The Fires of Perfection

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