Social Reform Movement 19th Century

America

For a More Democratic America

Temperance Movement

• Objectives and Goals: make alcohol illegal– Protect home from domestic violence – Prevent low wage earners from wasting money on

alcohol– INCREASE production rates

• 1851 Neal Dow secured prohibition in Maine– Maine Law was copied by other states

• 1874 Frances Willard founded Women Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU)

Drink was everywhere in early America. “Liquor at that time,” recalled the Massachusetts carpenter Elbridge Boyden, “was used as commonly as the food we ate.” Americans drank in enormous quantities. Their yearly consumption at the time of the Revolution has been estimated at the equivalent of three-and-a-half gallons of pure, two-hundred proof alcohol for each person. After 1790 American men began to drink even more. By the late 1820s imbibing had risen to an all-time high of almost four gallons per capita.

Why Women as Leaders?

Temperance

Improved Treatment of the Insane and Criminals

• Dorothea Dix – Sunday school teacher who turned advocate for helping mentally ill

• After seeing first hand the treatment of insane/mentally ill in prisons, she pushed the Massachusetts legislature for institutions to help them.

Improved Treatment of the Insane and Criminals

Abolitionism

Frederick Douglass

William Lloyd Garrison

Grimke Sisters Sojourner Truth

Degrees of Abolition

Moderates:Non expansionists:Keep slavery in the

South but not in new territories

Immediate Abolitionists (Douglass, Garrison)

End Slavery throughout the United States NOW!

Conservatives :Constitutional Issues/5th Amendment property rights• American Colonization Society: move freed blacks

to Liberia

Why would Northerners and Southerners be aggravated with immediate abolitionists?

• Northerners did not want to upset cotton trade with southerner planters (economic)• Southerners felt abolitionists

would provoke slave rebellions (political/social)

Slave Revolts

Denmark Vesey1822 Charleston, SC• Planned a massive

uprising • Plan leaked to slave

owners• Vesey and a dozen of

supporters were hanged

Slaves RevoltNat Turner (1831)

Richmond, VA Saw himself as Moses to his

people/Lead them to freedom Resulted in deaths of 60+ whites Turner was hanged and dozens of

slaves were killed in retaliation Consequences: Stricter slave

codes ( Illegal to teach slaves to read, no assembly, restricted travel, NO weapons!)

Public Education

• Industrialization demanded new skill sets from labor– Needed workers with skills to work with machines and

processes (Erie Canal, steam engine, engineering railroads)– Needed citizens with knowledge to participate in a more

complex society (intercontinental trade, increasing foreign trade, increased immigration, more eclectic society)

• Horace Mann- leading educational reformer– Standardized school calendars– TAX SUPPORTED schools– Abolish corporal punishment– Teacher training schools– Compulsory attendance

If you were a school teacher the 1850s, here are 13 rules to which you probably were required to adhere:• 1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys [lamp globes], and trim

wicks.• 2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and scuttle of coal for the day’s

session.• 3. Teachers will make their pens carefully. They may whittle nibs to

individual tastes.• 4. Male teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or

two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.• 5. After 10 hours in school teachers should spend their remaining time

reading the Bible or other good books.• 6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be

dismissed.• 7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his/her

earnings for his/her benefit during his/her declining years so that he/she won’t become a burden on society.

• 8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barbershop will give good reason to suspect his/her worth, intentions, integrity, and honesty.

9. The teacher who performs his/her labors faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of 25 cents per week in his/her pay providing the Board of Education approves.10. Teachers will maintain a garden on school grounds to provide additional food for themselves or students.11. Teacher candidates must be at least 16, be able to read and write, do simple arithmetic, and have a clergyman’s letter in hand attesting to their sound moral character.12. Teachers must attend a house of worship every Sunday.13. Teachers must keep the school clean, haul any necessary wood to keep the stove going, bring water from the well, and start a pot to boil in the morning so students who bring their lunch can heat it if necessary.

Women’s SuffrageSusan B. Anthony • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Women’s Suffrage

Seneca Falls Convention 1848

– First assembly for women’s rights

– Declaration of Sentiments

– Aligned women’s situation with slaves

– Modeled after the Declaration of Independence

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

• He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

• He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

• He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.

• Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

Review Major TermsDraw a line that connects the terms to the correct social reform

movement

• Temperance

• Mentally Illness/Health

• Abolition Movement

• Public Education

• Suffrage

• Neal Dow• Horace Mann• Frederick Douglass• Elizabeth Cady Stanton• Susan B. Anthony• Nat Turner • Maine Law• 19th Amendment• Tax supported• Seneca Falls Convention and

Declaration• Dorthea Dix

Compare and Contrast the Abolitionist movement to Women’s Suffrage

Abolition Women’s Suffrage

Commonalities