Introduction
The reform movements that swept through American society
after 1820 were reactions to a range of factors:
the Second Great Awakening, the transformation
of the American economy, industrialization, urbanization,
and lingering agendas of the revolutionary period.
As a way of introducing students to the variety
of reform movements, this lesson looks at two reform
movements—anti-slavery and women's rights.
In addition to learning about the beliefs and
motivations of each group, we will seek the cultural
connections among the various reform impulses.
Objectives
1.
To understand the fundamental beliefs of abolitionism
and the range of anti-slavery positions.
2.
To understand the activities of women of different
racial and social groups within the women's
rights movement in antebellum America.
3.
To explore the use of visual and audio sources
as a means to understand reform movements in antebellum
America.
Part 1
In order to get a sense for abolitionists and their
debates, both among themselves and with others, students
should begin with readings about the American Colonization
Society. They might first read
Henry Noble Sherwood's 1917 article on the origins of
colonization in The Journal of Negro History. The
Africans in America Resource Bank Colonization site includes
the ACS 1820
memorial to Congress, as well as several documents
by free-black ACS members. A website devoted to
The
Nineteenth Century in Print contains the full
text of some interesting, less well known, works relating
to Colonization. Daguerreotypes
of ACS members are available at the Library of Congress's
American Memory site. Students might also want to look at another
LOC site with images
of pamphlets, letters, and membership certificates,
as well as other images, including important manuscript
records. A site devoted to other
abolitionists'
criticism of Colonization includes the famous
1834 debate at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. Students should be encouraged to study the
1839 constitution adopted by the ACS for the Commonwealth
of Liberia, in order to make a direct comparison with
the William Lloyd Garrison's “
Declaration
of Sentiments.”
The gradualism of Colonization was swept aside by
calls for immediate emancipation. To convey
a sense of this transformation, ask students to read
John G. Whittier’s
account of the founding convention of the American
Anti-Slavery Society. The site maintained by Africans
in America on William
Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society
has links to articles from The Liberator,
including an editorial on David Walker’s Appeal
and a letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Students
should also read Garrison’s inaugural
editorial.
Students should be asked to account for Colonization’s
failure to ignite the public, despite the support
of national leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Henry
Clay. Students
might also be asked to draw connections between reformist
impulses and Garrison’s absolutist immediatism. For further information, students could consult
the Nineteenth
Century in Print site, which includes interesting
minor texts relating to anti-slavery in general, or
the Abolition
and Slavery website, which contains a wide variety
of resources, including background articles, slave
narratives, landmark legislation, and court cases.
Just as there were prominent African-Americans in
the Colonization movement, black voices also emerged
in other anti-slavery groups. In order to illustrate
the absence of consensus, even within the black community,
teachers should ask students to read in the following
documents. They might begin with these excerpts from
David Walker’s 1829 Appeal
. . .to lthe Coloured Citizens of the World, but in
Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United
States of America. For Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative, they could see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/.
Images of Douglass’s two newspapers can be found
at http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0history/hwny-douglass-family.html;
see http://www.gwu.edu/~e73afram/abm-kf-am.html
for a comparison between Douglass’s North
Star and Garrison’s Liberator.
Two of Douglass's public addresses are available at
http://douglassarchives.org/doug_a10.htm
and http://douglassarchives.org/doug_a68.htm.
For an interesting compare and contrast exercise,
students could read both the autobiography of Samuel
Ringgold Ward, another fugitive-slave-turned-abolitionist,
and the Douglass Narrative. Teachers
should visit this site for more full texts of major
abolitionist writings, including Rev. William
Goodell’s Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History
of the Great Struggle In Both Hemispheres; With A
View of The Slavery Question In The United States.
The
scripturally argued
An
Anti-Slavery Manual by Rev. John G. Fee might
provide an effective counterpoint to Douglass, Ward,
and Goodell, as well as to Garrison’s anti-slavery
positions. The images in the Anti-Slavery
and Civil War section of the LOC’s Printed
Ephemera Collection help trace the activities of the
anti-slavery movement.
Of particular use is a printer’s
specimen book showing various “stages”
in a slave’s realistic or hoped-for life: a free man in Africa, a man for sale, a runaway,
married, and a fugitive.
This specimen page would be a great primary
source around which teachers could frame a discussion
over the respective goals of Colonization and immediatist
abolition. Finally,
ask the students how black and white abolitionists
differed.
For
yet another set of perspectives, students should also
read the works of women in the anti-slavery movement,
such as Angelina Grimké’s Appeal
to the Christian Women of the South and her
“Speech
at Pennsylvania Hall.”
The Online
Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings
website has several works by Lydia Maria Child. A selection of her letters
has been collected by the Women’s History website.
The experience of a black, female abolitionist is
represented in Olive Gilbert’s 1850 Narrative
of Sojourner Truth. Students may look at a
facsimile
of the 1850 Narrative
at the Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers
of the 19th Century website. A good student exercise after reading Gilbert’s
Narrative
would be to construct the ways in which Gilbert’s
narration has changed both Sojourner Truth’s
presentation and reception, including the current
arguments over the famous phrase, “Ar’n’t
I A Woman?”
Part 2
The
etext library maintained by the University of Virginia’s
Mid-Century
Woman’s Rights Movement site contains the
“Declaration of Sentiments & Resolutions“
proclaimed at Seneca Falls, as well as pieces by Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Emily
Collins, Sojourner Truth, and Lucy Stone. Information on the interactions
between women and men and among various reform impulses
can be found at the Women and Social Movements in
the United States 1775-2000 website. This site maintains folders containing documents
and topical discussions about such subjects as the
appeal of moral reform to women, Lucretia Mott’s
combined interest in anti-slavery and women’s
rights, and men’s support for women’s
rights. Julia
Louisa Lovejoy’s Selected
Letters from Kansas (1855-1863) gives us the
perspective of an abolitionist pioneer in Kansas.
Following up on the exercises in Part 1, students
should compare the Seneca Falls “Declaration
of Sentiments” with Garrison’s AAAS “Declaration
of Sentiments.” How and why was the Seneca Falls document modeled
on Garrison’s? What further connections be made with the “Declaration”
proclaimed in Philadelphia in 1776? The essays at the Women and Social Movements
site should work as springboards to a discussion about
the connections between the various reform movements.
Part 3
The
exercises in this section have been selected to encourage
students to apply their knowledge of antebellum reform
to popular images and songs of the times.
Students
interested in the connections between women, abolitionism,
and women’s rights should be encouraged to look
at the printer’s
specimen type of a supplicant female slave.
Teachers
could ask students to brainstorm a list of all social
problems related in any way to alcohol. Then, the students could, in large or small
groups, compare and contrast their list s with any
of the following temperance cartoons:
"The
Drunkard's Progress: From the First Glass to the Grave,”
1846;
"The
Way of Good and Evil";
"A
Case of Infectious Fever,” 1820;
"A
Swell Head,” 1860s; and
"Tree
of Intemperance,” 1855.
The
songs of Henry
Clay Work (1832-1884) offer another approach to
the interconnections among reform movements. Work wrote popular songs, several of which
enjoyed wide currency in his times; one, “Marching
through Georgia,” remains widely known today. Have the students read or listen to Work’s
songs; the site holds audio versions as well as the
words. Have
the students pay particular attention to the following
song: "Marching
through Georgia," "Babylon is Fallen," Kingdom Coming,"
and "Come Home, Father." These songs conflate several reform impulses, especially temperance
and anti-slavery. How are these songs representative of the reformers? How do they combine more than one impulse?
Teachers
might want to print out the words to these songs and
lead sing-alongs, accompanied by the synthesizer score
provided by the site. |
