3-7: CULTURE AND REFORM MOVEMENTS

EFFECTS OF BUSINESS EXPANSION

• Factory System

• Early factories were cotton-spinning mills

• Separated owners from workers

• 70% of goods produced in Northeast

• By 1850, value of industrial output surpassed agricultural production

EFFECTS OF BUSINESS EXPANSION

• Lowell System

• Relied on machines and technology

• Unskilled labor

• Labor force—young unmarried women and children

• By 1850s, women replaced by cheap immigrant labor (Irish)

• Periodic economic panics kept workers dependent

• Labor unions very weak

NORTHEAST POPULATION

• Immigration (1820-1860)

• Ireland—potato famine

• Settled in urban areas along Eastern seaboard

• Factory/construction workers

• Germany—political turmoil

• Settled farther west than Irish

• More money, more skills than Irish

• Nativism—opposition to immigrants

• Know-Nothing Party

• Hostile to Irish and German immigrants, particularly if Catholic

NORTHEAST POPULATION

• Urban Slums

• Neighborhoods segregated by ethnicity

• Poor water, sanitation, housing, transportation, safety

• Wealthy gained infrastructure first

SOUTHERN SOCIETY

• White Society

• Majority were small farmers

• Aristocracy dominated politics

• The “Peculiar Institution”

• Slave codes

• Slave life—religion, networking, marriage

• Infrequent revolts

• Underground railroad

• Free Blacks

• Heavy discrimination

• Some property rights

Slaveholders as Percentage of Population

No Slaves (75%)

1-20 Slaves (24. 3%)

20-50 Slaves (0.6%)

50+ Slaves (0.1%)

CULTURE

• Transcendentalism

• Tenets

• Simplicity

• Nature

• Emotion

• Imagination

• Emerson

• Thoreau

• Walden

• Civil Disobedience

• Moral case for opposing unjust laws

CULTURE

• Romanticism

• Tenets

• Reaction against reason

• Embrace of nature

• Betterment of mankind

• Literature

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Scarlet Letter—legacy of Puritanism

• Walt Whitman

• Leaves of Grass—love of nature

• James Fenimore Cooper

• Leatherstocking Tales—individualism

• Art

• Hudson River School

RELIGION

• Enlightenment (18th century) weakened position of churches

• Second Great Awakening

• Wave of religious enthusiasm

• Charley Finney

• Lyman Beecher

• Awareness of immorality of slavery

• Belief in improving the human condition

PERFECTIONISM

• Belief that humans can achieve a better life

• Mormon Migration

• Pushed west seeking religious freedom

• Utopian Experiments

• Brook Farm

• Morality regulated

• Cooperative lifestyle

• Oneida Community

• Open marriages

• Free love

REFORM MOVEMENTS

• Education• Public schools

• Feminism• Break from Cult of Domesticity

• Expanding Republican Motherhood

• Platform of legal and educational rights

• Seneca Falls Convention• Suffrage, property,

marriage/divorce, education

• Temperance

• Criminals—rehabilitation

• The Insane

• Abolitionism