History 101: Week 10 (Professor Messer-Kruse)

History 101: Week 10 (Professor Messer-Kruse)

Apr. 3, 1995: The Ferment of Antebellum Reform

I. American history punctuated by periods of upsurge in popular reform - Progressive Era, New Deal Era, 1960s, though none of these matched the Antebellum Era in the breadth of proposed reforms, number of converts, etc. A. temperance B. social purity C. health and diet 1. anti-smoking 2. dress reform D. women's rights E. abolition F. sabbatarianism G. mental health reform H. prison reform I. pacifism J. Christian evangelicalism

K. Whereas Progressive Era, New Deal Era, advocated specific reforms for specific problems, a great number antebellum reformers (like the radicals of the 1960s) did not want to attack particular injustices, but to remake and perfect the world.

L. Many reformers brought to their crusade a religious fervor and a universal claim of the usefullness of their proposals.

M. Indeed, the achievements and failures of these interesting reformers have decisively shaped the world in which we live in large and small ways: 1. abolitionists - civil war - civil rights. 2. antebellum evangelicals - modern Christian evangelicals. 3. suffragists - feminism. 4. temperance - just say no. 5. health/diet reform - vegetarianism/fitness

II. Roots of Reform Impulse:

A. 2nd Great Awakening.

1. Origins - Evengelical fever simmered ever since the first Great Awakening of 1730's. But the size of the revival of the antebellum years dwarfed even that of a century earlier. From 1800 to 1860, the largest Protestant demonomations saw their membership skyrocket 1,300 percent.

2. Character - tent meetings (go on for days, weeks) serial preaching throughout day and night. Mass conversions and extrordinary emotional displays: a. One commonly seen outpouring of ecstatic religious emotionalism (the swaying back and forth so violently that the head nearly met the ground both forward and backward) passed into the vernacular as "the jerks."

3. Location: While First GA was centered in New England and spread throughout the nation, the 2nd GA began in Kentucky and Tennessee and spread northward about 1801. a. location suggests link with stress and upheavel of frontier life. (1) message of the self-determination of salvation sat well with the "rugged independence" ethos of the frontier.

4. Spread: Charles G. Finney, son of a New York farmer, who educated himself well enough to become a lawyer. Converted to revivalism in 1821 and proclaimed that "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause."

5. Social basis of Revival: The 2nd GA preached against predestination and argued man was a completely free moral agent. Emphasis was on conversion from sin to rightousness. a. corallary to all this was an emphasis on the perfectability of man and of society.

b. 2nd GA appealled to both the poor and the middling levels of society. It was in many ways the product of a time when the settled foundations of American communities and social relationships were being shaken by the commercial revolution. (1) middle classes because the doctrines of free will, its emphasis on self-discipline, and it promise of a heavenly reward for rightousness followed their own ideas that had been shaped by the rising commercial ethos of America. (a) also the middle and upper classes were reevaluating womens roles in society and evangelical doctrines reinforced notions of woman's seperate sphere in society, both in their need to be isolated from the corrupting jungle of the public world but also for their better moral guardianship of the family and home.

(2) poor, because the evengelical spirit cared little for church hierarchy and shunned complex theology for uncomplicated Christian doctrines.

III. The religious revival also brought out the first American millinarian sects. (A theological trend most apparent as we today approach the third millenium).

A. William Miller, 16th child of an upstate New York farm family. Self educated to the point where he could biblically outquote any Christian theologian in America. The same year the Charles Finney began his long crusade, Miller also experienced his epiphany but he realized through a close reading of the Bible that the second coming was at hand and was to be sometime in 1843. 1. As the fated year approached, the Worcester asylum reported in its annual report for 1842 that it housed 120 patients that it categorized as "religiously insane." Suicides seemed to rise as the date approached. 2. 1843 a huge wooden ampitheater built in Boston for the thousands of faithful to await their ascension (local wags rumored that Miller had taken out 7 years of insurance on it.) 3. When 1843 came and went, Miller recalculated to Oct. 22, 1844 and on that in anticipation of that day thousands disposed of their worldly goods, donned simple robes, and climbed onto their rooftops only to spend a cold drafty night out of doors.

Apr. 5, 1995: Workers and Utopians

I. Roots of cooperation: A. Enlightenment Rationalism. B. Millenialism 1. Shakers, 1784-1794. Established 11 communes in NY and N. England. By 1820s Shaker communes had spread to OH, KT, IN. By 1860s had 6000 members. 2. Harmonists, (led by George Rapp, a German immigrant who arrived in the US in 1804.) Established prosperous commune in Harmonie, IN.

Harmonists and Shakers both successful early experiments because their members bound together by a religious millenial sensibility and the strict discpline of a charismatic leader. (Interestingly, both emphasized celibacy - a practice they believed both Godly and useful in overcoming selfish and atomizing tendencies endemic to societies organized on nuclear familial structures.)

II. The reputation of these early religious experiments travelled widely in European intellectual circles. Though some observers denounced the inherent "despotism" of these societies, many were inspired by their order, harmony, and prosperity. Engels was influenced to embrace socialist views after studying the Shakers in the 1840s. When Karl Marx was on his deathbed, Engels sent him a letter that attempted to cheer him with the phrase, "Remember the Shakers."

III. In America, cooperative principles appealed to: A. workers concerned about loss of skill and coming factory regime. B. lost and lonely individuals in search of human intimacy and community. C. people concerned with an ever increasingly depersonalized polity and who searched for personal freedom and power. D. dissenters from social and religious orthodoxy.

IV. Development of secular cooperative communal organizations: A. 1821 NY professionals found "Society for Promoting Communities". B. Robert Owen, an English manufacturer who attempted to reform the industrial revolution by building a model company town at New Lenark, Scotland. Owen wrote of attempting to overcome the alienation between urban and rural life, between man and his labor power, between man and woman, and between the individual and society, that the industrial revolution had produced. 1. When George Rapp worried that his communal flock were growing content and losing their pious edge in the midst of the prosperity they had scratched from the soil, ordered them to pull up stakes and move further west. Rapp sold the entire town of Harmonie to Owen in 1825 for $150,000. 2. Owen was quite a popular figure at this time - even being invited t address Congress soon after taking over Harmonie (renaming it New Harmony). 3. New Harmony attracted a diverse assortment of neighboring backswoodsman, urban freethinkers, pious Swedenborgians, political dissenters, and even Josiah Warren (founder of American anarchism). (New Harmony allowed virtually anyone to become a member if they signed the charter of principles, except for blacks.) 4. New Harmony eventually collapsed under the wieght of its own social and ideological diversity and the lack of a clear leadership to effect compromise among the factions that developed. C. Brook Farm: George Ripley founded Brook Farm in 1840 in Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an early member. Brook Farm also attempted to overcome the deepening split between mental and physical labor evident in modern society.

V. But the bulk of communal experiments in American history were influenced by a French philosopher, Charles Fourier and his American propogandist, Albert Brisbane. Brisbane brought Fourierist doctrine to the US in 1842.

Apr. 7, 1995: Immigrants and Know-Nothings

I. Immigration: Until the late 1820s, few immigrants chose the United States as their destination. (Europes uprooted masses chose Czarist Caucasus, Poland, and Brazil. Panic of 1819 and the difficult years that followed were a great deterant. A. Ireland - Disenfranchisement Act of 1829 not only took the right to vote away from many Irish farmers, but took away the last incentive that their landlords had to keep them on their holdings. In the years that followed tens of thousands were evicted. B. Europe generally faced hard winters and poor harvests in 1829-1830, driving many off their lands.

C. 60,000 immigrants arrived in US in 1832. Between 1828 and 1844, 500,000 immigrants arrived in the U.S., one out of three of them being Irish. By the later 1840's, the tide had swelled to over 200,000/year.

D. In 1807 there were but 70,000 Catholics in America. By 1830 there were 500,000 and in 1860 their numbers had surged to 3,000,000.

II. Immigrants and politics:

A. newcomers tended to concentrate in the poorest wards of the largest cities. There, ward politicians harnessed their insularity, their dependency, and their desire for assimiliation by building an effective party apparatus that attended to all these needs. 1. By 1830's, New York City's Irish voters and politicians had already begun to make their influence felt in the political life of the city. a. well established in urban police force. b. a power in city hall.

III. Nativism and anti-catholicism have a long history in America:

Thomas Jefferson in Notes on Virginia wrote: "To the principles of our government nothing can be more oppossed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet from such we are to expect the greatest number of immigrants...a heterogenuous, incoherent, distracted mass. I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements."

A. Irish catholics in particular were viewed with suspicion and fear by white Protestants. They were considered: 1. clannish - prone to grouping in secret societies that were subversive of the foundations of the republic. 2. dependent and manipulated by their Democratic politicians and by their Bishops and foreign Pope. 3. Profligate and of loose morality.

B. 1835 Samuel Morse published "Foreign Consipiracy against the Liberties of the United States," a book alleging a Papal and monarchical alliance to subvert the American republic. 1. Alleged that disguised Jesuits being dispatched by a coalition of the Pope and the Austrian crown into the Mississippi valley so as to cleave the west from the United States. 2. "We are the dupes of our hospitality. The evil of immigration brings to these shores illiterate Roman Catholics, the tools of reckless and unprincipled politicians, the obedient instruments of their more priestly leaders."

C. 1836, Maria Monk's "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings during a Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun in the Hotel Dien Nunnery at Montreal," was published in New York and soon sold 40,000 copies and was serialized in a number of large dailies. Within a few years sales topped 300,000 copies making it the best-selling book in US history up to that time (it would be overtaken only by Uncle Tom's Cabin in the 1850s).

1. It purported to reveal Maria's sufferings in a Montreal convent, including flagellation, and her being ravaged by a Priest and having his baby. 2. Massachusetts even held hearings and sent a committee to investigate the "secret chambers" of its local Catholic institutions - though, of course, none of the allegations were proven to be true.

IV. Birth of the Know-nothings:

A. 1835 nativists in NYC organized a "Native American Party" in response to a controversy over funding of parochial schools and the question of Bible reading in the class-rooms. 1. 1837 a "Native American Party" captured control of New York's city council and Mayors office.

B. Similar parties sprung up around the country and on July 1845, delegates from 13 states met in Philadelphia and soon founded a national Native American Party that ran candidates for national office.

C. Other nativists worked in the fraternal arena. Later that year, Philadelphian Protestants founded "The Order of United Americans", a secret society pledged to unify "true-born Americans", to check the progress of immigrant politicians, and to save the Union from Popish schemes.

1. By 1852, the OUA claimed 30,000 members.

2. Copycat organizations also flourished in the 1840's with names as "The United American Mechanics, The United Sons of America (and United Daughters of America), The Sons of Liberty, The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, etc.

3. Four national journals of Know-nothing opinion were published in these years, The Republic (begun Jan. 1851), The Know-nothing and American Crusader, The Wide-Awake and the Spirit of Washington, and lastly The Mystery (that claimed it was "published nowhere, sold everywhere, edited by Nobody and Know- nothing."

D. Nativists entered national politics with

E. Agenda of the Know-nothings:

1. restrictions on immigration and on office-holding by foreign-born. 2. eradication of parochial schools (indeed the Philadelphia movement had its start in a dispute over which version of the Bible, King James or Orthodox, to use in public schools. 3. Sabbatarianism 4. election of only native Americans to office. 5. attack against the "corrupt tendencies" of the Catholic church. 6. end to sectional controversies (pro-slavery)

V. By the second and third decades of the 19c., such ideas boiled over into violent ethnic confrontation:

A. Late summer of 1834 a mob of Protestant workmen and volunteer fire companies, attacked the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and ransacked, desecrated and burned it to the ground.

1. Reaction to success of immigrant political machines. 2. Depression of 1837 - the need for a scapegoat.

B. May - July 1844, Philadelphia's Kensington riots.

VI. Why the upsurge in nativism?

A. The undercurrent of America's republican ideology viewed ethnic/religious diversity as a potential source of discord and faction in the polity and therefore to be avoided. B. Manifest Destiny beliefs rested upon Anglo-Saxon identity. C. As the sectional crisis deepened, Americans sought to overcome the conflict between the states by burying it under ethnic Protestant unity. D. The economic/social change brought on by the unrelenting commercial and industrial revolution (especially the depression of 1837) demanded obvious scapegoats.

ID: NOTES-101.10.

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