CHAPTER 12
Religion, Romanticism, and Reform,
1800–1860
This chapter explores intellectual and social currents prior to the Civil War. It reviews the important
developments in religion with the Second Great Awakening, namely its impact on existing denominations
and the rise of new denominations. The chapter then explores the Romantic movement and the rise of
uniquely American literature, including a look at the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. A More Democratic Religion
A. Rational Religion
B. Unitarianism and Universalism
C. The Second Great Awakening
D. Frontier Revivals
E. Denominational Growth
F. Revivalism and African Americans
G. Camp Meetings and Women
II. Romanticism in America
A. Transcendentalism
B. Ralph Waldo Emerson
C. The Transcendental Club
D. Henry David Thoreau
iv. Herman Melville
v. Walt Whitman
vi. Newspapers
III. The Reform Impulse
A. Temperance
B. Prisons and Asylums
C. Women’s Rights
D. Seneca Falls
E. Susan B. Anthony
F. Early Public Schools
G. Food and Sex
H. Utopian Communities
i. The Shakers
ii. Brook Farm
i. William Wells Brown
ii. Frederick Douglass
iii. Sojourner Truth
iv. The Underground Railroad
LECTURE IDEAS
1. Write a lecture to introduce the role of evangelicalism and the Second Great Awakening in mid-
nineteenth-century America. For a good overview of the Second Great Awakening—its origins, its
2. Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a leading activist and proponent of
3. A lecture on the Romantic movement would give a balance between the political and social history of
4. Two of the more interesting attempts to establish utopian communities in the 1840s took place in the
Boston–Concord area at Fruitlands and Brook Farm. Write a lecture that compares these efforts in
5. Henry David Thoreau is widely regarded as a founder of American environmentalism, and his Walden
is often viewed as a pioneering ecological text. What is the basis of this claim? Write a lecture that
addresses the question of Thoreau’s influence as an environmentalist from his day until our own. Key
6. For an exploration into abolitionism, divide your class into two groups. Have the groups research and
report on the two movements of white abolitionism and black abolitionism. Suggested sources
include:
• Ronald G. Walters’s The Anti-Slavery Appeal: American Abolitionists After 1830 (1976)
7. Write a lecture on the intellectual defense of slavery that developed in the antebellum South. Use Paul
Finkelman’s Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (2003) for its extended essay and
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
1. Give each group in your class a particular reform group to research. It could consist of education,
temperance, women’s rights, and others. Give a short overview of the spirit of reform and then let
2. Ask your students to research more deeply into Romanticism. Ask them to find out more about other
aspects of American Romanticism, like art and music, as well as explore the connections to European
Romanticism. After this research is completed, have a discussion in which students consider how the
3. Access Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of
Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful,
Beautiful, and Christian Homes
4. Consider the importance of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 to the women’s rights movement.
Outline the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and later, Susan B. Anthony. Then have
your students read the Declaration of the Rights and Sentiments and compare it to the Declaration of
5. For an exploration into abolitionism, divide your class into two groups. Have the groups research and
report on the two movements of white abolitionism and black abolitionism. After each group has
presented, see what each of their reports had in common and how they were different. Do there
appear to be any points of cooperation between the two movements? See Ronald G. Walters’s The
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What was the most significant development or trend in the United States during the first half of the
nineteenth century, and what makes your answer more compelling than any of the other possibilities?
2. Did religion serve as a unifying or dividing force in antebellum America? What is the basis of your
position?
3. How were the revivals and camp meetings an escape from the restrictions of everyday life? How did
they help empower women, in particular, and lead to the reform movements?
4. How does studying an intellectual movement like Romanticism offer insights into other aspects of
PRACTICING CITIZENSHIP
This chapter relates a period in which newspaper readership was exploding, a situation directly opposite
to that of our own time, in which technological and cultural changes have sent newspaper circulations
plummeting and put the American newspaper industry into a dire crisis. Should Americans be concerned
about this development? To formulate a response, read a good daily newspaper (the hard copy, not the
online edition!) every day for an entire week. If your town or city doesn’t have one, then read a great
