The decades before the Civil War saw the birth of the American reform tradition.  Reformers—female and male, black and white--launched unprecedented campaigns to educate the deaf and the blind, rehabilitate criminals, extend equal rights to women, and abolish slavery.  Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons, and hospitals for the infirm and the mentally ill are all legacies of this first generation of American reform.

     What factors gave rise to the reform impulse and why was it unleashed with such vigor in pre–Civil War America?  Reformers had many different reasons for wanting to change American society.  Some hoped to remedy the distresses created by social disorder, violence, and widening class divisions.  Others found motivation in a religious vision of a godly society on earth.

     During the early nineteenth century, poverty, lawlessness, violence, and vice appeared to be increasing at an alarming rate.  In New York, the nation’s largest city, crime rose far faster than in the overall population. Between 1814 and 1834, the city’s population doubled, but reports of crime quadrupled. Gangs, bearing such names as Plug Uglies and Bowery B’hoys, prowled the streets, stealing from warehouses and private residences.  Public drunkenness was a common sight.  By 1835, there were nearly 3000 drinking places in New York—one for every 50 persons over the age of 15.  Prostitution also generated concern.  By 1850, a reported 6000 “fallen women” strolled the city streets.  Mob violence evoked particular fear.  In a single decade, 1834–1844, 200 incidents of mob violence occurred in New York.  Adding to the sense of alarm were scenes of heart-wrenching poverty, such as children standing barefoot outside hotels, selling matches.

     Social problems were not confined to large cities like New York.  During the decades before the Civil War, newspapers reported hundreds of incidences of duels, lynchings, and mob violence.  In the slave states and southwestern territories men frequently resolved quarrels by dueling.  In one 1818 duel between two cousins, the combatants faced off with shotguns at four paces!  Lynchings too were widely reported.  In 1835, the citizens of Vicksburg, Mississippi, attempted to rid the city of gambling and prostitution by raiding gaming houses and brothels and lynching five gamblers.  In urban areas, mob violence increased in frequency and destructiveness. Between 1810 and 1819 there were 7 major riots; in the 1830s there were 115.

     A nation in which the vice president had to carry a gun while presiding over the Senate—lest senators attack each other with knives or pistols—seemed to confirm criticism by Europeans that democracy inevitably led to anarchy.  Incidents of crime and violence led many Americans to ask how a free society could maintain stability and moral order. Americans sought to answer this question through religion, education, and social reform.

     More than anxiety over lawlessness, violence, and vice sparked the reform impulse during the first decades of the nineteenth century.  America’s revolutionary heritage, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and religious zeal all contributed to a sensitivity to human suffering and a boundless faith in humankind’s capacity to improve social institutions.

     Many pre–Civil War reformers saw their efforts as an attempt to realize the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.  Invoking the principles of liberty and equality set forth in the Declaration, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison attacked slavery and feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for equal rights for women.

     The philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the people’s innate goodness and with its rejection of the inevitability of poverty and ignorance, was another important source of the reform impulse.  Those who espoused the Enlightenment philosophy argued that the creation of a more favorable moral and physical environment could alleviate social problems.

     Reformers identified liquor as the cause of a wide range of social, family, and personal problems.  Many middle-class women blamed alcohol for the abuse of wives and children and the squandering of family resources.  Many businesspeople identified drinking with crime, poverty, and inefficient and unproductive employees.

     The stage was set for the appearance of an organized movement against liquor.  In 1826 the nation’s first formal national temperance organization—the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance—was born.  Led by socially prominent clergy and laypeople, the new organization called for total abstinence from distilled liquor.  Within 3 years, 222 state and local antiliquor groups were laboring to spread this message.

      By 1835 an estimated 2 million Americans had taken the “pledge” to abstain from hard liquor. Temperance reform drew support from many southerners and westerners who were otherwise indifferent or hostile to reform.  Their efforts helped reduce annual per capita consumption of alcohol from 7 gallons in 1830 to 3 gallons a decade later, forcing 4000 distilleries to close.

     The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from “heavy drinking” cultures heightened the concerns of temperance reformers.  Between 1830 and 1860, nearly 2 million Irish arrived in the United States along with an additional 893,000 Germans.  In Ireland, land was in such short supply that many young men were unable to support a family by farming.  The only solution was to delay marriage and socialize with other young men in “bachelor groups,” a ritual that often involved drinking.  These immigrants probably drank no more than most native-born Americans before the 1830s, but increasingly heavy drinking was regarded as a problem demanding government action.

     The initial thrust of reform—moral reform—was to rescue the nation from infidelity and intemperance.  A second line of reform, social or humanitarian reform, attempted to alleviate such sources of human misery as crime, cruelty, disease, and ignorance.  A third line of reform, radical reform, sought national regeneration by eliminating slavery and racial and sexual discrimination.

Early Antislavery Efforts

     As late as the 1750s, no church had discouraged its members from owning or trading in slaves.  Slaves could be found in each of the 13 American colonies, and before the American Revolution, only the colony of Georgia had temporarily sought to prohibit slavery (because its founders did not want a workforce that would compete with the convicts they planned to transport from England).

     By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, protests against slavery had become widespread.  By 1804 nine states north of Maryland and Delaware had either emancipated their slaves or adopted gradual emancipation plans.  Both the United States and Britain in 1808 outlawed the African slave trade.

     The emancipation of slaves in the northern states and the prohibition against the African slave trade generated optimism that slavery was dying.  Congress in 1787 had barred slavery from the Old Northwest, the region north of the Ohio River to the Mississippi River.  The number of slaves freed by their masters had risen dramatically in the upper South during the 1780s and 1790s, and more antislavery societies had been formed in the South than in the North.  At the present rate of progress, predicted one religious leader in 1791, within 50 years it will “be as shameful for a man to hold a Negro slave, as to be guilty of common robbery or theft.”

     In the early 1830s, however, the development of the Cotton Kingdom proved that slavery was not on the road to extinction.  Despite the end of the African slave trade, the slave population continued to grow, climbing from 1.5 million in 1820 to over 2 million a decade later.

    A widespread belief that blacks and whites could not coexist and that racial separation was necessary encouraged futile efforts at deportation and overseas colonization.  In 1817 a group of prominent ministers and politicians formed the American Colonization Society to resettle free blacks in West Africa, encourage planters voluntarily to emancipate their slaves, and create a group of black missionaries who would spread Christianity in Africa.  During the 1820s, Congress helped fund the cost of transporting free blacks to Africa.

     A few blacks supported African colonization in the belief that it provided the only alternative to continued degradation and discrimination. Paul Cuffe (1759–1817), a Quaker sea captain who was the son of a former slave and an Indian woman, led the first experiment in colonization.  In 1815 he transported 38 free blacks to the British colony of Sierra Leone, on the western coast of Africa, and devoted thousands of his own dollars to the cause of colonization.  In 1822 the American Colonization Society established the colony of Liberia, in west Africa, for resettlement of free American blacks.

     It soon became apparent that colonization was a wholly impractical solution to the nation’s slavery problem.  Each year the nation’s slave population rose by roughly 50,000, but in 1830 the American Colonization Society succeeded in persuading only 259 free blacks to migrate to Liberia, bringing the total number of blacks colonized in Africa to a mere 1400.

The Rise of Abolitionist Sentiment in the North

     Initially, free blacks led the movement condemning colonization and northern discrimination against African Americans.  As early as 1817, more than 3,000 members of Philadelphia’s black community staged a protest against colonization, at which they denounced the policy as “little more merciful than death.”  In 1829 David Walker (1785–1830), the free black owner of a second-hand clothing store in Boston, issued the militant Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.  The appeal threatened insurrection and violence if calls for the abolition of slavery and improved conditions for free blacks were ignored. The next year, some 40 black delegates from 8 states held the first of a series of annual conventions denouncing slavery and calling for an end to discriminatory laws in the northern states.

     The idea of abolition received impetus from William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879).  In 1829 the 25-year-old white Bostonian added his voice to the outcry against colonization, denouncing it as a cruel hoax designed to promote the racial purity of the northern population while doing nothing to end slavery in the South.  Instead, he called for “immediate emancipation.”  By immediate emancipation, he meant the immediate and unconditional release of slaves from bondage without compensation to slaveowners.

     In 1831, Garrison founded The Liberator, a militant abolitionist newspaper that was the country’s first publication to demand an immediate end to slavery.  On the front page of the first issue, he defiantly declared: “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”  Incensed by Garrison’s proclamation, the state of Georgia offered a $5000 reward to anyone who brought him to the state for trial.

    Within four years, 200 antislavery societies had appeared in the North.  In a massive propaganda campaign to proclaim the sinfulness of slavery, they distributed a million pieces of abolitionist literature and sent 20,000 tracts directly to the South.

Abolitionist Arguments and Public Reaction

     Abolitionists attacked slavery on several grounds.  Slavery was illegal because it violated the principles of natural rights to life and liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence.  Justice, said Garrison, required that the nation “secure to the colored population...all the rights and privileges that belong to them as men and as Americans.”  Slavery was sinful because slaveholders, in the words of abolitionist Theodore Weld, had usurped “the prerogative of God.”  Masters reduced a “God-like being” to a manipulable “THING.”  Slavery also encouraged sexual immorality and undermined the institutions of marriage and the family.  Not only did slave masters sexually abuse and exploit slave women, abolitionists charged, but in some older southern states, such as Virginia and Maryland, they bred slaves for sale to the more recently settled parts of the Deep South.

     Mobs led by “gentlemen of property and standing” attacked the homes and businesses of abolitionist merchants, destroyed abolitionist printing presses, disrupted antislavery meetings, and terrorized black neighborhoods.  Crowds pelted abolitionist reformers with eggs and even stones.  During antiabolitionist rioting in Philadelphia in October 1834, a white mob destroyed 45 homes in the city’s black community.  A year later, a Boston mob dragged Garrison through the streets and almost lynched him before authorities removed him to a city jail for his own safety.  In 1837, the abolitionist movement acquired its first martyr when an antiabolitionist mob in Alton, Illinois, murdered Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, editor of a militant abolitionist newspaper.  Three times mobs destroyed Lovejoy’s printing presses and attacked his house. When a fourth press arrived, Lovejoy armed himself and guarded the new press at the warehouse.  The antiabolitionist mob set fire to the warehouse, shot Lovejoy as he fled the building, and dragged his mutilated body through the town.

Division Within the Antislavery Movement

     Questions over strategy and tactics divided the antislavery movement.  At the 1840 annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, abolitionists split over such questions as women’s right to participate in the administration of the organization and the advisability of nominating abolitionists as independent political candidates. Garrison won control of the organization, and his opponents promptly walked out. From this point on, no single organization could speak for abolitionism.

     One group of abolitionists looked to politics as the answer to ending slavery and founded political parties for that purpose.  The Liberty party, founded in 1839 under the leadership of Arthur and Lewis Tappan, wealthy New York City businessmen, and James G. Birney, a former slaveholder, called on Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, end the interstate slave trade, and cease admitting new slave states to the Union.  The party also sought the repeal of local and state “black laws” in the North, which discriminated against free blacks, much as segregation laws would in the post-Reconstruction South. The Liberty party nominated Birney for president in 1840 and again in 1844.  Although it gathered fewer than 7100 votes in its first campaign, it polled some 62,000 votes 4 years later and captured enough votes in Michigan and New York to deny Henry Clay the presidency.

     In 1848 antislavery Democrats and Whigs merged with the Liberty party to form the Free Soil party. Unlike the Liberty party, which was dedicated to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for African Americans, the Free Soil party narrowed its demands to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the exclusion of slavery from the federal territories.  The Free Soilers also wanted a homestead law to provide free land for western settlers, high tariffs to protect American industry, and federally sponsored internal improvements.  Campaigning under the slogan “free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,” the new party polled 300,000 votes (or 10 percent) in the presidential election of 1848 and helped elect Whig candidate Zachary Taylor.

     Other abolitionists, led by Garrison, took a more radical direction, advocating civil disobedience and linking abolitionism to other reforms such as women’s rights, world government, and international peace. Garrison and his supporters established the New England Non-Resistance Society in 1838.  Members refused to vote, to hold public office, or to bring suits in court.  In 1854 Garrison attracted notoriety by publicly burning a copy of the Constitution, which he called “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” because it acknowledged the legality of slavery.

     African Americans played a vital role in the abolitionist movement, staging protests against segregated churches, schools, and public transportation.  In New York and Pennsylvania, free blacks launched petition drives for equal voting rights. Northern blacks also had a pivotal role in the “underground railroad,” which provided escape routes for southern slaves through the northern states and into Canada. African-American churches offered sanctuary to runaways, and black “vigilance” groups in cities such as New York and Detroit battled slave catchers who sought to recapture fugitive slaves.

     Fugitive slaves, such as William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Harriet Tubman, advanced abolitionism by publicizing the horrors of slavery. Their firsthand tales of whippings and separation from spouses and children combated the notion that slaves were contented under slavery and undermined belief in racial inferiority. Tubman risked her life by making 19 trips into slave territory to free as many as 300 slaves. Slaveholders posted a reward of $40,000 for the capture of the “Black Moses.”

     Frederick Douglass was the most famous fugitive slave and black abolitionist.  The son of a Maryland slave woman and an unknown white father, Douglass was separated from his mother and sent to work on a plantation when he was 6 years old. At the age of 20, in 1838, he escaped to the North using the papers of a free black sailor.  In the North, Douglass became the first runaway slave to speak out against slavery.  When many Northerners refused to believe that this eloquent orator could possibly have been a slave, he responded by writing an autobiography that identified his previous owners by name.  Although he initially allied himself with William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass later started his own newspaper, The North Star, and supported political action against slavery.

     By the 1850s, many blacks had become pessimistic about defeating slavery.  Some African Americans looked again to colonization as a solution.  In the 15 months following passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, some 13,000 free blacks fled the North for Canada.  In 1854, Martin Delany (1812–1885), a Pittsburgh doctor who had studied medicine at Harvard, organized the National Emigration Convention to investigate possible sites for black colonization in Haiti, Central America, and West Africa.

     Other blacks argued in favor of violence.  Black abolitionists in Ohio adopted resolutions encouraging slaves to escape and called on their fellow citizens to violate any law that “conflicts with reason, liberty and justice, North or South.”  A meeting of fugitive slaves in Cazenovia, New York, declared that “the State motto of Virginia, ‘Death to Tyrants,’ is as well the black man’s as the white man’s motto.”  By the late 1850s, a growing number of free blacks had concluded that it was just as legitimate to use violence to secure the freedom of the slaves as it had been to establish the independence of the American colonies.

     Between the 1820s and 1840s, individuals who believed in the perfectibility of the social and political order founded hundreds of “utopian communities.”  These experimental communal societies were called utopian communities because they provided blueprints for an ideal society.

     The characteristics of these communities varied widely. One of the earliest perfectionist societies was popularly known as the Shakers. Founded in 1776 by “Mother” Ann Lee, an English immigrant, the Shakers believed that the millennium was at hand and that the time had come for people to renounce sin.  Shaker communities regarded their male and female members as equals; thus, both sexes served as elders and deacons.  Aspiring to live like the early Christians, the Shakers adopted communal ownership of property and a way of life emphasizing simplicity. Dress was kept simple and uniform.  Shaker architecture and furniture are devoid of ornament—no curtains on windows, carpets on floors, or pictures on walls—but they are pure and elegant in form.  The two most striking characteristics of the Shaker communities were their dances and abstinence from sexual relations.  The Shakers believed that religious fervor should be expressed through the head, heart, and mind, and their ritual religious practices included shaking, shouting, and dancing.  Viewing sexual intercourse as the basic cause of human sin, the Shakers also adopted strict rules concerning celibacy.  They attempted to replenish their membership by admitting volunteers and taking in orphans.  Today, the Shakers have all but died out.  Fewer than 20 members survived in the first decade of the 21st century.

     Another utopian effort was Robert Owen’s experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana, which reflected the influence of Enlightenment ideas.  Owen, a paternalistic Scottish industrialist, was deeply troubled by the social consequences of the industrial revolution.  Inspired by the idea that people are shaped by their environment, Owen purchased a site in Indiana where he sought to establish common ownership of property and abolish religion.  At New Harmony the marriage ceremony was reduced to a single sentence and children were raised outside of their natural parents’ home.  The community lasted just three years, from 1825 to 1828.

     Some 40 utopian communities based their organization on the ideas of the French theorist Charles Fourier, who hoped to eliminate poverty through the establishment of scientifically organized cooperative communities called “phalanxes.”  Each phalanx was to be set up as a “joint-stock company,” in which profits were divided according to the amount of money members had invested, their skill, and their labor. In the phalanxes, women received equal job opportunities and equal pay, equal participation in decision making, and the right to speak in public assemblies.  Although one Fourier community lasted for 18 years, most were unsuccessful.

     The currents of radical antislavery thought inspired Frances Wright, a fervent Scottish abolitionist, to found Nashoba Colony in 1826, near Memphis, Tennessee, as an experiment in interracial living. She established a racially integrated cooperative community in which slaves were to receive an education and earn enough money to purchase their own freedom. Publicity about Fanny Wright’s desire to abolish the nuclear family, religion, private property, and slavery created a furor, and the community dissolved after only four years.

     Perhaps the most successful—and notorious—experimental colony was John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community.  A lawyer who was converted in one of Charles G. Finney’s revivals, Noyes believed that the millennium would occur only when people strove to become perfect through an “immediate and total cessation from sin.”