In the mid-nineteenth century, America experienced a remarkable flowering of reform movements. Often motivated by religious revivals, they addressed such issues as promoting temperance, establishing public school systems, improving treatment of prisoners, insane people, and slaves, defending civil rights for women, and combating corruption in government.
Most antebellum reformers aimed to change society by convincing individual members of the population that their causes were right, a technique called moral suasion. Using a wide range of oral and print media, including speeches, newspapers, plays, novels, children’s literature, and songs, they promoted their ideas to the masses, making themselves appear accessible and credible. Improved printing and transportation technologies lowered costs, encouraging even small organizations to spread their messages far and wide.
Reformers’ understanding of the world shaped the scope of their work. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi influenced education by urging schools to teach according to the principles of natural and universal laws. Others, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Graham, pushed individuals to come out of their religious sectarian beliefs or even from all theistic faith altogether and become “Free Thinkers” or atheists. They were joined by those who embraced the millenialist and perfectionist ideals of Unitarianism, which reworked Puritanism’s doctrine of endless misery into an optimistic vision of a progressively more joyful life on earth.
The economic, demographic, and technological changes of antebellum America inspired and shaped a great variety of reform initiatives. Yet despite the diversity of antebellum reform, it most frequently looked less like a coherent movement than a shifting collection of voluntary associations, each with its own peculiar history and agenda.
About the Author
