ANTEBELLUM REFORM MOVEMENTS

& KINDLING FOR WARSubtext: Where’s Lincoln?

Cynthia Szwajkowski, Ph.D.

Library of Congress (TPSNVA)

WHO & WHAT IS AMERICAIN THE 19TH CENTURY

LET’S SET THE STAGE

AMERICAN INFANCY GIVES WAY TO TURBULENT TEENAGE

YEARS

WE FIND OURSELVES: ARTISTICALLY PHILOSOPHICALLY & INTELLECTUALLY POLITICALLY

AS TYPICAL TEENAGERS, WE DEMAND CHANGE

Who Were Americans in the Antebellum period?

Voters - The Envy of the World Unique, relatively classless system Religious – owned a Bible &

Shakespeare Land Hungry – Manifest Destiny – “Vote

Yourself a Farm” – Mexican-American War Literary focus - Self-reliance

The peasant's wife and Congress reasoned in the same fashion.

Tocqueville

Bustling Northern Cities

Southern counterpart

Broadside by Anti-Slavery Society,William Dorr & Theodore Weld 1835

“When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can discover only two modes of action for the white inhabitants of those States: namely, either to emancipate the Negroes and to intermingle with them, or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831

REFORM MOVEMENTS1. ABOLITION2. TEMPERANCE3. EDUCATION4. WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

Stemming from: RELIGION: 2ND GREAT AWAKENING TRANSCENDENTALISM WESTERN EXPANSION & THE

MEXICAN AMERICAN WAR THE VOTE & THE FARM

As early as 1841, Lincoln wrote that “slavery had the power of making me miserable”.

TRANSCENDENTALISMAMERICAN RENAISSANCE

1837 – 1848, or ‘til today

Transcendentalists affirm some of the best qualities characteristic of American civilization: Self-reliance, a willingness to question authority, a quest for spiritual nourishment. These writers made us

self-consciously aware of who we are.

Transcendentalists

Education for all Women’s rights Temperance Anti-slavery

EMERSON IS A ROCK STAR at the Lyceums

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden Pond

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”Read The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail with Mexican-American war.

TheApostle

OfIndividuality

Walt WhitmanAMERICA HAS NOT FOUND A POET

WORTHY OF THE NATION’S “AMPLE

GEOGRAPHY” & “INCOMPARABLE

MATERIALS”.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I WILL ENCOMPASS ALL OF AMERICAN NATURE AND DEMOCRACY BY MY CELEBRATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL.”

“I celebrate myself; / And what I assume you shall assume;

For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”

~Walt Whitman

.

Margaret Fuller challenged Emerson & helped meld transcendentalism,

anti-slavery & women’s rights

If the negro be a soul, if the woman be a soul, appareled in flesh, to one master only are they accountable.

~ Margaret Fuller

Harriet Beecher StoweReverand Lyman & Roxanna Beecher expected their children to shape their world: ~7 sons became ministers ~Oldest daughter Catharine pioneered education for women ~Youngest daughter Isabella founded the National Women's Suffrage Association ~Harriet believed her purpose in life was to write. Her most famous work exposed the truth about the greatest social injustice of her day

- human slavery

1852 - Uncle Tom's Cabin can be read as a point of arrival in a long American quest to evolve a morality out of the Puritan heritage, the words of the chartering documents of the Republic, the ethos of the Enlightenment, and the values of Transcendentalism.

See Reader’s Theatre

DEBATE AMONG PROPONENTS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Harriet Beecher Stowe believed that change could only come through “acceptable female behavior” such as writing.

From Slave Culture to Quaker to Abolitionist to Feminist

Angelina Grimke & Harriet & Catherine Beecher Stowe debated on newspaper & magazine covers. Angelina & Sarah Grimke believed women could play the same roles as men.

RELIGION SECOND GREAT AWAKENING METHODISTS EMOTIONAL Fascinationwith exotic,mysterious& occult Some femaleMinisters Itinerant

Methodist camp meeting, March 1, 1819Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. (1860)

Sojourner Truth Ex-slave Isabella van

Wagener obeys God’s command to change her name & become a preacher

On revival circuit, she entrances anti-slavery audiences.

On women’s rights:

“I could work as much…and bear the lash as well as a man & aren’t I a woman?”

Title: Lincoln showing Sojourner Truth the Biblepresented by colored people

of Baltimore.

Executive MansionWashington, D.C.Oct. 29, 1864

Library of Congress

Seneca Falls – 1848

Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Lucretia Mott met over Abolitionism (in London) Elizabeth Cady Stanton included a demand for Women’s suffrage in the Declaration of

Sentiments but took a broad view of women’s lives & combined her public role with wife & Mother of 7.

They met Susan B. Anthony who was working in Temperance And welcomed Frederick Douglass

Seneca Falls

Abigail Adams - Remember the Ladies

Declaration of Sentiments – Seneca Falls

BOTH ABOLITIONISM & WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE:

PROMOTED THE EXPANSION OF THE AMERICAN PROMISE OF LIBERTY & EQUALITY – TO African Americans & to women

At the FIRST WOMEN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION IN SENECA FALLS –Frederick Douglass, the Motts, Wrights, Stantons, McClintocks & Hunts – all active abolitionists

The Antislavery – Women’s Suffrage Connection

“Women can neither take the Ballot nor the Bullet…therefore to use, the right to petition is the one sacred right which we ought not to neglect.”

Susan B. Anthony, Address to the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1863

AND OTHER CONNECTIONS…

BOTH AFRICAN AMERICAN AND WOMEN’S MOVEMENT REACH MOST OF THEIR GOALS WITH THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

NATIVE AMERICANS PART OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SUPPORT

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/herstory/

TEMPERANCE PROMOTED BY THE

PREACHERS OF THE 2ND GREAT AWAKENING

TAKEN UP BY WOMEN ACTIVISTS

MOST AMERICANS DRINKING 4 GALLONS OF LIQUOR PER YEAR.

Daughter of temperance: Virtue, love and temperance [between 1835 and 1856]

Celebrating the Constitutional Convention First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry Archives, 1774 City Tavern George Washington-Entertainment of 15 Sept., 1787 To 55 Gentlemans Dinners & Fruit (pounds shillings - pence) Rellishes, Olives etc....................................... 20 12 6 54 Bottles of Madera...................................... 20 5 60 of Claret ditto.......................................... 21 8 ditto of Old Stock....................................... 3 6 8 22 Bottles of Porter ditto................................. 2 15 8 of Cyder ditto............................................. 16 12 ditto Beer................................................ 12 7 Large Bowels of Punch.................................. 4 4 Segars Spermacity candles etc......................... 2 5 To Decantors Wine Glass [e]s & Tumblers Broken etc............... 1 2

6 To 16 Servants and Musicians Dinners................................... 2

16 Bottles of Claret........................................ 5 12 5 ditto Madera............................................... 1 17 6 7 Bouls of Punch............................................ 2 16 £89 4 2

Composite of two illustrations:

1. Rev. L. Armstrong, Dr. B.J. Clark, Gardiner Stow, and James Mott around table with Holy Bible, Temperance Constitution, and Blackstone's Commentary

2. The Mawney House in which was organized the first temperance society

Library of Congress

THE FOCUS OF ALL THESE REFORM MOVEMENTS BECOMES ABOLITION

“THE GREATEST DANGER TO AMERICAN SURVIVAL … WAS SECTIONAL CONFLICT BETWEEN North and South over the future of slavery.

~James McPherson, Battlecry of Freedom

Sectionalism which had always existed in America became increasingly acute with the rise of abolition in the 1830s.

RAN AWAY activity

Lincoln: The spectacle of slavery was a “continual torment to me.”

Frederick Douglass -4th of July Speech

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON & THE LIBERATOR

In addition to William Lloyd Garrison & the Liberator, Old Man

Eloquent kept up the call to end the GAG Rule.

“Am I gagged or am I not?”J. Q. Adams

JQA led the fight against the Gag rule from 1836 - 1844

Over 130,000 petitions praying for action against slavery led to “tabling” of all such petitions after 1836.

OLD MAN ELOQUENT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZFZ3Lg2JI&feature=related

Missouri Compromise - 1820

MEXICAN AMERICAN WAR

Freshman Whig Congressman on Polk’s call for war:

“(Polk) is avoiding the scrutiny of his own conduct…by fixing the public eye upon military glory—that rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms but to destroy.

(Polk) talked like an insane man…His mind, taxed beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove.”

“This House ought to assert, in the strongest manner, this right to call for information; and especially in such cases as those where questions of war and peace are depending.”

~ Old Man Eloquent when Polk refused to give all communications regarding the situation to Congress BEFORE they would consider a declaration of war.

“Should it go abroad that all the power we have here, as the people’s representatives, is to record the edicts of a master?”

~ Robert Schenk, Ohio Whig

LINCOLN’S SPOT RESOLUTION

Lincoln is a Whig

In 1849, Lincoln Drafted a gradual Abolition bill for D.C.

http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/timeline_flash.html

Extension of MO Compromise considered

1849 – 1850

Henry Clay on the floor of the Senate. Millard Fillmore presides as Calhoun & Webster look on.

Violence in the Senate

Library of Congress

Compromise of 1850 – includes Fugitive Slave Law

Seward’s Higher Law

Lincoln in 1852

(if the Republic could remove the danger of slavery and restore a) “captive people to their long-lost fatherland that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change (then) it will indeed be a glorious consummation”.

Kansas- Nebraska Act 1854

Reynolds's political map of the United States, designed to exhibit the comparative area of the free and slave states and the territory open to slavery or freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise

Buchanan

Lewis Cass

Stephen Douglas

Franklin Pierce

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?

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Whigs & Conscience Whigs final split over Kansas-Nebraska Act

Lincoln & others begin to believe that it is all a sinister Southern plot to extend slave territory and extend southern power in Washington

New, all-Northern Republican Party emerges. Free land (no extension of slavery), Free land (Homestead Act)

1855

HAVE WE REACHED THE POINT AT WHICH CIVIL WAR IS

INEVITABLE?

THE LANGUAGE OF THE YEARS

See Reader’s Theatre

MEET CHARLES FINNEYAND THEODORE WELD AND ANGELINA

GRIMKE – History through Biography

Ways to Organize Info from a Biography Flip Book Fact Sheet Character Map Web Fanny Pack or Bio Cube or brown bag Reenactment Collage