Social Reform Movement
The Social Reform Movement in the United States, particularly from the 1820s to the 1850s, was a period marked by a surge of advocacy for various societal changes aimed at addressing social, political, and economic issues of the time. This era was characterized by a strong belief in progress and the potential for individual and collective improvement. Influenced by religious, Enlightenment, and romantic ideals, reformers sought to tackle a range of social injustices, including the treatment of the mentally ill, the rights of women, and the abolition of slavery.
Key figures such as Dorothea Dix and Horace Mann championed reforms in mental health and education, respectively, while the temperance movement transitioned from moderation to a push for total abstinence from alcohol. The abolitionist movement evolved from gradual emancipation to demanding immediate end to slavery, spurred by influential leaders like William Lloyd Garrison. Various reform efforts were often organized through voluntary associations, which played a crucial role in mobilizing public support and awareness. Though most active in the northeastern and western United States, the movement's influence reached into the southern states, indicating its national significance. Overall, the Social Reform Movement reflects a complex interplay of values and aspirations aimed at fostering a more equitable society.
Social Reform Movement
Date 1820’s-1850’s
A wave of religious and philanthropic movements, collectively known as the social reform movement, worked for humanitarian and democratic reforms that included abolition, temperance, woman suffrage, and wider access to education.
Locale Northeastern and western United States
Key Figures
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), former Unitarian minister who was a central figure in the Transcendental movementLyman Beecher (1775-1863), pastor of Boston’s Park Street ChurchElihu Burritt (1810-1879), pacifist editor of theAdvocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), reformer concerned especially with the treatment of the mentally illCharles Fourier (1772-1837), French social theorist whose doctrine of communitarian living was embraced by many American reformersThomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851), founder of the first free American school for the hearing impairedWilliam Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), abolitionist editor ofThe Liberator Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), educator who founded the Perkins School for the BlindHorace Mann (1796-1859), champion of free public educationTheodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895), founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and organizer of the group “Seventy”
Summary of Event
In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour.” The wave of reform that swept over much of the United States from the 1820’s to the 1850’s seemed to prove Emerson’s theory that the human being is “born . . . to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself.” In those decades, people enlisted in a variety of causes and crusades, some of which were of a conservative nature, while others challenged basic institutions and beliefs.
The antebellum reform movement was partly a response to economic, social, and political changes following the War of 1812. Such changes provoked feelings of anxiety in the United States, generating anti-Mason, anti-Roman Catholic, and anti-Mormon crusades. However, change also generated a feeling of optimism and confirmed the almost universal faith in progress that characterized early nineteenth century Americans. Reformers came from two groups: religious reformers and the wealthy who felt obligated to help the less fortunate.
Evangelical religion played an important role in the origins of the reform movement. The shift from the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination to more democratic teachings that emphasized humankind’s efforts in achieving salvation nourished ideas of perfectionism and millenarianism. Not only could individuals achieve “perfect holiness” but the world itself, as evidenced by the movements of reform, was improving and moving toward the long-awaited thousand-year reign of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
In addition to evangelicalism, the legacy of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution—the natural rights philosophy and the faith in humanity’s ability to shape society in accordance with the laws of God and nature—was a stimulus to reform. So was the nineteenth century’s romantic conception of the individual. “The power which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform,” Emerson wrote, “is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man, which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms are the removing of some impediment.”
Antebellum reformers attacked a variety of evils. Dorothea Dix urged humane treatment for the mentally ill; Thomas Gallaudet and Samuel Gridley Howe founded schools for the hearing impaired and the blind. Prison reform engaged the efforts of some, and a campaign to abolish imprisonment for debt made slow but sure progress in the pre-Civil War period. Horace Mann championed common schools, and free public schooling gradually spread from New England to other parts of the United States. Elihu Burritt, the “learned blacksmith,” urged the abolition of war and related evils. Communitarians, inspired by religious or secular principles, withdrew from society to found utopian experiments such as Oneida, Amana, Hopedale, Ephrata Cloister, and New Harmony. The communitarian teachings of French social theorist Charles Fourier inspired such experiments as Brook Farm, the North American Phalanx of Red Bank, New Jersey, and the Sylvani Phalanx of northeastern Pennsylvania. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and others championed higher education, the suffrage, and legal and property rights for women.
Temperance and abolition were the two most prominent secular crusades of the period. Both of them passed through several phases, moving from gradualism to immediatism and from persuasion to legal coercion. The temperance movement began with an appeal for moderation in the consumption of alcoholic beverages and shifted by the late 1820’s to a demand for total abstinence. The Reverend Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons, published in 1826, were instrumental in effecting this shift to total abstinence; the “teetotal” position was further popularized during the 1840’s by the Washington Temperance Society of reformed “drunkards” (alcoholics) and the children’s Cold Water Army.
Similar to the temperance movement, the abolition, or antislavery, movement moved from a position favoring gradual emancipation and colonization during the 1820’s, to a demand for immediate abolition of the sin of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Theodore Dwight Weld’s “Seventy” preached the immediatist doctrine, and it was adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society, which had been founded in 1833. During the 1840’s, some temperance and antislavery reformers, disillusioned by the lack of results from education and moral suasion, turned to politics as a means of achieving their goals. Some abolitionists supported the Liberty and Free-Soil Parties, and later the Republicans, and sought legislation preventing the extension of slavery into the territories. Temperance advocates succeeded in getting statewide prohibition and local option laws passed in a number of states during the early 1850’s.
In most cases, the vehicle of reform was the voluntary association. Virtually every movement had a national organization, with state and local auxiliaries, which sponsored speakers, published pamphlets, and generally coordinated efforts in behalf of its cause. Although such societies were often rent by factionalism, they proved remarkably effective in arousing the popular conscience on the moral issues of the day. By 1850, for example, there were almost two thousand antislavery societies with a membership close to 200,000, compared to about five hundred such societies in 1826.
Significance
Although most of the reform movements had their largest following in the northeastern and western parts of the United States, their impact was not confined to those sections. Southerners, although hostile to abolitionism and other radical causes, were receptive to pleas for educational and prison reform and for better treatment of the insane and the blind. The temperance crusade made considerable headway in the South. Thus, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the particular cause, the antebellum social reform movement was a truly national phenomenon.
Bibliography
Foster, Lawrence. Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991. An intriguing study of religion, sexuality, and women’s roles in utopian living.
Griffin, Clifford S. Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960. Views the antebellum reform movement as an essentially conservative effort by wealthy reformers attempting to preserve social stability, sobriety, and order.
Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Evaluates the influence of Charles Fourier’s communitarianism on the growth of utopian living in the United States.
Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880. 2d rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1966. Discusses the general characteristics of utopian communities and describes several important examples.
Mandelker, Ira L. Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Discusses both the social tensions that caused a need for utopian communities and the internal tensions that caused most of them to fail.
Nye, Russel B. William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. Explains Garrison’s role in the greater humanitarian reform movement, as well as his involvement with abolition groups.
Tyler, Alice Felt. Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860. 1944. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Surveys major reform efforts in the context of political, economic, and social conditions in the United States. The conclusions have been challenged by later works, but this remains a valuable, comprehensive study of reform.