1. The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790-1860
Cover Slide
The American Pageant
Chapter 15
The Ferment of Reform and Culture,
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2. Angelina Grimké
Angelina Grimké
Born in the south to a prominent slaveholding family, Angelina Grimké moved to the north to distance herself from an institution she hated. When she discovered that northerners were no more sympathetic about the plight of slaves than southerners and would not give abolition a free hearing, she chose to do something about it. She toured the northeast, speaking first to groups of women and then to large mixed audiences. She capped her tour by becoming the first woman to address the Massachusetts state legislature. Her courage won new respect both for abolitionists and for women. (Library of Congress)
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3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sons, 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton posed in 1848 with two of her sons, Henry Jr., left, and Neil. Stanton, one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, traveled widely and agitated for women's equality while raising five children. (Collection of Rhoda Jenkins)
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4. Margaret Fuller by Thomas Hicks, 1848
Disappointed that his first child was a girl, Margaret Fuller's father decided to educate her as if she were a boy. As a child, she wrecked her health studying Latin, English, and French classics. She joined Ralph Waldo Emerson's circle of transcendentalists. In 1846 Horace Greeley sent her to Europe as the Tribune's foreign correspondent. There she met artists and writers, observed the Revolutions of 1848, and married an Italian nobleman. On her return to America in 1850, she, her husband, and infant son died in a shipwreck off Long Island. (Constance Fuller Threinen)
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5. Shaker Village at Alfred, Maine, Joshua H. Bussell, 1845 (Plate XVI)
This map shows the layout of a Shaker Village. The Shakers, the largest of the communal utopian experiments, reached their peak between 1820 and (Library of Congress)
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6. Temperance pledge
Temperance pledge
Pressured by his determined wife and pleading child, this reluctant tippler is about to submit to "moral suasion" and sign the pledge to abstain from alcohol. (Library of Congress)
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7. Theatre poster: Uncle Tom's Cabin
With its vivid word pictures of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin translated well to the stage. Stowe herself was among the many who wrote dramatizations of the novel. Scenes of Eliza crossing the ice of the Ohio River with bloodhounds in pursuit and the evil Simon Legree whipping Uncle Tom outraged northern audiences and turned many against slavery. Southerners damned Mrs. Stowe as a "vile wretch in petticoats." ( Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)
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8. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was historic for a number of reasons. Not only did it help to fire up northern antislavery sentiments, but it also was the first American novel that featured African American characters in prominent roles. It was issued in various editions with many different covers, but most of them featured the lead character, Uncle Tom--another first in American publishing. This particular cover, from an early "Young Folks' Edition" of the book, depicts the stooped old man with his young, sympathetic white mistress. (Collection of Picture Research Consultants and Archives)
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9. Map: Religious and Utopian Communities, 1800-1845
The desire to construct a perfect society influenced the founding of a number of communities, especially in the period from 1800 to Religious motives dominated the founding of Shaker and Mormon communities. In addition to the ideas of Robert Owen, those of Frenchman Charles Fourier, who sought to cure the evils of competitive society by establishing a harmonious world in which men and women performed "attractive" labor, influenced the founding of communities like Modern Times on Long Island and the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey. Brook Farm was, for a period, a Fourierite community. Noyes's Oneida mingled religious and secular motives in ways hard to disentangle.
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