1. Give Me Liberty! AN AMERICAN HISTORY FIFTH BRIEF EDITION
Lecture Slides
Give Me Liberty! AN AMERICAN HISTORY FIFTH BRIEF EDITION
by Eric Foner

2. Chapter 12 Chapter 12 An Age of Reform, 1820–1840
Among many Americans who devoted their lives to the crusade against slavery few were as selfless or courageous as Abby Kelley. Born in Massachusetts in 1811, she was educated at a Quaker boarding school in Rhode Island. While teaching in Lynn, Massachusetts she joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1838, began speaking on the topic. Her first lecture was literally a baptism by fire, when reports that abolitionists favored “amalgamation” of (or sexual relations between) the races led Philadelphia residents to burn the meeting hall to the ground. For two decades, she spoke throughout the North in churches, public halls, and antislavery homes, and was also active in other pacifist organizations and women’s rights, demonstrating the interconnected nature of reform movements. While not the first American woman to speak in public, she did so more than any other, challenging her era’s idea that the woman’s “place” was in the home. Likewise, she led an unconventional private life as well, being long-married to abolitionist Stephen S. Foster, but continuing to lecture soon after the birth of their daughter in Criticized for not devoting herself to in-home care of her infant, Kelley replied that “I have done it for the sake of the mothers whose babies are sold away from them. The most precious legacy I can leave my child is a free country.”

3. A woman’s rights quilt
A Woman’s Rights Quilt. Made by an unknown woman only a few years after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, this quilt embodies an unusual form of political expression. It includes scenes visualizing a woman engaged in various activities that violated the era’s cult of domesticity, and it illustrates some of the demands of the early women’s rights movement. The individual blocks show a woman driving her own buggy and a banner advocating “woman rights,” another dressing to go out while her husband remains at home wearing an apron, and a third addressing a public meeting with a mixed male-female audience.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

4. Lecture Preview The Reform Impulse The Crusade against Slavery
Black and White Abolitionism
The Origins of Feminism
The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen above.

5. Focus question: The Reform Impulse
What were the major movements and goals of antebellum reform?
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

6. Utopian experiments Utopian Communities The Shakers
Abolitionism was only one of the era’s reform movements. The reform impulse was rooted in the proliferation of voluntary groups, as Americans organized against liquor, and public entertainment and mail delivery on Sunday, as well as in favor of prison, education, and labor reform, all while seeking to emphasize cooperation over competitive individualism. Nearly all of these groups tried to sway public opinion for their causes, sending out speakers, petitions, and publishing pamphlets, with many active in more than one movement. Some such as liquor reform were national movements, while others such as women’s rights, unionism, and education reform were weak or nonexistent in the South due to their association with antislavery; many of the reform causes were international, with advocates regularly crisscrossing the Atlantic to promote their ideas. Reformers adopted a wide variety of tactics to achieve social change, including “moral suasion” and advocacy of governmentally forced reform, while others withdrew from society to establish their own cooperative settlements hoping to demonstrate the superiority of the collective way of life.
About 100 reform communities were established before the Civil War, called “utopian” by historians after Thomas More’s novel Utopia, which outlined a perfect society. Most arose from religious conviction, but some were secular efforts to counteract the effects of the market revolution. Nearly all of them set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis to restore harmony in an overly individualistic world and narrow the widening gap between rich and poor. Their collective efforts brought the words “socialism” and “communism,” meaning social organization in which productive property is community rather than individually owned, into American politics. Most attempted to find substitute gender roles, alter marriage patterns, and some attempted to prevent sexual relations between men and women entirely; others allowed partner changes at will. But almost all called for the end of private property accompanied by an end to men’s “property” in women.
The Shakers were the most successful of the religious utopians, and at their height in the 1840s, they had settlements from Maine to Kentucky totaling 5,000 members. Founded in the late eighteenth century by Mother Ann Lee, a British emigrant claiming to be directed by God, the Shakers believed that men and women were spiritual equals and that their work was equally important. They eschewed traditional families; men and women abstained from sex and lived separately in communal dorms. They were called Shakers for their religious services, which included frenzied dancing. Though they rejected private property, the Shakers found economic success by marketing plant seeds, breeding cattle, and making furniture.

7. Utopian communities, mid-nineteenth century
In the first half of the nineteenth century, dozens of utopian communities were established in the United States, where small groups of men and women attempted to establish a more perfect social order within the larger society.
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Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
Map 12.1 Utopian Communities, Mid-Nineteenth Century

8. Abolitionist meeting with Frederick douglass in attendance
A rare photograph of an abolitionist meeting in New York State around Frederick Douglass is at the left of the woman at the center.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
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9. A shaker dance
An engraving of a Shaker dance, drawn by Benson Lossing, an artist who visited a Shaker community and reported on life there for Harper’s Magazine in 1857.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
An engraving of a Shaker dance, by Benson Lossing,

10. Noyes’ influence Oneida
Oneida, founded in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes, was also influential. Noyes, having become an evangelical, preached that he and his followers had achieved moral perfection and were free of sin. Noyes first founded a community in Putney, Vermont, where private property was abolished and “complex marriage” practiced. In Noyes’s system of complex marriage, any man could propose sexual relations with any woman, who was free to accept or reject the invitation. Tried for adultery, Noyes left Vermont and founded Oneida, a dictatorial community ruled by Noyes in which an early form of eugenics was practiced, which lasted until 1881.

11. Secular utopias Worldly Communities
To outsiders, utopian communities seemed like “voluntary slavery,” but members’ selfless devotion to leaders’ teachings and rules often allowed the communities remarkable longevity. The Shakers survived into the twentieth century. More worldly oriented communities tended to break down much quicker from internal divisions. The most important secular communitarian was Robert Owen; appalled at worker degradation in the early industrial revolution, he created a model village at New Lanark, Scotland with strict discipline, but comfortable housing and free public education. With 1,500 employees, it was the largest cotton manufacturing center in the world. He promoted communitarianism as a peaceful means of ensuring workers received the full value of their labor. In 1824, he purchased the Harmony community in Indiana, originally founded by George Rapp, an early-nineteenth century German immigrant to America. In New Harmony, Owen hoped to create a “new moral world.” Young children were removed from parents and placed in school where they were trained to value the common good over individual ambition. Owen defended women’s rights, especially education and divorce rights. But multiple internal divisions meant the community only survived for a few years, though its influence on labor, education, and women’s rights were long-lasting.

12. The Crisis The Crisis, a publication by the communitarian
The Crisis, a publication by the communitarian Robert Owen and his son, Robert Dale Owen. The cover depicts Owen’s vision of a planned socialist community.
The Crisis, a publication by the communitarian
Robert Owen and his son, Robert Dale Owen.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

13. The Reform Impulse Religion and Reform
Most Americans saw private property as the basis of economic independence and freedom and marriage as the basis of the social order, so they were unlikely to join these utopian communities. More typical of the reform impulse were movements directed to freeing men and women from external restraints, such as slavery, or from personal behavior, such as drinking or criminality. Many of these movements were inspired by the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, which encouraged people to believe that sinners were “free moral agents” who could reform and “perfect” both themselves and the world. Revivals led older reform movements to become more radical. Temperance shifted toward the complete elimination of drinking, criticism of war became outright pacifism, and calls for gradual emancipation transformed into demands for immediate abolition. To the emerging northern middle-class, reform became a badge of respectability, indicating control of their own lives and human accountability. The American Temperance Society (1826) attempted to redeem both habitual drunkards, but occasional drinkers as well, and claimed by the 1830s to have persuaded hundreds of thousands to renounce liquor. By 1840, alcohol consumption had fallen by half its rate a decade earlier.

14. “love, purity and fidelity”
A temperance banner from around 1850 depicts a young man torn between a woman in white, who illustrates female purity, and a temptress, who offers him a drink of liquor.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
A temperance banner, ca

15. Criticism Critics of Reform Reformers and Freedom
Many Americans saw reform as an assault on their own freedoms. Drinking was prominent at everyday celebrations and events. Taverns were popular meeting places for workingmen and sites of political discussion, organizational meetings, and popular recreation. American Catholics—Irish and German immigrants in particular—often opposed reform efforts. Unlike Protestant reformers, they viewed sin as inevitable in society and individuals, and they viewed the belief that the world could be perfected as irreligious and productive of reformers’ attempts to impose their own worldview on others. Catholics tended to place less emphasis on the individual as a free moral agent and emphasized communities centered on family and church.
Reformers faced a contradiction between their hopes to establish a moral order and to expand personal freedom. Their notion of freedom was both liberating and controlling. They said their goal was to help Americans enjoy genuine liberty by liberating them from the “slavery” of drink, poverty, and sin. Yet they believed that self-fulfillment derived from self-discipline and that the free individual fully practiced self-control. Reformers worried that western settlers and immigrants lacked self-control and required either private reform groups or the government to change their behaviors. These associations were especially successful at harnessing new printing technology to influence the era’s reform movements.

16. Institutional development
The Invention of the Asylum
The Common School
Reform efforts created a multitude of new institutions designed to transform individuals into free, morally upright citizens, performing services once rendered in the family or small community. In the 1830s and 1840s, Americans built jails for criminals, asylums for the mentally ill, and orphanages. These institutions emerged from reformers’ belief that social ills could be cured and eliminated by placing individuals in an environment where their character could be changed. While today many of these institutions have become overcrowded and focused mostly on holding inmates at bay away from society, reformers originally hoped to remake the afflicted into productive, self-disciplined citizens.
The most significant institution-building effort before the Civil War was the move to establish common schools—tax-supported state school systems open to all children. In the early nineteenth century, most children were educated, if at all, in local schools, private academies, or at home. Many children had no access to education. Horace Mann, a Massachusetts lawyer and Whig politician, led efforts to create new common schools. Mann embraced industrialization but hoped that universal public education would restore social equality by bringing children from all social classes together and giving them an equal opportunity for upward social mobility. With support from labor unions, factory owners, and middle-class reformers, by 1860 every northern state had tax-supported school systems for children. The common school movement created the first real career opportunity for women, especially as teachers. In the South, most viewed literate blacks as dangerous, and had no desire to tax themselves for education of poor whites, thus the region lagged far behind in public education, one of many ways the North and South seemed to be growing apart.

17. Focus question: The Crusade against Slavery
What were the different varieties of abolitionism?
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

18. The Crusade against Slavery
Colonization
Compared to drinking, breaking the Sabbath, and illiteracy, the greatest evil in American society first attracted the least attention from reformers. For decades, the only criticism of slavery seemed to come from Quakers, slaves, and free blacks. Before the 1830s, most white Americans who called for the abolition of slavery also supported the “colonization” of free slaves, or their deportation, to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America. In 1816, supporters of this idea founded the American Colonization Society, which promoted the gradual abolition of slavery and the settlement of black Americans in Africa. It soon established Liberia on the coast of West Africa, to which some free blacks did emigrate. Even though many saw colonization as impractical, prominent political leaders in the Jacksonian era, such as Henry Clay, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, and even Jackson himself, supported the Colonization Society. Many in the North saw colonization as the only means of ending slavery, while southern colonizationists urged free blacks, whom they regarded a degraded group that endangered white society, to leave the country. Others simply thought racism so entrenched that it was safer for blacks, once freed, to leave the nation; like Indian removal, colonization rested on the premise that America was a fundamentally white society. Of course, while several thousand free blacks did migrate to Liberia, most African-Americans opposed the idea of colonization and argued that, as Americans, they had the right to remain in the United States as free and equal citizens. In 1817, some 3,000 free blacks assembled in Philadelphia for the first black national convention, making resolutions to insist that blacks were Americans, entitled to the same freedom and rights enjoyed by whites.

19. abolitionism Militant Abolitionism
The abolitionist movement of the 1830s arose in opposition to colonization and its supporters. The new abolitionists drew on the religious idea that slavery was a sin and the secular one that it contradicted the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. They rejected gradual emancipation and demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. They vociferously criticized slavery and slaveholders and affirmed that blacks, once freed, should become equal citizens of the republic, not colonizers of distant lands. White abolitionists demanded that race should not prevent the equal enjoyment of economic, civil, and political rights in the United States. They opposed racism in all its forms. The first sign of this new abolitionism was An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an 1829 pamphlet written by David Walker, a free black in Boston. Walker called on black Americans to mobilize for abolition, with arms if necessary, and warned Americans that God would punish them if they did not end slavery. Walker invoked the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, but he also asked blacks to take pride in African civilizations’ achievements and claim their rights as Americans. Walker died under mysterious circumstances. Only with the appearance in 1831 of The Liberator, the weekly journal of William Lloyd Garrison, did the new abolitionism take root. Garrison, a Bostonian, was strident in his rhetoric and unbending in his commitment to abolition. Garrison even suggested that the North should abrogate the Constitution and dissolve the Union in order to end its complicity with slavery. While few abolitionists supported this notion, many adopted his criticisms of colonization and called for immediate abolition.

20. “proclaim liberty” An abolitionist banner demonstrates antislavery
An abolitionist banner. Antislavery organizations adopted the Liberty Bell as a symbol of their campaign to extend freedom to black Americans. Previously, the bell, forged in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, had simply been known as the Old State House Bell.
An abolitionist banner demonstrates antislavery
organizations’ adoption of the Liberty Bell as a symbol
of their campaign to extend freedom to black Americans.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

21. William Lloyd garrison
William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator and probably the nation’s most prominent abolitionist, in a daguerreotype from around 1850.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, ca

22. The message Spreading the Abolitionist Message
Slavery and Moral Suasion
The abolitionist movement quickly spread from a handful of activists to thousands of villages, towns, and cities throughout the North. They took advantage of new print technology and expanding literacy by printing and distributing enormous amounts of pamphlets, newspapers, books, novels, and broadsides. Between the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and 1840, about 100,000 northerners joined local abolition groups. Most were ordinary citizens, although a few prominent men, such as the New York merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan, also joined. Theodore Weld, an evangelical minister, helped create a mass constituency for abolition by using the methods of the revivalists, calling slavery a sin that could only be absolved by immediate abolition.
While many southerners believed that the abolitionists hoped to incite a slave insurrection, nearly all abolitionists, despite their militant rhetoric, rejected violence as a means of ending slavery. Many were pacifists or “non-resistants,” who believed that coercion had to be eliminated from all human institutions and relationships. They adopted the strategy of “moral suasion,” or convincing slaveholders to end their sinful ways and shaming northerners into action. Abolitionists were the first in American history to try to transform society by changing mass opinion through education and agitation instead of infiltrating existing political parties. On the other hand, abolitionists felt that slavery was so deeply embedded in the United States that fundamental changes nationwide would have to occur; personal liberty took precedence over other forms of freedom such as property rights and local self-government.

23. Abolitionist book for children
Pages from an abolitionist book for children. Abolitionists sought to convince young and old of the evils of slavery.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
Pages from an abolitionist book for children.

24. Slave market of america
Slave Market of America, an engraving produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, illustrates their cause with American traditions, even as they mocked the nation’s claim to be a “land of the free.”
Slave Market of America, produced by the American
Anti-Slavery Society, 1836.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

25. New visions A New Vision of America
The abolitionists tried to reassert that freedom was a universal entitlement in an age when freedom and citizenship had become associated with whiteness. The idea that Americans could be a single people undifferentiated by race has its origins with the abolitionists, not the founding fathers. Antislavery activists viewed slaves and free blacks as equal members of the national community, a concept summarized by Lydia Maria Child in her 1833 work An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. They argued that birthplace, not race, should determine who was an American, an idea later enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. They were the first to argue that human rights were more important than national sovereignty, and they urged enforcement of international laws against the slave trade and slavery. While some abolitionists like Garrison detested the Constitution as a covenant with the devil, others, like Frederick Douglass, believed that it offered no protections to slavery. But abolitionists invented the concept of equality before the law, regardless of race. And they consciously presented abolition as the culmination of the Revolution’s values of liberty and equality. Abolitionists seized upon the language of the Declaration of Independence, and created from the Old State House Bell, the symbol of the Liberty Bell. Of course, all Americans claimed their political beliefs were representations of the revolutionary legacy, including southern slaveowners. Abolitionists never represented more than a small portion of the Northern population, but as the controversy intensified, their belief that slavery contradicted the national heritage of freedom spread far beyond their own circles.

26. Focus question: Black and White Abolitionism
How did abolitionism challenge barriers to racial equality and free speech?
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

27. Black and White Abolitionism
Black Abolitionists
Blacks played a leading role in the abolitionist movement. Northern blacks attracted to Garrison’s opposition to colonization and his demand for equal rights were half of The Liberator’s subscribers. Several blacks were leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and northern-born blacks and fugitive slaves such as Frederick Douglass quickly became major organizers and speakers. Many fugitive slaves published accounts of their experience of slavery, which became powerful tools in communicating the reality of slavery to northern audiences. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, was based on one fugitive slave’s life and sold more than 1 million copies in only a few years. By the 1840s, black abolitionists frustrated with white control started to hold their own black abolitionist conventions. Some, like Henry Highland Garnet, departed from the white movement by calling for violent resistance to slavery, a position highly at odds with prevailing belief in moral suasion. Black abolitionists took every opportunity to reject the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty, and many reversed the common association between the United States and freedom’s progress. Black communities in the North devised an alternative calendar of “freedom celebrations” centered on the anniversary of the slave trade ban and West Indian freedom in place of July 4th. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered the greatest oration on American slavery and freedom in Rochester, New York; he focused on the hypocrisy of nation celebrating freedom on Independence Day while allowing slavery to flourish. Rather than deny the founders’ legacy, he drew upon it, arguing that subsequent generations had strayed from a “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence.” He insisted that the United States could only continue its original mission through abolition, which would free the “great doctrines” of the Declaration of Independence from the “narrow bounds” of race.

28. “eliza’s escape”
One of many popular lithographs illustrating scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most widely read of all antislavery writings. This depicts the slave Eliza escaping with her child across the ice floes of the Ohio River.
Lithograph illustrating the scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which Eliza escaped with her child across the icy Ohio River.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

29. Frederick douglass Photograph of Frederick Douglass,
A photograph of Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave who became a prominent abolitionist, taken between 1847 and As a fellow abolitionist noted at the time, “The very look and bearing of Douglass are an irresistible logic against the oppression of his race.”
Photograph of Frederick Douglass,
taken between 1847 and 1852.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

30. Resistance to freedom Gentlemen of Property and Standing
Abolitionism initially sparked violent hostility from northerners who thought the movement threatened to dissolve the Union, interfere with profits originating in slave labor, and overthrow white supremacy. Led by “gentlemen of property and standing,” usually merchants with economic ties to the South, mobs disrupted abolitionist meetings. In 1837, the antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Illinois while defending the printing press for his newspaper from assault, for the fifth and final time. Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general allowed abolitionist literature to be removed from the mails. In 1836, when abolitionists flooded the House of Representatives with petitions calling for emancipation in Washington, D.C., the House adopted the “gag rule,” which prohibited that body from considering the petitions. The rule was repealed in 1844, in great part due to the efforts of former president John Quincy Adams. By then, attacks on the free speech of abolitionists convinced many northerners that slavery was incompatible with the democratic liberties of white Americans. Abolitionists broadened their appeal in order to win the support of northerners who cared little for black rights, but could be persuaded that slavery threatened their own freedoms. The struggle to discuss slavery and its abolition in public made abolitionism the first great struggle for free speech in American history.

31. DESTRUCTION BY FIRE OF PENNSYLVANIA HALL
Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania Hall, a lithograph depicting the burning of the abolitionist meeting hall by a Philadelphia mob in 1838.
Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania
Hall, depicting the burning of the Philadelphia abolitionist meeting hall by a mob in 1838.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

32. Am I not a man and a brother?
Am I Not a Man and a Brother? The most common abolitionist depiction of a slave, this image not only presents African Americans as unthreatening individuals seeking white assistance but also calls upon white Americans to recognize blacks as fellow men unjustly held in bondage.
Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, the most common
abolitionist depiction of a slave.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

33. Focus question: The Origins of Feminism
What were the diverse sources of the antebellum women’s rights movement and its significance?
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question.
Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

34. The Origins of Feminism
The Rise of the Public Woman
Women and Free Speech
Much of abolitionism’s strength was found in northern women, who joined in large numbers. Most were evangelical Protestants, New England Congregationalists, or Quakers, who thought that slavery violated Christian belief and practice. The public sphere was open to women in ways that government and party politics were not. They could not vote, but they could circulate petitions, attend meetings, march in parades, and speak in public. Women were active in political issues from slavery to presidential campaigns, and long before the could voted, circulated petitions, attended mass meetings, marched in political parades, delivered lectures, and raised money for political causes; they became active in temperance, asylum building, and other reforms. Dorothea Dix led a movement for more humane treatment of the insane, who at the time were usually simply held in jails; her efforts led to twenty-eight states building mental hospitals before the Civil War.
Women’s participation in abolitionism inspired the early movement for women’s rights. In fighting for the rights of slaves, women gained a new understanding of their own subordination in society and law. Angelina and Sarah Grimké, daughters of a South Carolina slaveholder, converted to Quakerism and abolitionism while visiting Philadelphia and begin to denounce slavery in public. Themselves denounced for their public activities, they forthrightly defended women’s rights to take part in political debate and share social and educational privileges held by men.

35. The standard of women’s rights
Feminism and Freedom
The Grimké sisters were the first to apply the abolitionist doctrine of universal freedom and equality to women’s status. Their work and writings helped inspire other women to adopt the standard of women’s rights in the early 1840s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who became key organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention (the women’s rights convention of 1848), were antislavery activists. They had been barred from abolitionist meetings because of their sex. The Seneca Falls Convention raised the issue of women’s suffrage for the first time in American history. The Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled on the Declaration of Independence, added women to Jefferson’s proposition that “all men are created equal,” and listed the injuries men had inflicted on women, including denying them the right to vote. The Seneca Falls Convention further denounced an entire social structure that denied women access to education, employment, property and wages, and children in the event of divorce; deprived women of independent legal status when they married; and restricted them to the home. Equal rights became the rallying cry for women’s rights, and meant claiming access to all the definitions of freedom.
Like abolitionism, temperance, and other reforms, feminism was international, and though it lacked broad backing at home, allies were found abroad. Margaret Fuller became the first woman to be appointed literary editor of the New York Tribune in She argued that the transcendentalist idea that freedom meant personal development applied to women. She died with her husband and baby in a shipwreck in 1850 while returning to the United States from Europe.

36. Margaret fuller Feminist writer Margaret Fuller.
An undated engraving of feminist writer Margaret Fuller ( ).
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
Feminist writer Margaret Fuller.

37. The slavery of sex Women and Work The Slavery of Sex
Women demanded the right to participate in the market revolution. In 1851, black abolitionist Sojourner Truth insisted the movement devote attention to poor and working-class women, and repudiate the idea that women were too delicate to work outside the home. Though those at Seneca Falls were mostly middle class, they rejected the identification of the home as the woman’s “sphere.” During the 1850s, feminists attempted to popularize the “bloomer,” a new style of dress consisting of a tunic and trousers. Though joked at by men, they attempted to make a serious point about the confining nature of prevailing fashions that made it almost impossible for a place in the public sphere or to work outside the home.
The dichotomy between freedom and slavery shaped feminist political language; just as the idea of “wage slavery” enabled northern workers to challenge the inequalities of the market revolution, the “slavery of sex” allowed the women’s movement to challenge male authority and female subordination. Feminists repudiated the law of marriage that labeled the family a “private” institution independent of public authority. The analogy between free women and slaves gained prominence as it was swept up into the debate over slavery. Southern defenders of slavery simply labeled the inequalities of both slavery and marriage as natural, and eliminating slavery would threaten marriage. Of course, marriage was not literally equivalent to slavery, but married women did not have the right to the fruits of her own labor. Beginning in Mississippi in 1839, numerous states began enacting laws to protect women’s property from husbands’ creditors, but these were intended to protect family property during the 1837 depression more than expanding women’s rights. In 1860, New York expanded married women’s legal and business rights, but in most of the rest of the country, property and wages of both husband and wife still belonged to the husband.

38. The “bloomer” Woman’s Emancipation, satire from Harper’s Monthly,
Woman’s Emancipation, a satirical engraving from Harper’s Monthly, August 1851, illustrating the much-ridiculed “Bloomer” costume.
Woman’s Emancipation, satire from Harper’s Monthly,
August 1851.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

39. New directions and underlying differences
“Social Freedom”
Inspired by abolitionism, women’s rights advocates turned the popular understanding of self-ownership, or control over one’s person, in a new direction. The abolitionist’s emphasis on the slave master’s violation of the slave woman’s body lent a new reality to the ideal of self-ownership for women’s rights activists. The law of domestic relations assumed a husband’s right of sexual access to his wife and his right to inflict corporal punishment on her. Courts generally did not interfere in cases of physical or sexual abuse unless it was extreme. The issue of women’s private freedom showed underlying differences in the women’s rights movement. A belief in equality between the sexes, and notions of natural differences between men and women, co-existed in the movement. Even as some feminists entered the public sphere and challenged aspects of the “cult of domesticity,” they accepted other dimensions of women’s subordination. Even staunch feminists avoided discussion of women’s sexual freedoms, in and out of marriage. Yet the gradual decline in birthrates over the course of the nineteenth century indicates that many women exercised more freedom in their intimate lives.

40. Abolitionism divided The Abolitionist Schism
Even in reform circles, the issue of women’s rights was very controversial. Abolitionist men who welcomed women’s participation typically did not welcome their advocacy of rights for themselves. Disagreement over women’s proper role in abolitionist activity sparked a split in abolitionist ranks in The appointment of a female abolitionist to the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society caused male abolitionists who believed women should not occupy such a prominent position to form their own rival organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Behind the split was a fear among some abolitionists that Garrison’s radicalism on issues like women’s rights, and his refusal to endorse voting or running candidates for office, was stunting the movement’s growth. To make abolitionism a political movement, these men formed the Liberty Party, whose candidate for president in 1840 received only one-third of 1 percent of the total vote. While the achievement of the goals of the women’s rights movement lay far in the future, by 1840, the abolitionist movement had accomplished its most important work. It had spread the message of antislavery throughout the North and awakened a broad array of people and groups to the evils of slavery and the necessity of its abolition. The movement’s greatest achievement was ending the conspiracy of silence that attempted to maintain national unity by suppressing public debate on slavery.

41. “get off the track!”
This image appeared on the cover of the sheet music for “Get Off the Track!,” a song popularized by the Hutchinson singers, who performed antislavery songs. The trains Immediate Emancipation (with The Liberator as its front wheel) and Liberty Party pull into a railroad station. The Herald of Freedom and American Standard were antislavery newspapers. The song’s lyrics praised William Lloyd Garrison and criticized various politicians, among them Henry Clay. The chorus went: “Roll it along! Through the nation / Freedom’s car, Emancipation."
This image appeared on the cover of the sheet music
for “Get Off the Track!,” a song popularized by the
Hutchinson singers, who performed antislavery songs.
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Brief Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

42. Review The Reform Impulse The Crusade against Slavery
Focus Question: What were the major movements and goals of antebellum reform?
The Crusade against Slavery
Focus Question: What were the different varieties of abolitionism?
Black and White Abolitionism
Focus Question: How did abolitionism challenge barriers to racial equality and free speech?
The Origins of Feminism
Focus Question: What were the diverse sources of the antebellum women’s rights movement and its significance?

43. MEDIA LINKS —— Chapter 12 ——
Title
Media link
Eric Foner on the abolition movement, pt 1: freedom and citizenship
The Abolition Movement, pt 1: Freedom and Citizenship
Eric Foner on the abolition movement, pt 2: Seneca Falls convention
The Abolition Movement, pt 2: Seneca Falls Convention
Eric Foner on antebellum social reform
Antebellum Social Reform
Eric Foner on slavery, pt 6: center of American politics in the 1840s
Slavery, pt 6: Center of American Politics in the 1840s
Eric Foner on Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus
Lincoln's Suspension of Habeas Corpus
Eric Foner on religion and American reform
Religion and American Reform

44. Next Lecture PREVIEW: —— Chapter 13 —— A House Divided, 1840–1861
Fruits of Manifest Destiny
A Dose of Arsenic
The Rise of the Republican Party
The Emergence of Lincoln
The Impending Crisis

45. Independent and Employee-Owned
Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slide Set for Chapter 12 Give Me Liberty! AN AMERICAN HISTORY FIFTH BRIEF EDITION by Eric Foner