Name Period Date AP US History Mr. McAuley

TEST: Antebellum Society

In 1831 Lowell was little more than a factory village. Several corporations were started, and the cotton-mills belonging to them were building. Help was in great demand; and stories were told all over the country of the new factory town, and the high wages that were offered to all classes of work-people,-stories that reached the ears of mechanics' and farmers' sons, and gave new life to lonely and dependent women in distant towns and farmhouses. . . . The widow came with her little flock and her scanty housekeeping goods to open a boarding-house or variety store, and so provided a home for her fatherless children. Many farmers' daughters came to earn money to complete their wedding outfit, or buy the bride's share of housekeeping articles. . . . Troops of young girls came by stages and baggage-wagons, men often being employed to go to other States and to Canada, to collect them at so much a head, and deliver them at the factories. 

Harriet Robinson, Loom and Spindle; or, Life among the Early Mill Girls, 1898

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“There is so little principle in the church, so little firmness and stability of purpose, that [unless the religious feelings are awakened and kept excited, counter worldly feelings and excitements will prevail, and men will not obey God.]…Many good men have supposed, and still suppose, that the best way to promote religion, is to go along uniformly, and gather in the ungodly gradually, and without excitement. But however such reasoning may appear in the abstract, facts demonstrate its futility.” Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 1835, with 1868 revisions

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“The existence of chattel slavery in a nation that claimed to be Christian, and the use of Christianity to justify enslavement, confronted black Evangelicals [Protestants] with a basic dilemma, which may be most clearly formulated in two questions: What meaning did Christianity, if it were a white man’s religion, as it seemed, have for blacks; and, why did the Christian God, if he were just as claimed, permit blacks to suffer so? In struggling to answer these questions, a significant number of Afro-Americans developed a distinctive evangelical tradition in which they established meaning and identity for themselves as individuals and as people. Simultaneously, they made an indispensable contribution to the development of American Evangelicalism.”

Albert J. Raboteau, historian, African American Religion, 1997

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“The religious history of the early republic’s Second Great Awakening encapsulates two contradictory tendencies: a rising value on women’s special piety and enthusiastic participation, coupled with an ever-louder chorus of admonitions about women’s God-ordained subordination to men.”

Patricia Cline Cohen OAH Magazine, Winter 2000

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“Everyone acquainted with southern slaves knows that the slave rejoices in the elevation and prosperity of his master; and the heart of no one is more gladdened at the successful debut of young master or miss on the great theatre of the world than that of either the young slave who has grown up with them and shared in all their sports, and even partaken of all their delicacies—or the aged one who has looked on and watched them from birth to manhood, with the kindness and most affectionate solicitude, and has ever met from them all the kind treatment and generous sympathies of feeling, tender hearts. Judge Smith…said in an emergency he would rely upon his own slaves for his defense—he would put arms into their hands, and he had no doubt they would defend him faithfully. In the late Southampton insurrection, we know that many actually convened their slaves and armed them for defence, although slaves were here the cause of the evil which was to be repelled.”

Thomas Dew, President of the College of William and Mary, 1832William Harper, James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Roderick Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument

(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1853)

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“Still, though a slaveholder, I freely acknowledge my obligations as a man; and I am bound to treat humanely the fellow creatures whom God has entrusted to my charge … It is certainly in the interest of all, and I am convinced it is the desire of every one of us, to treat our slaves with proper kindness.

Letter from former South Carolina governor James Henry Hammond, 1845 “Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of Liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and denounce … slavery ‘the great sin and shame of America’!”

Frederick Douglass, speech titled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 1852

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“Is there no danger to the Democracy of the country from such formidable foes arrayed against it? Is Metternich its friend? Is the Pope its friend? Are his official documents, now daily put forth, Democratic in their character? O there is no danger to the Democracy; for those most devoted to the Pope, the Roman Catholics…are all on the side of Democracy. Yes; to be sure they are on the side of Democracy. They are just where I should look for them. Judas Iscariot joined with the true disciples.”

Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States, 1835Interpretation:

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“The making of the New York canals did not really cost the people of the state the value of one cent, except so far as foreign materials may have been employed in the construction of them,…On the contrary, they gave a large and wholesome

circulation to money, and enriched many individuals; and the increased value of property, and of profit, resulting from them, must be supposed by counting up hundreds of millions of dollars, if indeed, the benefits of them be within supposition at all!”

Hezekiah Niles, “Great National Interests,” 1826

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