Chapter 14

New Movements in America1815 - 1850

I. Immigrants and Urban Challenges

• Between 1840-1860 – 4 million European immigrants

• Irish Potato Famine– 1841 – potato blight (fungus) kills Irish potatoes– Irish go to U.S. to escape starvation– Very poor, worked unskilled jobs in cities, low wages

• German Revolution– 1848 – revolution against harsh rule fails– Germans go to U.S. to escape political persecution– Settled in Midwest on farms and rural areas– Some worked low paying jobs (seamstress, bricklayer, clerks, etc.)

Anti-Immigration Movements

• Native-born Americans feared losing jobs to immigrants willing to work for less

• Nativists: Americans opposed to immigration• 1849 – Know-Nothing Party: supported

measures making it difficult for foreigners to hold public office

Rapid Growth of Cities

• Cities grow because of jobs and transportation• Middle Class: social and economic level between

the wealthy and the poor• Entertainment– Libraries– Theater and concerts– Playing cards– Bowling, boxing, baseball

New York Knickerbockers1862

Urban Problems

• City residents lived near workplaces – many lived in tenements: poorly designed apartment buildings that housed large numbers of people

• Dangers:– No clean water– No health regulations– Fire– Crime– Ways to remove waste

II. American Arts

• Transcendentalism: belief that people could transcend, or rise above, material things in life (simplicity and individualism)

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller

• Utopian Communities: groups of people who tried to form perfect societies

American Romanticism• Great interest in nature, emphasis on individual expression,

and rejection of established rules• Artists:

– Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter– Herman Melville – Moby Dick– Edgar Allan Poe – “The Raven”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – “Paul Revere’s Ride”– Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass– Washington Irving – Legend of Sleepy Hollow– Emily Dickinson – well known female poet

III. Reforming Society

• Second Great Awakening: 1790-1800s – Christian renewal movement – led to movements to fix social problems

• Temperance Movement: urged people to stop drinking alcohol – thought alcohol caused violence, poverty, and crime

Prison Reform

• Dorthea Dix: reformed prison cells and treatment of prisoners – created hospitals for mentally ill

• Others built reform schools for children

Improvements in Education

• Common School Movement: children were taught in a common place, regardless of background – created by Horace Mann

• Schools and colleges for women opened • Thomas Gallaudet: founded first free school

for the hearing impaired in 1817

African American Communities

• African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church • 1835 – Oberlin College becomes first to accept

African Americans• Some opportunity to attend schools in North

and Midwest – very limited in South – – illegal for slaves to learn to read and write– slaveholders feared revolt

IV. The Movement to End Slavery

• Abolition: complete end to slavery

• Quakers were among the first abolitionists

• Abolitionists differed though on treatment of African Americans

• Colonization: establish a colony for free slaves in Africa - Liberia

Famous Abolitionists

• William Lloyd Garrison: published The Liberator – founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833

• Sarah and Angelina Grimke: white southerners – wrote Appeal to the Christian Women of the South in 1836

Garrison’s 1st Anti-Slavery Speech• I. That the slaves of this country, whether we consider their moral, intellectual or

social conditions, are preeminently entitled to the prayers, and sympathies, and charities, of the American people; and their claims for redress are as strong as those of any Americans could be in a similar condition.

• II. That, as the free States—by which I mean non-slave-holding States—are constitutionally involved in the guilt of slavery, by adhering to a national compact that sanctions it; and in the danger, by liability to be called upon for aid in case of insurrection; they have the right to remonstrate against its continuance, and it is their duty to assist in its overthrow.

• III. That no justificative plea for the perpetuity of slavery can be found in the condition of its victims; and no barrier against our righteous interference, in the laws which authorize the buying, selling and possessing of slaves, nor in the hazard of a collision with slaveholders.

• IV. That education and freedom will elevate our colored population to a rank with the white—making them useful, intelligent and peaceable citizens.

Famous Abolitionist

• Frederick Douglass: escaped slave who learned to read and write – published The North Star

• Sojourner Truth: former slave who gave dramatic anti-slavery speeches

Frederick Douglass Writings• (1851) “The opinion was ...

whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion I know nothing.... My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant.... It [was] common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age."I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day. ... She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone."

• (1882) “I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the 'quick round of blood,' I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.”

The Underground Railroad

• Network of people who arranged transportation and hiding places for fugitive or escaped slaves

• Harriet Tubman: most famous “conductor” – helped over 300 slaves to freedom

Opposition to Ending Slavery

• Northern workers feared freed slaves would take their jobs

• Southerners saw it as a threat to way of life socially and economically

• Gag Rule: forbade House of Representatives to discuss anti-slavery petitions – overturned by John Quincy Adams as violation of 1st Amendment

V. Women’s Rights

• Fighting for African American rights led many female abolitionists to fight for women’s rights

• Margaret Fuller: wrote Women in the 19th Century in 1845 – stressed individualism

• Critics of women’s rights pointed to traditional roles for women in the home

Seneca Fall Convention

• First public meeting about women’s rights held in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott

• Declaration of Sentiments: detailed beliefs about social injustice toward women – modeled after Declaration of Independence

Famous Women’s Rights Leaders

• Lucy Stone: gifted women’s rights speaker

• Susan B. Anthony: turned women’s rights into a political movement for equality and voting

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton: founder of the National Women’s Suffrage (voting) Association