United States History

D

Social Reforms

In the second quarter of the 19th century Americans built a number of institutions and social movements dedicated to improving the morals of individuals and of society in general. The most prominent reformers were Northern, middle–class Whigs who had been influenced by evangelical revivals in the 1820s and 1830s. Those revivals taught an ethic of improvement: Sin and disorder, they said, were not inevitable results of Adam’s fall (as described in the Bible). They were the results of bad choices made by free and morally accountable men and women. Beginning in the 1820s, these middle–class evangelicals proposed reforms that would teach Americans to make good moral choices and thus, one individual at a time, improve society and perhaps make it perfect.

D

1

Schools

The most pervasive and enduring result of these movements was a system of tax–supported public schools. The great school reformers were Northern Whigs such as Horace Mann of Massachusetts and Calvin Stowe of Ohio (husband of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe). They proposed public school systems that were centralized at the state level and that made attendance mandatory. These schools were geared to teaching patriotism, manners, and civility, along with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Among Whig reformers, the goal of public schools was to build character in individual students. Ultimately, reformers wished to make a perfect society by filling it with perfect individuals. Democrats supported the schools, but saw them as a means of providing equal opportunity to all whites. Democrats, and Southerners from both parties, also tended to support local control over schools, to favor shorter school years, and to make efforts to keep taxes low.

D

2

Prisons

A second institutional reform was concerned with prisons and asylums. Northern Whig evangelicals proposed new forms of prisons that were meant less to punish the bodies of criminals (through whippings, incarceration, and execution) than to improve their souls. Pennsylvania built a prison in which convicts sat alone in their cells with only Bibles to keep them company. Most other states adopted the Auburn System, which took its name from a pioneering prison in New York. Under this system, prisoners slept in solitary cells but worked in groups—although a policy of absolute silence was enforced. The products of prison workshops were sold to outside markets. Whigs favored this system because it promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property, and other people.

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D

3

Temperance

The largest and most sustained organized social movement in American history was the temperance crusade against the use of alcohol that began in the 1820s. Again, Northern Whig evangelicals took the lead. They argued that alcohol abuse as well as the violence and personal and social disintegration associated with it had gotten out of control. In fact, per capita alcohol consumption, which had grown steadily since the 1790s, was at an all–time high in the 1820s.

Middle–class evangelicals assumed that poverty, crime, family violence, poor child rearing, and almost every other social ill was traceable to heavy drinking. A sober citizenry, they argued, would result in a society free of crime and violence, filled with happy homes and quiet streets. In the 1840s working people formed their own temperance movement—first through the Washingtonian Temperance Society, and then through temperance lodges. Members of both groups turned in the 1850s to campaigns for statewide prohibition. Beginning with Maine in 1851, 13 states adopted legislation that outlawed alcohol by 1855. Of those states, all but Delaware were in the North.

E

Radical Reform

The great belief of Northern middle–class evangelicalism—a belief behind most middle–class reform—was that human nature was not irreparably damaged by original sin. In the 17th and 18th centuries Protestants had been certain that nearly all of mankind was damned. Only a few would be saved, they believed, and those only by the arbitrary grace of God, not by their own efforts. These Protestants also thought that most human beings were incapable of correct moral behavior unless they were coerced.

In the first half of the 19th century, most Americans—including nearly all Southern whites—continued to believe that people were morally defective. Coercive institutions, such as the patriarchal family and slavery, were necessary to impose order on naturally disorderly people. Northern middle-class evangelicalism promoted the belief that human beings could change. Evangelists preached that women and men were moral free agents who could give themselves to God and thus escape a life of sin.

In this view of human nature, institutions that hindered individual freedom were unnecessary. Such institutions prevented men and women from assuming responsibility for themselves, thus making it impossible for them to freely give themselves to God and to a life of Christian love and moral improvement. The implications of this view were individualistic and anti–institutional. Some rejected all human government. A few who believed in no government joined utopian communities such as one at Oneida, New York, which practiced a form of free love to remove elements of power from relations between men and women (see Oneida Community). Others, including many utopians, became radical feminists and abolitionists.

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