Unit 4 Princeton Review Pt. 4 Flashcards
(20 cards)
Getting land/moving west
The United States government actively encouraged settlers to move west.
US gov gave away, or sold at reduced rates, large tracts of land to war veterans.
The government also loaned money at reduced rates to civilians so that they too could move west.
Some settlers, called squatters, ignored the requirement to buy land and simply moved onto and appropriated an unoccupied tract as their own.
Economic Pursuits
Settlers in the Ohio Valley and points west soon found that the area was hospitable to grain production and dairy farming.
As previously discussed, much of the area was flat and could easily be farmed by new farm implements such as mechanical plows and reapers.
Transportation advances made shipping produce easier and more profitable, and soon the Midwest came to be known as “the nation’s breadbasket.”
Fur trading
The western frontier was also home to cattle ranchers and miners.
Fur trading
another common commercial enterprise on the frontiers.
Fur traders were also called “over- mountain men.”
They were often the first pioneers in a region, and they constantly moved west, one step ahead of farming families.
When they reached Oregon, they ran out of places to go. Furthermore, they had hunted beaver to near extinction. A group of former trappers formed the first American government in the Oregon Territory and began lobbying for statehood.
Frontier life was hard, but offered opportunities
To survive, settlers constantly struggled against the climate, elements, and Native Americans who were not anxious for the whites to settle, having heard about their treatment of eastern tribes.
Still, the frontier offered pioneers opportunities for wealth, freedom, and social advancement
Offered opportunities that were less common in the heavily populated, competitive East and the aristocratic South.
Those women who could handle the difficulties of frontier life found their services in great demand, and many made a good living at domestic work and, later, running boardinghouses and hotels.
Because of the possibilities for advancement and for “getting a new start in life,” the West came to symbolize freedom and equality to many Americans.
Second Great Awakening
early social reform movements grew out of the Second Great Awakening, which, like the first, was a period of religious revival, mainly among Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists.
In the early 1800s, the expansion of the Enlightenment in the United States encouraged more education, which led to more secularism and a decline in church attendance.
Preachers like Charles Finney toured the rural regions of western New York and the rural South, spreading evangelical religious beliefs.
The Second Great Awakening peaked in the 1820s and 1830s, as church membership soared in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches.
New religions like the Mormons and Shakers were inspired by the Second Great Awakening, as were social reform movements like the temperance movement.
Women were particularly inspired by the Second Great Awakening, and were encouraged to become active leaders in their new church communities.
The western and central regions of New York State were known as the Burned-over District for the spiritual fervor that figuratively set the area on fire.
Reform Movements
Usually, the most active members of reform groups were women, particularly those of the middle and upper classes.
Temperance movement
Movement against gambling
Movement against prostittuion
Temperance movement
Temperance societies, some of which tried to encourage people to sign the pledge not to drink and some of which sought outright prohibition of liquor, formed and remained powerful until the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 provided for nationwide prohibition.
(Not coincidentally, prohibition finally succeeded at the same time it became evident to politicians that women would soon gain the right to vote.)
The temperance movement was largely promoted by Protestant churches and reformers, and tied to the rise in Irish and German immigrants who were mostly Catholic, representing the divide between the two branches of Christianity—this will later be expressed in the Nativist movement/Know-Nothing Party.
Many northern states also prohibited the manufacture or purchase of alcoholic beverages during this period.
against gambling and against prostittuion movements
against gambling
these groups battled other vices as well, particularly gambling.
By 1860, every state in the Union had outlawed lotteries, and many had prohibited other forms of gambling.
Against prostitution
A group called “The Female Moral Reform Society” led the battle against prostitution in the cities, focusing not only on eliminating the profession but also on rehabilitating those women involved in it.
Reform movements role in wider history, effects
The reform movements associated with The Second Great Awakening were a precursor to the later reform movements of the Progressive Era
Many of the issues debated in the early 19th century, such as women’s suffrage and temperance, would not reach fruition until nearly one hundred years later.
Reform societies also helped bring about penitentiaries, asylums, and orphanages by popularizing the notion that society is responsible for the welfare of its least fortunate.
Asylums, orphanages, and houses of refuge for the poor were built to care for those who would previously have been imprisoned or run out of town.
With leadership from Dorothea Dix, penitentiaries sought to rehabilitate criminals (rather than simply isolate them from society, as prisons do) by teaching them morality and a “work ethic.”
The Shakers
utopian group that splintered from the Quakers, believed that they and all other churches had grown too interested in this world and too neglectful of their afterlives.
Shakers, followers of Mother Ann Lee, isolated themselves in communes where they shared work and its rewards; they also granted near-equal rights to women, even allowing them to attain priesthood.
Believing the end of the world was at hand and that sex was an instrument of evil, the Shakers practiced celibacy; their numbers, not surprisingly, diminished.
The Shaker revival ended during the 1840s and 1850s.
Other Utopian groups included the Oneida community in New York and the New Harmony community in Indiana.
Brook Farm
Perhaps the most well-known of these experimental communities was Brook Farm, established near Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841.
Brook Farm was home to the Transcendentalists
a group of nonconformist Unitarian writers and philosophers who drew their inspiration from European romanticism.
Transcendentalists believed that humans contained elements of the divine, and thus they had faith in man’s, and ultimately society’s, perfectibility.
The most famous of these writers were Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter; Ralph Waldo Emerson; and Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau is most noted for his publication of Walden, an account of the two years he spent living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts.
Perhaps not as well-known, but equally significant, was Thoreau’s demonstration of civil disobedience.
Thoreau refused to pay taxes to a government that waged war against Mexico and subsequently enacted a Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850 (see the separate section on this in the next chapter).
Hudson River School
Another important group involved in this American Renaissance was the Hudson River School painters, the first distinct school of American art.
Their goal was to create a specific vision for American art, and they painted mostly landscapes that seemed to portray an awe for the wilderness and beauty of wild America.
Like Thoreau and Emerson, the painters were influenced by European romanticism.
The Mormons
The Mormons, on the other hand, continue to thrive today.
Joseph Smith formed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints in 1830.
Smith’s preaching, particularly his acceptance of polygamy, drew strong opposition in the East and Midwest, culminating in his death by a mob while imprisoned in Illinois.
The Mormons, realizing that they would never be allowed to practice their faith in the East, made the long, difficult trek to the Salt Lake Valley, led by Brigham Young.
There, they settled and transformed the area from desert into farmland through extensive irrigation.
The Mormons’ success was largely attributable to the settlers’ strong sense of community. Through their united efforts, they came to dominate the Utah territory.
Other reasons for reform movements
The Second Great Awakening was only one source of the antebellum reform movements.
By the 1820s and 1830s, most of the Founding Fathers were dead, but they left a legacy of freedom and equality, expressed in part in the Declaration of Independence as well as the Preamble to the Constitution.
In the 1830s, “We, the People” still meant white males.
Many women were active in the abolitionist movement, and it was their exclusion from participation at a worldwide antislavery convention held in London in 1840 that convinced women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to hold the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls in upstate New York (in the same Burned-over District from the Second Great Awakening).
Stanton and Mott, along with other reformers, published the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women, which they modeled after the American Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal….”
Four years later, Stanton would team up with Susan B. Anthony, with whom she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.
Education Reform
Finally, Horace Mann was instrumental in pushing for public education and education reform in general.
He lengthened the school year, established the first “normal school” for teacher training, and used the first standardized books in education
(McGuffey’s Reader was used by 80 percent of public schools).
Mann is noted for his belief that “Education is the great equalizer.”
The Abolition Movement
Before the 1830s, few whites fought aggressively for the liberation of the enslaved people. The Quakers believed
slavery to be morally wrong and argued for its end.
Most other antislavery whites, though, sought gradual abolition, coupled with colonization, a movement to return Black people to Africa.
For example, the American Colonization Society, established in 1816, sought to repatriate enslaved people to the newly formed country of Liberia in Africa.
Many politicians supported the cause, including Henry Clay.
The religious and moral fervor that accompanied the Second Great Awakening, however, persuaded more and more whites, particularly Northerners, that slavery was a great evil.
As in other reform movements, women played a prominent role, such as the Grimke sisters from South Carolina, who were early abolitionists despite growing up in a slave-holding family.
Moderates vs. Immediatists
Moderates - wanted emancipation to take place slowly and with the cooperation of slave owners.
Immediatists - as their name implies, wanted emancipation at once.
Most prominent among white immediatists was William Lloyd Garrison, who began publishing a popular abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator in 1831 and helped found the American Antislavery Society in 1833.
William Lloyd Garrison
as their name implies, wanted emancipation at once.
Most prominent among white immediatists was William Lloyd Garrison, who began publishing a popular abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator in 1831 and helped found the American Antislavery Society in 1833.
His early subscribers were mostly free Blacks, but as time passed, his paper caught on with white abolitionists as well.
Garrison fought against slavery and against moderates as well, decrying their plans for Black resettlement in Africa as racist and immoral.
Garrison’s persistence and powerful writing style helped force the slavery issue to the forefront.
His message, as you may imagine, did not go over well everywhere; some southern states banned the newspaper, and others prohibited anyone from discussing emancipation.
Congressional gag rule
When congressional debate over slavery became too heated, Congress adopted a gag rule that automatically suppressed discussion of the issue.
It also prevented Congress from enacting any new legislation pertaining to slavery.
The rule, which lasted from 1836 to 1844, along with southern restrictions on free speech, outraged many Northerners and convinced them to join the abolition movement.
Change abolition movement, pre to post 1830
The abolition movement existed prior to 1830, but it had been primarily supported by free Blacks such as David Walker.
David Walker
A Bostonian, his Appeal to the Colored People of the World told all freed Black people to work to end slavery.
His work inspired William Lloyd Garrison.
Abolition associations formed in every large Black community to assist fugitive enslaved people and publicize the struggle against slavery; these groups met at a national convention every year after 1830 to coordinate strategies.
In the 1840s, Frederick Douglass began publishing his influential newspaper The North Star. D
ouglass, an escaped enslaved person, gained fame as a gifted writer and eloquent advocate of freedom and equality; his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one of the great American autobiographies.
Other prominent Black abolitionists included Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and then returned south repeatedly to help more than 300 enslaved people escape via the underground railroad (a network of hiding places and “safe” trails); and Sojourner Truth, a charismatic speaker who campaigned
