Awakening and Reform
As Andrew Jackson and other leading politicians battled over the tariff and the B.U.S., an upsurge of religious fervor swept across the country. This widespread evangelical movement is called the Second Great Awakening. In the 1820s, a preacher named Charles Finney started organizing revivals, often outdoors at camp meetings. Soon there were hundreds of traveling preachers traversing the country and holding thousands of revivals each year.
The preachers of the Second Great Awakening delivered dramatic sermons that stirred the emotions of their listeners. Challenging Calvinist tradition, the revivalists stressed free will and individualism. They preached that people determined their eternal fate by their choices and that each person could achieve salvation by making the right choices. The evangelical preachers further encouraged Christians to change society through moral reform.
The message of the Second Great Awakening blended with the prevailing ideals of American society, which stressed individualism and hard work. Americans increasingly believed they could improve themselves and society. A wave of reform movements emerged in the three decades before the Civil War.
Temperance: |
Crusade against the excessive drinking of alcoholic beverages. Reformers, many of them women, sought to protect families from alcoholism and restrict disorderly activities of immigrants. |
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Education: |
Effort led by Horace Mann to promote tax-supported public education. Made schooling more widely available, especially in the North. Higher education expanded too. |
Asylum and Prisons: |
Campaign spearheaded by Dorothea Dix to improve the woeful conditions at correctional facilities. |
Transcendentalism: |
Spiritualist movement, related to Romanticism, promoting the idea that humans contained divine elements. Appealed primarily to intellectuals. |
Utopias: |
Responding to the changes of industrialization, utopian reformers sought to create ideal communities based on certain economic or social principles. The socialist cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana, is one of the most famous utopias. |
