CHAPTER 12 An Age of Reform, 1820–1840
This chapter concentrates on the history of reform, including various communal endeavors, public institutions,
abolitionism, and feminism. The chapter begins with the story of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Abby
Kelley. The reform impulse is explored by looking at examples of the nearly 100 utopian communities, almost all of
which set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis. As the reform movements took on more radical issues
such as temperance, abolition, and pacifism, many Americans saw the reform impulse as an attack on their own
freedom. The era also saw an increase in institution building, which was inspired by the conviction that those who
passed through their doors could eventually be released to become productive, self-disciplined citizens. The chapter
then examines the crusade against slavery from colonization to immediate abolition. The antislavery movement
sought to reinvigorate the idea of freedom as a truly universal entitlement, and at every opportunity, black
abolitionists rejected the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty. The chapter also explores nineteenth-century
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Abby Kelley
A. Kelley was one of the first women abolitionists.
B. She also was an active pacifist and pioneer for women’s rights.
C. She gave more speeches than any other female orator.
II. The Reform Impulse
1. Numerous voluntary associations participated in reforms.
2. Reformers adopted a wide variety of tactics to bring about social change.
A. Utopian Communities
1. About 100 reform communities were established in the decades before the Civil War.
2. Nearly all the communities set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis, hoping both to restore
social harmony to a world of excessive individualism and to narrow the widening gap between the rich
and poor.
B. The Shakers
1. The Shakers were the most successful of the religious communities and had a significant impact on the
outside world.
a. Founder Mother Ann Lee was from England.
2. Shakers believed men and women were spiritually equal.
3. They abandoned private property and traditional family life.
a. Celibacy
4. They were economically successful with vegetable and herb cultivation, cattle breeding, and furniture
making.
C. Oneida
1. The founder of Oneida, John Noyes, preached that he and his followers had become so perfect that they
had achieved a state of complete “purity of heart,” or sinlessness.
a. Started in Vermont
D. Worldly Communities
1. New England transcendentalists established Brook Farm to demonstrate that manual and intellectual
labor could coexist harmoniously.
a. Influenced by French social reformer Charles Fourier
2. Although it was an exciting miniature university, Brook Farm failed in part because many intellectuals
disliked farm labor.
E. The Owenites
1. The most important secular communitarian was Robert Owen.
2. Owen promoted communitarianism as a peaceful means of ensuring that workers received the full value
of their labor.
3. At New Harmony, Owen championed women’s rights and education.
a. Failed after a few years due to squabbling
b. Influenced labor movement, education reform, and women’s rights
F. Religion and Reform
1. Some reform movements drew their inspiration from the religious revivalism of the Second Great
Awakening.
G. The Temperance Movement
1. To members of the North’s emerging middle-class culture, reform became a badge of respectability.
2. The American Temperance Society directed its efforts at both the drunkards and the occasional drinker.
3. The temperance crusade and other reforms aroused hostility.
H. Critics of Reform
1. Many Americans saw the reform impulse as an attack on their own freedom.
a. Catholics rallied against the temperance movement.
i. The number of Catholics was growing as a result of Irish and German immigration.
I. Reformers and Freedom
1. The vision of freedom expressed by the reform movements was liberating and controlling at the same
time.
2. Many religious groups in the East formed reform groups promoting religious virtue.
a. They formed the American Tract Society and American Bible Society.
J. The Invention of the Asylum
1. Americans embarked on a program of institution building.
2. These institutions were inspired by the conviction that those who passed through their doors could
eventually be released to become productive, self-disciplined citizens.
K. The Common School
1. A tax-supported state public school system was widely adopted in the North.
2. Horace Mann was the era’s leading educational reformer.
3. Mann believed that education would “equalize the conditions of men.”
4. Common schools provided career opportunities for women, and most of the teachers came to be women.
5. The lack of public education in the South widened the divide between the North and South.
III. The Crusade against Slavery
A. Colonization
1. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, promoted the gradual abolition of slavery
and the settlement of black Americans in Africa.
2. Many prominent political leaders supported the ACS.
3. Like Indian removal, colonization rested on the premise that America was fundamentally a white
society.
B. Blacks and Colonization
1. Several thousand blacks emigrated to Liberia with the help of the American Colonization Society.
2. Most African-Americans adamantly opposed the idea of colonization.
C. Militant Abolitionism
1. A new generation of reformers demanded immediate abolition.
a. They believed that slavery was both sinful and a violation of the Declaration of Independence.
2. David Walker’s An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World was a passionate indictment of slavery
and racial prejudice.
D. The Emergence of Garrison
1. The appearance in 1831 of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly journal published in
Boston, gave the new breed of abolitionism a permanent voice.
2. Some of Garrison’s ideas appeared too radical, but his call for immediate abolition was echoed by
many.
a. Garrison rejected colonization, and The Liberator remained the preeminent abolitionist journal.
E. Spreading the Abolitionist Message
1. Abolitionists recognized the democratic potential in the production of printed material.
2. Theodore Weld helped to create the abolitionists’ mass constituency by using methods of religious
revivals.
3. Identifying slavery as a sin was essential to replacing the traditional strategies of gradual emancipation
and colonization with immediate abolition.
F. Slavery and Moral Suasion
G. Abolitionists and the Idea of Freedom
1. Abolitionists repudiated the idea of wage slavery popularized by the era’s labor movement.
a. Only slavery deprived human beings of their “grand central right—the inherent right of self-
ownership.”
2. Slavery was so deeply embedded in American society that its destruction would require fundamental
changes in both the North and South.
H. Birthright Citizenship
1. The crusade against slavery gave birth to a new understanding of citizenship and rights.
2. Long before the Civil War, abolitionists black and white developed a definition of national citizenship
severed from the concept of race and rights enforced by the federal government.,
I. A New Vision of America
1. The antislavery movement sought to reinvigorate the idea of freedom as a truly universal entitlement.
a. Abolitionists, not the founders, saw America unbounded by race.
2. They insisted that blacks were fellow countrymen, not foreigners or a permanently inferior caste.
a. Being born in America should determine citizenship, not race.
IV. Black and White Abolitionism
A. Black Abolitionists
1. From the inception of the antislavery movement, blacks played a leading role.
a. Frederick Douglass and other ex-slaves published accounts of their bondage.
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave the abolitionist message a powerful human appeal, as
it was modeled on the autobiography of fugitive slave Josiah Henson.
B. Abolitionism and Race
1. Although the movement was racially integrated, whites relegated blacks to secondary positions.
2. Black abolitionists developed an understanding of freedom that went well beyond that of most of their
white contemporaries.
a. They attacked the intellectual foundations of racism.
C. Slavery and American Freedom
1. At every opportunity, black abolitionists rejected the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty.
2. Black abolitionists articulated the ideal of color-blind citizenship.
3. Frederick Douglass famously questioned the meaning of the Fourth of July.
D. Gentlemen of Property and Standing
1. Abolitionism aroused violent hostility from northerners, who feared that the movement threatened to
disrupt the Union, interfere with profits wrested from slave labor, and overturn white supremacy.
E. Slavery and Civil Liberties
1. Mob attacks and attempts to limit abolitionists’ freedom of speech convinced many northerners that
slavery was incompatible with the democratic liberties of white Americans.
2. The fight for the right to debate slavery openly and without reprisal led abolitionists to elevate free
opinion to a central place in what Garrison called the gospel of freedom.
V. The Origins of Feminism
A. The Rise of the Public Woman
1. Women were instrumental in the abolition movement.
B. Women and Free Speech
1. Participation in abolitionism inspired the early movement for women’s rights.
2. Women lectured in public about abolition.
3. The Grimké sisters argued against the idea that taking part in assemblies, demonstrations, and lectures
was unfeminine.
a. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838)
i. Critique of separate sphere for women
ii. Equal pay for equal work
b. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a portion of an antislavery article
(1837) by Angelina Grimké in The Liberator.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) highlights part of Catharine Beecher’s critique of
white abolitionist women in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (1837).
C. Women’s Rights
D. Feminism and Freedom
1. Lacking broad backing at home, early feminists found allies abroad.
2. Women deserved the range of individual choices, the possibility of self-realization that constituted the
essence of freedom.
3. Margaret Fuller sought to apply to women the transcendentalist idea that freedom meant a quest for
personal development.
a. She served as editor of The Dial and literary editor of New York Tribune.
E. Women and Work
F. The Slavery of Sex
1. The concept of the “slavery of sex” empowered the women’s movement to develop an all-encompassing
critique of male authority and their own subordination.
2. Marriage and slavery became powerful rhetorical tools for feminists.
G. “Social Freedom”
1. The demand that women should enjoy the rights to regulate their own sexual activity and procreation
and to be protected by the state against violence at the hands of their husbands challenged the notion
that claims for justice, freedom, and individual rights should stop at the household’s door.
2. The issue of women’s private freedom revealed underlying differences within the movement for
women’s rights.
H. The Abolitionist Schism
1. When organized abolitionism split into two wings in 1840, the immediate cause was a dispute over the
proper role of women in antislavery work.
2. The Liberty Party was established in hopes of making abolitionism a political movement.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• To what were the newly established communal and utopian communities reacting? What was it about society
that made these group members attempt to create alternative lifestyles?
• Discuss how the vision of freedom expressed by the reform movements was liberating and controlling at the
same time.
• Explain how public school was supposed to “equalize the conditions of men.”
• How does the life of Abby Kelley reflect the many reform impulses of antebellum America?
• Discuss what role blacks played in the abolition movement. How did their view of freedom differ from that of
the white abolitionists? Why were they so opposed to the colonization movement?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
David Walker
www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2930.html
PBS has a special online resource called Africans in America, with an excerpt on David Walker, one of the proponents of
abolitionism.
The Shakers
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/shakers/
This website is the companion site for the Ken Burns documentary.
Frederick Douglass
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1539.html
This site from Africans In America: Judgement Day, Part 4 (PBS series) includes a Douglass biography as well as related primary
source documents.
William Lloyd Garrison
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2929.html
This site from Africans In America: Judgement Day, Part 4 (PBS series) includes a Garrison biography as well as related primary
source documents.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Blight, David. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018.
Boydston, Jeanne, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, eds. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and
Woman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Cain, William E., ed. William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator. New York:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1995.
Delano, Sterling F. Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2004.
Matteson, John. The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Tetrault, Lisa. The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898. Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998.
Wellman, Judith. “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks.” Journal of Women’s History 3,
no. 1 (1991): 9–37.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Form the class into the Seneca Falls Convention of white and black middle-class men and women who met to improve
women’s rights. Discuss the early feminist movement and the highlights of the Seneca Falls Convention. Be sure to present
the activities and views of Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, Abby Kelley, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and Lydia Maria Child. Ask the class a series of questions such as why the feminist movement began, how did it
2. Divide the students into groups and assign each group a historical utopian community to discuss. Then have the students draft
a plan for their own utopian community. Ask them to share with the class what their community will look like—its name,
structure, rules, gender roles, and so forth. Also ask the students a range of questions from the textbook information regarding
the history of utopian communities. These include:
• Why did utopian communities form?
• What aspects of social structure did they have in common?