’s work, not for the ladies who might injure themselves if they thought too hard
about an issue. Regardless, many women decided that if they were going to advocate the way they
wanted to, they needed more rights for themselves. And that’s how you get the Seneca Falls Convention
in 1848. This was a convention called to address women’s rights in American society and it was led
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Under their leadership the convention drafted a document
codifying their desires known as the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which was cast
in the form of the Declaration of Independence, and said this: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…” Oooh, saucy. It goes on to list
the grievances of women against a society that has repeatedly disenfranchised them and treated
them as second-class citizens. Now their efforts wouldn’t bear the fullness of its fruit for
another seventy years or so, but this was the time when women planted their flag in the ground
and refused to give up what was rightfully theirs. Alright, that’s what you need to know
about UNit 4 Topic 11 of the AP U.S. History curriculum. If you need help getting an
A in your class and a five on your exam in May, then click here to grab my Ultimate Review Packet.
Click on this playlist right here for more videos on Unit 4. And if you want me to keep making these
videos, then by all means, subscribe. Heimler out.
