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.
