Chapter 15 Overview

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Chapter 15 Overview
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The Second Great Awakening

• 1800s-1830s
• Emphasized the importance of religion
• Reaction against declining church membership and
  deism
• Emphasized emotion over reason
• Used camp meetings (revival meetings)
• Emphasis on the ability of an individual to earn
  salvation (as opposed to predestination)
• Led to the growing popularity of new
  denominations
• Actively sought female participation

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Charles Grandison Finney

• "America's foremost revivalist"
• Encouraged women
• Innovative techniques
• Humans can earn salvation
• Abolitionist

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Camp Meetings

• The camp meeting is a phenomenon of American
  frontier Christianity. The "camp meeting" was a
  response to the lack of established churches on
  the frontier. Word of mouth told that there was
  to be a religious meeting at a certain location.
  Due to the primitive means of transportation, if
  this meeting was to be more than a few miles'
  distance from those attending, it would
  necessitate their leaving home for its entire
  duration, or as long as they desired to remain,
  and camping out at or near its site. Unlike
  traditional religious events these meetings could
  provide their participants with almost continuous
  services once one speaker was finished (often
  after several hours) another would often rise to
  take his place.

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New Sects Denominations

• Baptists Methodists grew the most
• Other Examples
• Millerites (Adventists)Jesus would return on
  October 22, 1844
• UnitariansJesus was not divine
• MormonsNew American scriptures

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Reform Movements

• Partly inspired by the Second Great Awakening,
  Americans began to look for new ways to improve
  society.

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Temperance

• Opposed excessive (and sometimes any) alcohol
  consumption
• American Temperance Society (1826)
• Northern states experimented with prohibition
  laws in the 1850s.

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Public Schools

• Reformers believed that better organized schools
  were needed to cope with growing industrialism
  and immigration.
• Horace Mann advocated 1) state funded schools, 2)
  assigning students to specific grades, 3) longer
  school years, 4) required attendance, and 5)
  standardized text books.
• In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first compulsory
  school attendance law.

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Horace Mann
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Abolition

• Sought the abolition of slavery
• Some favored immediate, uncompensated abolition
• Others favored gradual forms of abolition
• William Lloyd Garrison
• Frederick Douglass

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Abolitionists
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Womens Rights

• Lucretia Mott Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Seneca Falls Convention (1848) Declaration of
  Sentiments

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident that
  all men and women are created equal.
• The history of mankind is a history of repeated
  injuries and usurpations on the part of man
  toward woman, having in direct object the
  establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To
  prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
  world.
• He has never permitted her to exercise her
  inalienable right to the elective franchise.
• He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the
  formation of which she had no voice.
• He has withheld from her rights which are given
  to the most ignorant and degraded men--both
  natives and foreigners.
• Having deprived her of this first right of a
  citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving
  her without representation in the halls of
  legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

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• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the
  law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property, even
  to the wages she earns.
• He has monopolized nearly all the profitable
  employments, and from those she is permitted to
  follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
  He closes against her all the avenues to wealth
  and distinction which he considers most honorable
  to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine,
  or law, she is not known.
• He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a
  thorough education, all colleges being closed
  against her.
• He allows her in church, as well as state, but a
  subordinate position, claiming apostolic
  authority for her exclusion from the ministry,
  and, with some exceptions, from any public
  participation in the affairs of the church.
• He has created a false public sentiment by giving
  to the world a different code of morals for men
  and women, by which moral delinquencies which
  exclude women from society, are not only
  tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

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Things have changed
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Asylums

• Dorothea Dix
• Champion of better treatment on the mentally ill.

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Prisons

• Debtors prisons were being abolished
• Capital punishment was being used less frequently
• Brutal punishments (whipping, branding) were
  being eliminated
• Prisons were to reform as well as punish

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Utopias

• Experiments in cooperative communities
• Over 40 utopian communities were set up