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Chapter 8 – A Push for Reform
Section Notes
Video
New Movements in America
Early Immigration and Urban
Reform
Women and Reform
Fighting against Slavery
Maps
A Push for Reform
The Great Irish Famine
History Close-up
The Underground Railroad
Quick Facts
Visual Summary: A Push for
Reform
Images
McGuffey Reader
Wave of Immigration
Working Conditions
Born into Slavery
New Movements in America
Main Idea
A revival in religion in the early 1800s helped lead to an
era of reform.
Reading Focus
•How did religion help lead to reform?
•What role did Horace Mann play in reforming education?
•What role did Dorothea Dix play in reforming prisons?
•What are transcendentalism and utopianism?
Religion Sparks Reform
• During the 1820s and 1830s Americans attended revivals and
joined churches in record numbers.
• This religious movement was called the Second Great
Awakening.
• Many preachers preached that through dedication and hard
work people could create a kind of heaven on earth.
• Across the country, tens of thousands of Americans became
determined to reform, or reshape, American life.
• The Second Great Awakening helped launch the Reform Era.
• From 1830 until 1860, many Americans attempted to reshape
American society.
• They were called reformers.
Religion Sparks Reform
• One of the main goals of the temperance movement
reformers was to reduce the use of alcoholic
beverages.
• Reformers wrote books, plays, and songs about the
evils of alcohol, which they linked to sickness, poverty,
and the breakup of families.
• In 1851 reformers persuaded legislators in the state of
Maine to outlaw alcohol.
• Over the next several years, some 12 states followed
suit.
Religion Sparks Reform
• Education reformers organized themselves and began
the common-school movement to extend and improve
public schools.
• The greatest school reformer of the Reform Era was
Horace Mann, who advocated a new, highly organized
approach to education.
• Education reform did nothing to help Native American
children or African American children.
• Mann’s school-reform efforts laid the groundwork for
education in the United States to the present day.
Reforming Prisons
• Dorothea Dix was a reformer who campaigned for humane
treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill.
• Moved by Dix’s plea, the Massachusetts legislature created
state-supported institutions to house and treat mentally ill
people separate from criminals.
• Dix and her supporters convinced other state governments to
create similar institutions.
• Before Dix began her work, there were no professional
treatment centers in the United States for the mentally ill.
• By the time of her death, more than 100 such institutions were
built across the country.
Transcendentalism and Utopianism
• Transcendentalist movement: members of this
movement believed in a philosophy called
transcendentalism.
• Transcendentalism is the belief that knowledge is found
not only by observation of the world but also through
reason, intuition, and personal spiritual experiences.
• Two leading transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
• Both expressed the transcendental belief that people
should be self-reliant and trust their intuition.
Transcendentalism and Utopianism
• Thoreau held that people should act according to their
own beliefs, even if they had to break the law.
• Another reform movement of this era was the utopian
movement.
• Some reformers believed in creating new communities
that would be free of social ills.
• These communities became known as utopian
communities, after the word utopia, which means “a
perfect society.”
Early Immigration and Urban Reform
Main Idea
A wave of Irish and German immigrants entered the
United States during a period of urbanization and reform.
Reading Focus
• Why did many Irish and Germans immigrate to the United
States in the 1840s and 1850s?
• What was life in the United States like for the new
immigrants?
• How did urbanization and industrialization lead to reform?
Irish and German Immigrants
• Since the 1700s, the poor people of Ireland had relied on the
potato as their staple, or major, food crop.
• From 1845 to 1849, a disease, or blight, struck the crop,
severely restricting the potato harvest.
• Deprived of their primary food source and receiving little relief
from the ruling British government, Ireland’s poor faced
starvation.
• By 1850 about 1 million had died during the Great Irish
Famine.
• Desperate to save themselves and their families, about 1.5
million of them settled in the United States.
Irish and German Immigrants
• Like the Irish, many Germans were fleeing conditions in
their homeland.
• Some fled economic depression and overpopulation, which
made jobs scarce.
• Others left to escape religious persecution, harsh tax laws,
or military service.
• Still others fled their country after a revolution in 1848
failed.
• Many Germans came to the United States in search of free
land and business opportunities.
• Push-pull model of immigration: factors that cause
people to leave their homeland are “pushes,” and factors
that cause people to move to a particular country are called
“pulls.”
The Lives of Immigrants
• Many immigrant groups to the United States have faced
discrimination.
• As the number of Irish immigrants grew, so too did these
feelings of nativism, or opposition to immigration.
• But the influx of a huge number of poor, Catholic, Irish
immigrants in such a short time changed many
Americans’ views.
• They began to regard immigrants as a threat to their
way of life.
The Lives of Immigrants
• Nearly as many Germans as Irish immigrated to the
United States in the mid-1800s.
• Fortunately for the Germans, they did not encounter the
same hostility that greeted Irish immigrants.
• Most German immigrants were middle class and
Protestant.
• They could afford to travel far inland, seeking free or
cheap land, reunions with relatives, or other
opportunities in the heartland.
• German immigrants worked as farmers, artisans, factory
workers, and in other occupations.
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
• By the mid-1800s, large American cities were home to
some tremendously wealthy people.
• The vast majority of urban Americans, however, were
very poor.
• Many city-dwellers lived in tenements, or poorly made,
crowded apartment buildings.
• Lacked adequate light, ventilation, and sanitation
– They were very unhealthy places to live.
• Disease spread rapidly in the crowded conditions.
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
• In some cities, local boards of health were established to
set sanitation rules.
• Enforcement was often uneven, and the poorer
neighborhoods received less attention than richer ones.
• Local reform societies reached only a fraction of those
who needed help.
• For the most part, the poor of America’s large cities
fended for themselves, helping their families, neighbors,
and friends as best they could.
• Serious efforts at reforming cities would not begin until
late in the century.
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
• Previously, most Americans had worked on farms.
– Worked for themselves, kept the profits they earned, and
made much of what they needed
• American factory workers were wage earners who were paid a
set amount by business owners.
• Using their limited wages, they had to buy the things they
needed from merchants in the city where they lived.
• A new social class arose: the urban working class.
– Most of them were poor and uneducated.
– Many were immigrants.
• Business owners wanted to maximize their profits.
– Resulted in low wages, long hours, and unsafe working
conditions for workers
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
• In the 1820s, workers began to organize into groups to
demand higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working
conditions.
• Labor movement: efforts by workers to improve their
situation
• Skilled workers, such as carpenters and masons, formed
organizations to regulate their pay.
• In 1834 several smaller groups united to form the
National Trades Union in New York City.
• The labor movement faced fierce opposition from
business owners and many government officials.
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
• The Ten-Hour Movement: a labor reform campaign to limit the
working day to 10 hours from the more common 12 hours or
more
• By 1840, all federal employees received a 10-hour workday.
• In the mid-1840s, New Hampshire became the first state to
limit the workday to 10 hours. Other states followed New
Hampshire’s example.
• Despite this success, laborers remained very much at the whim
of business owners. It would be decades before they made
substantial progress in improving their work conditions.
Women and Reform
Main Idea
After leading reform movements to help others, some
American women began to work on behalf of themselves.
Reading Focus
• What limits were placed on women’s lives in the early
1800s?
• What role did women play in the movements of the
Reform Era?
• Why was the Seneca Falls Convention important?
Limits on Women’s Lives
Legal limits
• With few exceptions, women could not vote or hold public
office.
• Other than marriage, they could not enter into legal contracts.
• When married couples with children divorced, the law awarded
custody of the children to the father.
Economic limits
• With few exceptions, married women could not own property.
• More than 60,000 industrial workers were women.
– Wages were low.
– The wages of married women were legally the property of
their husbands.
– Single women were expected to turn over their earnings to
their families.
Limits on Women’s Lives
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Widely held views
Women were inferior to men.
Women should attend only to household and family
duties—and to their husbands.
Matters of business, government, and politics should be
handled by men.
“A woman’s place is in the home” became a more
widespread belief during the Industrial Revolution.
Family life was threatened by taking women out of the
household to work.
Cult of domesticity: This movement urged women to
remain in the home environment. Books and magazines
praised the virtues of women staying at home, caring for
their families, and obeying their husbands.
Women in the Reform Era
• Women formed church societies that served as extensions of
their church work.
• Some of these groups evolved into reform societies—groups
that were organized to promote social reforms.
• The New York Female Reform Society was formed in 1834 to
promote moral reform or good behavior.
• Many similar groups were formed throughout the Northeast.
• Society members would visit poor neighborhoods, almshouses,
jails, and other places to provide religious instruction and
encouragement.
• Some members established homes for girls and women in
need.
Women in the Reform Era
• Women led the movement to reform education.
• Catharine Beecher ran a school for women, the Hartford
Female Seminary, in Massachusetts. Later, she opened the
Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio.
• Beecher worked to create normal schools and to send teachers
west to educate frontier children.
• Oberlin College in Ohio became the first American college to
welcome women as well as men in 1833.
• In 1837 Mary Lyon established the first women’s college in the
United States, Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
• Many women became teachers during the Reform Era.
• This gave them a fundamental role in shaping American life.
Women in the Reform Era
• Urban reforms during the Reform Era were implemented
largely by female reform societies.
• Women’s contributions to the labor movement arose from
their firsthand experiences as workers.
• Some of the earliest labor strikes were held by women
who were trying to improve their working conditions.
• Many participants in the temperance movement were
women.
• Because women were economically dependent on men,
they and their children were often the victims of men’s
excessive alcohol consumption.
The Seneca Falls Convention
• The Seneca Falls Convention was held in July 1848 in
Seneca Falls, New York.
• It was the first women’s rights convention held in
America.
• Many historians mark it as the beginning of the modern
American women’s movement.
The Seneca Falls Convention
Political power
• Many women wanted to obtain political power in order to
advance their reforms.
• Other women thought that political power should be
available to women because it was fair and reasonable.
• The time was right for women—who had long worked to
improve the lives of others—to fight to improve their own
lives.
The Seneca Falls Convention
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized
the Seneca Falls Convention.
• Mott was a prominent abolitionist.
• Stanton, like Mott, was also a dedicated and experienced
abolitionist.
• Mott and Stanton were motivated by their experiences of
discrimination at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in
London in 1840.
The Seneca Falls Convention
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Lucretia Mott called
a convention on behalf
of women’s rights.
• Held in 1848 in Seneca
Falls, New York
• Attended by about 300
people
• Produced the
Declaration of
Sentiments
• Written by Stanton and
signed by 100
participants—68 women
and 32 men
• It publicly stated their
belief that “all men and
women are created
equal.”
Fighting against Slavery
Main Idea
The movement to end slavery dominated the Reform Era.
Reading Focus
• What was life like for enslaved African Americans in the
South?
• How did people in the South fight against slavery?
• What were the major developments in the abolition
movement?
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
• Including the colonial period, slavery had been an
American institution for two centuries.
• Enslaved African Americans were held in every colony,
northern and southern.
• In the North, slavery continued to exist in some form
until the 1840s.
• By 1860 nearly 4 million African Americans lived in
slavery in the South.
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
• Enslaved men, women, and children worked every day of their
lives, from the time they were old enough to perform chores
until they were too old to be of any more use to the
slaveholder.
• Most enslaved people lived on farms or plantations in the
South, where cotton was a leading crop.
• They worked planting, tending, picking, processing, and loading
cotton.
• Other jobs included the many other tasks needed to maintain a
farm or plantation, such as constructing and repairing buildings.
• Other plantation slaves worked as servants in the slaveholder’s
house.
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
• Some enslaved people were skilled artisans, and many
worked as blacksmiths, bricklayers, or carpenters.
• Some slaves lived in cities where they worked in factories
and mills, in offices, and in homes.
• Others worked in mines or in the forest as lumberjacks.
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
A life of want
• Enslaved African Americans were provided with
inadequate food, clothing, and shelter.
• They seldom received medical care; sickness rarely
stopped their work.
• They had no rights under the law because it viewed
them as property.
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
• Many slaveholders treated their slaves relatively well. But they
generally did so in order to secure loyal service, not out of any
great sense of humanity.
• Some slaveholders used a wide variety of punishments, such
as beating, whipping, starving, and threatening a person’s
family members, to ensure obedience.
• Children were routinely separated from their parents, brothers
from their sisters, and husbands from their wives.
• African Americans developed ways to survive and bring some
light into their lives through religion, storytelling, and music.
The Antislavery Movement in the South
• In 1860, about 215,000 African Americans in the South were
free blacks.
– Former slaves who had been emancipated, or freed, by
slaveholders
– More typically, some were free because their ancestors had
been freed.
• They still faced harsh legal and social discrimination.
• Free blacks aided people escaping slavery and spoke out for
freedom.
Slave revolts
• An uprising led by Nat Turner in 1830 became the deadliest
slave revolt in American history.
• New laws were enacted to strictly limit the movements and
meetings of slaves.
The Antislavery Movement in the South
• Some enslaved people chose a nonviolent way to end their
enslavement—they escaped.
• They tried to reach the free states of the North or Canada or
Mexico, where slavery was illegal.
• No one knows exactly how many slaves escaped.
• Thousands attempted escape, and although most were soon
captured, many did make it to freedom.
• Underground Railroad: an informal, constantly changing
network of escape routes
• Sympathetic white people and free blacks provided escapees
with food, hiding places, and directions to their next
destination, closer to free territory.
• Harriet Tubman: famous Underground Railroad worker who
had escaped slavery and helped hundreds of slaves to freedom
The Abolition Movement
• The abolition movement was a campaign to abolish, or
end, slavery.
• No other movement attracted as many followers,
garnered as much attention, elicited such strong
feelings, or had such an impact on the history of the
United States.
• The abolition movement had deep roots in religion.
• Many religious people in the North saw slavery as a clear
moral wrong that went directly against their beliefs.
• By 1836 more than 500 antislavery societies existed.
The Abolition Movement
Abolition leaders
Opposing abolition
• William Lloyd Garrison:
published an abolitionist
newspaper for 35 years,
until slavery was abolished
• Sarah and Angelina
Grimké: sisters who were
outspoken campaigners for
abolition and women’s
rights
• Frederick Douglass: a
former slave, supported
women’s rights, but is best
remembered as an
abolitionist leader
• Southern slaveholders: an
attack on their livelihood,
their way of life, and even
on their religion
• Slaveholders and
politicians: slavery was
essential to the economy;
by 1860 cotton accounted
for about 55 percent of the
country’s exports
• Northern workers: freedom
for slaves might mean
more competition for jobs
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