Antebellum Idealism and Reform Impulses, 1820s–1850s

This is Unit Thirteen, part one, on the religious revival and the communities that grew out of it. Unit Twelve closed by promising the movements that formed against all of that. They begin here, and they begin in a church rather than in politics. Carry one belief through everything. These reformers expected the Kingdom of God to be established on earth, soon. People who believe the world can be perfected will try to perfect it, and every movement in this unit comes from that. Watch it produce two communities that started from the identical doctrine and ended in opposite places — one prohibiting sexual intercourse entirely and the other instituting communal marriage. There is an entry that puts them side by side, and it is the sharpest thing in this lecture. By the end you will be able to explain why millennialism is the engine here. To say why slaveholders reversed themselves on Christian instruction. To explain how one premise produced opposite practices. To say what the burned over district was. And to state the anchor's claim about drinking.

Five entries to establish the revival, and the fourth is the one to hold on to.

The revival itself.

USH1 1801 The Second Great Awakening

Antebellum reform drew on a Protestant revival called the Second Great Awakening, which emphasised emotional religious expression and personal spiritual rebirth, with itinerant ministers preaching to hundreds of listeners at outdoor camp meetings. Unit Four covered the First Great Awakening of the seventeen thirties. This is the second, and it runs the other way theologically.

What it rejected.

USH1 1802 Against Predestination

The revival's emphasis on personal salvation rejected predestination, the Calvinist belief that God had selected only certain people to be saved — a religious individualism matching the Jacksonian celebration of the ordinary individual. A doctrine that anyone may be saved by their own turning is a democratic claim as much as a theological one.

Where it began.

USH1 1803 Where the Revival Began

The movement began in Kentucky and Tennessee in the seventeen nineties and early eighteen hundreds among Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, arising amid swift population growth, western expansion and participatory democracy. Those rapid changes created anxiety, and egalitarian, emotional worship offered comfort against it.

What its followers expected.

USH1 1804 Millennialism

Participants adopted millennialism, the fervent belief that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth and that God would reign for a thousand years — an expected age of harmony and Christian morality, arriving soon. People who believe the world can be perfected will try to perfect it, which is where every reform movement in this unit comes from.

How fast the churches grew.

USH1 1805 The Institutions

Church membership doubled between eighteen hundred and eighteen thirty-five, and new national organisations formed to spread the revival's message — the American Bible Society in eighteen sixteen, the American Tract Society in eighteen twenty-five, the American Sunday School Union in eighteen twenty-four. These are national bodies with printing presses, which is what turns a revival into a movement.

One entry now, on a doctrine that reversed itself without anyone changing their mind.

Christianity and slavery.

USH1 1806 Christianity and Slavery

Many slaveholders had opposed converting enslaved people, believing that Christians could not be enslaved and fearing that Christian principles would inspire resistance. By eighteen hundred Americans had established legal grounds for enslaving Christians, and slaveholders reversed themselves, deciding that proper Christian instruction would make enslaved people more obedient and hardworking. African Americans meanwhile built churches of their own, Richard Allen founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the seventeen nineties, which the anchor calls the first independent Black Protestant church in the United States. Notice that the argument did not change because anyone refuted it. It changed because the legal question was settled the other way, and once Christians could be held as property the objection cost nothing. And watch what the reversal produced. Enslaved people given the Gospel took from it a message about deliverance that no master intended.

Two entries on the preacher and the place, and the place matters more.

The era's most effective revivalist.

USH1 1807 Charles Grandison Finney

Finney was born in western New York in seventeen ninety-two and studied law until a conversion experience in eighteen twenty-one turned him to revivals, his greatest success following a Rochester ministry taken up in eighteen thirty. Rochester was a boomtown of Erie Canal commerce, and its new middle class heard their own destiny in his message.

What the region was called.

USH1 1808 The Burned Over District

Western New York became known as the burned over district, named for the intense flames of religious fervour that swept repeatedly across the area — a region revived so often that observers described the ground as scorched. Nearly every movement in this unit has roots there, including the Mormons later in this lecture and the women's convention in part three.

Six entries on the intellectual movement running alongside the revival, and the last is its opposition.

The movement.

USH1 1809 Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism emerged in the Northeast from the eighteen twenties, holding that people could attain an understanding of the world surpassing rational, sensory experience — a reaction against mass democracy's tyranny of the majority, advocating individualism against conformity. European Romanticism, which emphasised emotion over reason, shaped it directly and gave it much of its vocabulary.

Its central figure.

USH1 1810 Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in eighteen oh three, graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and left the clergy after his wife died in eighteen thirty-one. Nature, published in eighteen thirty-six, located true spirituality outside the working world. Self-Reliance followed in eighteen forty-one, holding that whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

The friend he encouraged.

USH1 1811 Thoreau and Civil Disobedience

Thoreau lectured in eighteen forty-eight on the individual standing against governmental injustice, motivated by disgust over the Mexican-American War and over slavery, and published Civil Disobedience in eighteen forty-nine, urging readers to refuse support to immoral governments. Unit Eleven covered that war and pointed forward to here. Walden followed in eighteen fifty-four, after two years at the pond.

The movement's leading woman.

USH1 1812 Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a leading transcendentalist and an advocate of women's equality, on friendly terms with both Emerson and Thoreau. She was barred from attending Harvard, which admitted no women undergraduates until nineteen seventy-three. She was granted library access on intellectual merit, edited The Dial from eighteen forty, and died at forty in a shipwreck.

The poet.

USH1 1813 Whitman

Walt Whitman published twelve poems as Leaves of Grass in eighteen fifty-five, celebrating individual subjective experience as the source of meaning, with Song of Myself opening by celebrating himself and assuming the reader will assume the same. The poem then unites the individual with all people through transcendent bonds, which is individualism arriving at its own opposite.

Who objected.

USH1 1814 The Critics

Critics questioned transcendentalism's rampant individualism, pointing to the destructive consequences of compulsive and unchecked human behaviour, as in Melville's Moby Dick, where Ahab's obsession destroys his ship and costs him a leg. Edgar Allan Poe decried the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists, which tells you the quarrel was personal as well as intellectual.

Three entries on why people built new communities, and the third sets up the twin.

Why communities formed.

USH1 1815 Why Communities Formed

Before eighteen fifteen most Americans lived on farms in a pre-capitalist culture, and market and industrial change produced an appetite for new arrangements. The Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania, founded in the seventeen thirties, was the oldest communal experiment then surviving, and George Rapp led several hundred Rappites from eighteen oh five, holding all goods in common and encouraging celibacy.

The community founded by a woman.

USH1 1816 The Shakers

Ann Lee emigrated to New York in the seventeen seventies after a religious awakening convinced her that she was mother in Christ, teaching that God was both male and female, Jesus embodying one side and Mother Ann the other. To Shakers she represented the completion of divine revelation and the beginning of the millennium on earth.

How they lived.

USH1 1817 Shaker Practice

Shakers held men and women as equals, which the anchor calls a radical departure at the time, with women often outnumbering men and no private property, and furniture made with excellent workmanship as a deliberate substitute for worldly pleasure. They prohibited sexual intercourse, seeing it as a lesser spiritual life and a source of conflict between women and men.

Three entries on the community that read the same doctrine and went the other way.

Perfectionism.

USH1 1818 Oneida and Perfectionism

John Humphrey Noyes, educated at Dartmouth, Andover and Yale, took from the revival the doctrine of perfectionism, that a person can be perfect and free of sin, and claimed in eighteen thirty-four to have achieved that state himself. He then applied perfectionism to relations between men and women, which is where the notoriety came from.

What he proposed.

USH1 1819 Complex Marriage

Noyes advocated complex marriage, a form of communal marriage in which women and men who had achieved perfection could have intercourse without sin, along with male continence, whereby men would not ejaculate, freeing women from repeated pregnancy. Scandalised out of Putney, Vermont, the community moved to Oneida, New York, and screened prospective members for perfection.

What the two communities share.

USH1 1820 The Same Premise, Opposite Practice

The Shakers and the Oneida community began from the same premise and ended in opposite places. Both held that the millennium had begun or could begin, and that people living rightly could be freed from sin in this life. The Shakers concluded that sexual intercourse belonged to the lesser spiritual life and prohibited it entirely. Noyes concluded that people who had achieved perfection could not sin in the act at all, and instituted communal marriage in its place. This teaches something general about the period. Perfectionism is a premise about human capacity, not a programme. Once a movement believes people can be made perfect, the question of what perfection requires is wide open, and reformers reading the same doctrine reached conclusions that could not both be right. Note also what the two shared in practice. Both abolished private property, and both gave women a standing their surrounding society did not.

One entry on two experiments that ran on reason instead.

Brook Farm and New Harmony.

USH1 1821 Brook Farm and New Harmony

George Ripley founded Brook Farm at West Roxbury in eighteen forty-one, combining manual labour with intellectual pursuits, and it never exceeded one hundred members. Robert Owen bought the Rappites' twenty-thousand-acre parcel in eighteen twenty-five and renamed it New Harmony, drawing on faith in human reason rather than religion. Fire destroyed Brook Farm's main building in eighteen forty-six and it closed.

Four entries on the most successful of all of them.

Joseph Smith.

USH1 1822 Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith's family failed to prosper in the new market economy and moved to Palmyra, in the burned over district of western New York. Smith said in eighteen twenty-three that the angel Moroni revealed the location of golden plates. He published The Book of Mormon in eighteen thirty and organised his church that year, presenting himself as a prophet.

Why they grew.

USH1 1823 Why the Mormons Grew

Smith aimed to recapture what he saw as the purity of the primitive Christian church, and stressed families led by fathers, along with work and discipline — a patriarchal vision resonating with people who had failed in the market revolution. The aim was a New Jerusalem under church oversight, which is a communal claim as much as a doctrinal one.

The expulsions.

USH1 1824 The Expulsions

Hostility drove the Mormons from New York to Kirtland, Ohio in eighteen thirty-one, then on to Missouri, where fighting broke out in eighteen thirty-eight, with about ten thousand members relocating again, this time to Nauvoo in Illinois. By the eighteen forties Nauvoo held thirty thousand residents, making it the largest utopian community in the United States.

How it ended.

USH1 1825 Smith's Death

Smith received a revelation permitting church leaders to practise polygamy, declared the Americas the new Zion, and announced his candidacy for president in eighteen forty-four. He was arrested for treason over the destruction of a press that had criticised Mormonism. An anti-Mormon mob killed him while he was imprisoned, and Brigham Young led the church west to present-day Salt Lake City.

One entry to close, opening the reform campaigns that part two takes up.

Why temperance came first.

USH1 1826 Why Temperance Came First

Reformers held that intemperance was the most troubling problem in the United States, eroding morality and Christianity and corrupting American democracy itself, with consumption of gin, whiskey, rum and brandy in the first three decades reaching levels never equalled since. That is the anchor's claim and it is a strong one. The sheer scale of drinking is what made the movement plausible.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain why millennialism is the engine of this unit, because a movement expecting the Kingdom of God on earth will set about building it. You can say why slaveholders reversed themselves on Christian instruction, which was not because the argument was answered but because the legal question was settled the other way and the objection stopped costing anything. You can explain how one premise produced opposite practices — the Shakers prohibiting sexual intercourse entirely, Noyes instituting communal marriage — from the identical belief that people could be freed from sin in this life. You can say what the burned over district was and that nearly everything in this unit begins there. And you can state the anchor's claim about drinking, which is that consumption in the first three decades reached levels never equalled since, and that this is what made temperance plausible.