The Fires of Perfection
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The Fires of Perfection
Prophecies of the millennium—Revelations: 1,000 years of peace, triumph,
and it all begins here?
Benevolent associations—missionary zeal for reform: another sign of the Millennium?
But “The Benevolent Empire” exempted Unitarians, lower class types, and Catholics as agents of “Antichrist,”
and Beecher’s church burned to the ground
Lyman Beecher, celebrity minister, who inspired his eleven children to take leading roles in bringing about the
millennium, but they did it on their own terms..
Conversion experience—Charles Finney urged
people to get off the “anxious bench” and be reborn
Free will and perfectionism—no predestination, “Do it!” emotionally
Finney’s Rochester revival—transformation in six months
Revivalism’s appeal to the middle class—reassurance from boom and bust economy; success a badge of moral character, so losing wealth fearsome
Workers and church membership—religion can help you get ahead
Evangelicalism bolsters individualism and equality—how?
Charles Finney
Women’s Sphere
Women’s changing lives—marriage more
“iffy,” but important, so church a refuge, a moral base
“Sisterhood” and social networks—recharge the emotional deficit from “domesticity”
Domesticity in Europe—middle class “Victorianism”
Decline in the birthrate—later
marriages, birth control, expensive educations makeparents think twice: assetsnow monetary burdens
Catharine Beecher, and above, Queen
Victoria, the domestic ideal, with one of her
children. “Victorianism” came from her
reign.
American Romanticism
Romantic movement—emotion, intuition, individualism
Transcendentalist ideas—above everyday materialism
Emergence of American literature—self-confidence
Cooper and Wilderness—noble frontiersman
Thoreau and individualism—self-reliance
Melville and nature’s destructive power—individualism’s greed
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
James Fennimore Cooper, and Thoreau’s cabin at
Walden Pond.
Walt Whitman made big bucks at Xmas.
The Age of Reform
The Shakers and “Utopia”—male/female God; celibate, communal
The Oneida Community
and Complex Marriage
—new role for women,
“scientific” combinations
John Humphrey Noyes; women of
Oneida community
Movement to restore the ancient church—Mormonism, a new Christianity: unity of church/state, strong work ethic, secret temple rituals, continuing divine revelation
City of Zion: Nauvoo—after Ohio, Missouri;
despised by neighbors: baptism of the dead, eternal marriage, polygamy (plural marriage)
Robert Owen and New Harmony—failed secular utopias
Brook Farm—ditto
Carthage, Illinois, when Joseph Smith
and his brother Hiram were taken
out of jail and shot. The desperado was
going to behead Smith when he was
stopped.
Joseph Smith (Mormonism), Robert
Owen (New Harmony) and George Ripley
(Brook Farm).
Attack on drinking—four gallons/triple today’s: abstinence not just drunkenness Common school movement—state support
first wanted by workers? Overall, a slow movement Female education—fragile female minds?
Oberlin first coed college—End of Reading Dorothea Dix and the insane—reported
existing rampant abuses: more humane asylums
Attempts to curtail drunkenness and all its results were seen as a crusade; Dorothea Dix, advocate for the mentally ill, and Horace Mann, campaigner for the common school; Below is Mary Lyon,
founder of the first college for women, Mount Holyoke.
Abolitionism
Free blacks oppose colonization—Lundy’s solution
in newspaper The Genius of Universal
Emancipation: soon opposed by Garrison Garrison’s immediatism—colonization
racist, unequal; slavery a moral not economic question
Geography of abolitionism—New England
and religious New Englanders, but weak in cities and in business
Lane Seminary rebellion—Under Weld’s leadership, abolition blows up
in revivalist Beecher’s face; students, blacks move to Oberlin, but still rowdy
William Lloyd Garrison, his newspaper The Liberator; he
was a founder of American Anti-Slavery Society.
Lane Seminary
Black abolitionists—most favored
peaceful change, but David Walker urged violence;
Harriet Tubman (200) and U.R.R. Divisions among abolitionists—Beechers
The warehouse where Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and editor of the Alton Observer,
and 20 of his supporters were standing guard over a newly arrived
printing press from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. This was the fourth press that Lovejoy had
received for his paper. Three others already had been destroyed by
people like the mob that would kill Lovejoy this night.
Frederick Douglass, young and old.
Elijah P. Lovejoy, killed protecting his abolitionist printing press.
split; Garrison goes radical, including women’s rights
Seneca Falls convention—after getting dissed at anti-slavery meet,“Declaration of Sentiments” like D of I
Reform enters politics—effective for action over persuasion, but resisted
Struggle over prohibition—Maine Censorship of the mails
—anti-slavery pamphlets blocked Gag rule—no anti-slavery petitions
1836-1844
Philadelphia abolitionists,
including Lucretia Mott.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton with child.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke
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