The years from about 1820 until the Civil War, and the 1840s in particular, witnessed a heightened awareness of a range of social issues and gave rise to a number of active social reform movements. Emerson, in his 1841 lecture “Man the Reformer,” assessed the climate of the times as follows
In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all respected something,—church or state, literature or history, domestic usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined money. But now all these and all things else hear the trumpet and must rush to judgment,—Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the laboratory; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.
There was not only an outpouring of concerned effort on behalf of society’s unrepresented and underrepresented—Blacks, Native Americans, the labor force, women, children, the mentally ill—but also a trend toward the idealistic reshaping of society through communal living and through education and moral reform, including temperance.
The antislavery movement was the most visible reform movement of the period. Radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison edited and published The Liberator beginning in 1831 and established the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston in 1832. The American Anti-Slavery Society was established at Philadelphia in 1832. In 1840, Garrison took this national society over and radicalized it. In 1837, antislavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy died at the hands of rioters in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy was quickly held up as a martyr to the cause, as John Brown (executed in 1859) would be later. The Underground Railroad, a covert operation managed by such leaders as Harriet Tubman and Levi Coffin and implemented by a network of thousands, conveyed slaves from the South northward to freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in 1852, generating much sympathy for the plight of slaves. Other books and articles depicting the human toll of slavery appeared. Wendell Phillips, a supporter of Garrison, delivered speeches and wrote articles for The Liberator and other antislavery organs. Frederick Douglass, born a slave, also lectured and wrote on the topic. Political events kept the issue before the public eye, as did news of slave uprisings and mutinies (the well-known mutiny on the slave ship Amistad took place in 1839) and fugitive slave cases.
Although government policy during the course of expansion westward was dedicated to uprooting Native Americans and to eradicating those among them who proved uncooperative, there was simultaneous interest in their cultures and languages and some outrage over their treatment. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft extensively researched Native history and culture. His six-volume work on the subject appeared between 1851 and 1857. From the 1820s, the Native American was depicted heroically and tragically in fiction. As treaties were signed and tribes relocated, some Americans spoke out. On April 23, 1838, for example, as the federal government prepared to employ soldiers to remove unwilling Cherokees from Georgia and Tennessee to Oklahoma, in accordance with the questionably negotiated 1835 Treaty of Echota, Ralph Waldo Emerson emotionally protested in a letter to President Martin Van Buren “the terrific injury which threatens the Cherokee tribe.” Much later in the century, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody espoused the cause of Native American education.
Labor began to speak on its own behalf and to protest intolerable working conditions. Textile workers had unionized by 1820. Weavers (both male and female) went on strike in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, over decreasing wages and increasing hours. In 1828, there was a strike of textile workers at a factory in Paterson, New Jersey, requiring the militia to quell violence. In 1842, the legality of labor unions and the right to strike was upheld by a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision. In the same year, legislation was signed in Massachusetts to limit the working hours of children under twelve. Similar laws followed elsewhere. In the 1840s, female mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, edited and wrote for their own magazine, the Lowell Offering. George Henry Evans founded the Workingman’s Advocate and, in 1845, formed the National Reform Association for the benefit of labor. In 1860, Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in response to the introduction of new machinery, which was being operated by children, thereby reducing the pay of skilled mature labor. (The shoemakers won a wage increase as a result of the strike
The women’s rights movement also gained momentum in this climate of reform. In 1825, Frances Wright, a lecturer on such controversial topics as equal rights and birth control, moved from England to America. In 1828, Sarah Josepha Hale, advocate for women’s education, became editor of the Ladies’ Magazine in Boston. In 1837, she became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book in Philadelphia. Transcendentalist and reformer Margaret Fuller tackled such issues as marriage, the employment of women, and prostitution in her controversial and influential Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in 1845 and sold out within a week. In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first in a series of annual women’s conventions in Seneca Falls, New York. Suffrage, property rights, and divorce were debated. Two years later, a national women’s convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Also in 1848, the Boston Female Medical School, the country’s first medical school for women, opened. In the same year, New York State granted property rights to women commensurate to those for men. New, more radical suffrage periodicals arose. Amelia Bloomer’s Lily appeared in 1849, Una in 1853.
