The Antebellum Era: Major Social Reform Movements

1113 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Pre civil war women's suffrage

The antebellum period was full of social reform movements based on the urge to eradicate evil and improve human conditions in society. Despite the attempt to deal with a wide variety of reforms to provide positive changes to society these reform movements were met with varying degrees of success. This essay will focus on five of the major social reform movements of that era discussing their accomplishments, failures and impacts on America as a whole. They are the reforms of abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, institutional and educational reforms. The reform movements of the 1830’s and 1840’s were largely due to humanitarian reasons because of a period of Enlightenment in the previous century which emphasized rational over irrational thought linking ideas about a responsibility to God and society to always improve.

Christian morality, new ideas about liberty and human rights, economic changes, and as a result of the American and French Revolutions, abolitionism contributed to efforts among whites and blacks to end human bondage. The American Revolution fought for independence from Britain in the name of liberty and universal natural rights contradicted the continuation of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison was a white New Englander who published a weekly abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. He was convinced slavery was a sin and brought together Quaker abolitionists, evangelical abolitionists and New England associates to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in 1833. Its’ goal was immediate, uncompensated emancipation and equal rights for blacks.

Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and the Grimke sisters were also notable leaders in the abolitionist movement; though abolitionists were never more ...

... middle of paper ...

...tally insane in jails and almshouses in Massachusetts. In 1843 she presents her findings to the Massachusetts Legislature and by 1860 twenty states would follow her advice for building new insane asylums and prisons. The institutional reform movement was successful in that twelve new prisons were built and punishments were less harsh than they had previously been but they were unsuccessful in improving the treatment of criminal and the mentally insane. Institutions turned into places of brutality and neglect. Penitentiaries made their prisoners perform labor, solitary confinement, and they were severely punished if they disobeyed. Institutional reforms improved the lot of the mentally ill only slightly which meant graduating from being chained in basements, beaten, starved and naked to being locked in a mental institution at the mercy of experimenting doctors.

Show More
Related

  • Crazy Chapter Summary

    731 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the Earley book, the author started to talk about the history of mental illness in prison. The mentally ill people were commonly kept in local jails, where they were treated worse than animals. State mental hospitals were typically overcrowded and underfunded. Doctors had very little oversight and often abused their authority. Dangerous experimental treatments were often tested on inmates.

    Read More

  • 1825 To 1850 Reform Movements Essay

    566 Words  | 2 Pages

    Various reform movements and revolutions occurred in the time period between the years 1825 through 1850. Justice, freedom, liberty, equality, and the purist of happiness are all democratic values considered to enforce the reform movements of this time period. The democratic ideals tried to cut the social separation and discordance present in America mainly between the south and north sections. Originating from the Second Great Awaking with vast religious reinforcement democratic ideals spread through the new reform movements. Main movements that supported the democratic views included the Second Great Awaking revival, antislavery reform and more equal rights movements for women and men.

    Read More

  • Education In The Antebellum Era

    1101 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Antebellum period was a time of reform and improvement. After the War of 1812, America went through a period of westward expansion, patriotism and an economic emergence as a world power. Their new found power as a country inspired reformation. Abolitionists worked to end the institution of slavery through protests, rallies, and the formation of societies; women’s rights activists advocated in a similar way. Simultaneously, many Americans supported the government’s efforts to remove Native Americans from their own land. Americans during the Antebellum period were ambitious, but contradictory in their activism; while many activists fought for the rights of slaves and women, others sought to curtail rights of Native Americans.

    Read More

  • The Effects of American Reform Movements in the 1900s

    2279 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Effects of American Reform Movements in the 1900s Living in the United States of America is all about opportunity. The opportunity to get a good job, make money, and lead a life of good quality; in other words, the opportunity to live, live, and live the Pursuit of Happiness. However, the opportunity for many people was not around throughout the 1800s. Certain groups of people did not hold the basic rights that were guaranteed by the Constitution. In fact, most of the people that had opportunity were the wealthy white men, and few other people ever had any chance to lead a good life.

    Read More

  • Mental Illnesses In The 1800's

    269 Words  | 1 Pages

    Until 1851, the first state mental hospital was built and there was only one physician on staff responsible for the medical, moral and physical treatment of each inmate. Who had said "Violent hands shall never be laid on a patient, under any provocation." This improved the treatment of patients but the mentally ill that weren't in this asylum may have

    Read More

  • Abolitionist Movement after the 1930s

    712 Words  | 2 Pages

    In early nineteenth century there was the antislavery movement which was a failure. This people who were fighting for antislavery did not have a great support. They were nice gentle people who argued with an expression of moral disapproval but did not participate in an exert of activities. Organizations were formed to help support the freeing of slaves but these organizations did not have enough economical support to help with the thousands and thousands of slaves reproducing in America. They were able to free some slaves and tried returning some of them to their home lands in Africa but that was a failure because the amount of money need it to ship the Africans back to Africa was a high cost compared to the economical support that they had. There was even resistance from some Afr...

    Read More

  • American Antislavery 1820-1860

    1694 Words  | 4 Pages

    The antebellum American antislavery movement began in the 1820s and was sustained over 4 decades by organizations, publications, and small acts of resistance that challenged the legally protected and powerful institution of slavery and the more insidious enemy of black equality, racism. Abolitionists were always a radical minority even in the free states of the North, and the movement was never comprised of a single group of people with unified motivations, goals, and methods. Rather, the movement was fraught with ambiguity over who its leaders would be, how they would go about fighting the institution of slavery, and what the future would be like for black Americans.

    Read More

  • The Fundamental Diffferences Between The Black Abolitionists And The White Abolitionists Movements

    1558 Words  | 4 Pages

    But despite patriotic statement and vigorous public against colonization, there was a greater margin among black abolitionists and white who claimed to be abolitionists alike black people. In 1833 sixty reformers from eleven northern gathered in Philadelphia, creating an antislavery movements named American Antislavery Society (AASS). Its immediate goal was to end slavery without compensation for slaves oweners and rejected violence and the used of force. People involved were Quakers, Protestant clergymen, distinguished reformers, including three blacks by the names of Robert Purvis, Jame...

    Read More

  • The End Of The Antebellum Era

    838 Words  | 2 Pages

    Near the end of the Antebellum Era, tensions and sectionalism increased as the states argued over what was constitutional. The South had later seceded from the United States and had become the Confederacy of America while the North had remained as the Union. The South had fully supported states’ rights while the north had strongly disapproved it. However, westward expansion, southern anger with the abolitionists, and the secession of the South that had destroyed the feeling of unity in the country because of the disagreement over slavery had been the main factors to the cause of the Civil War. Therefore, since slavery was the primary reason for the discontent in the country, it had been the primary cause of the Civil War.

    Read More

  • The Abolitionist Movement of Slavery from the Early 19th Century to the American Civil War

    1306 Words  | 3 Pages

    At the dawn of the 19th century, slavery in the United States faced an uncertain future. Many had predicted that Industrial America would eventually eradicate slavery, but the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin impeded those predictions. This increased the profitability of slavery as each decade passed until the time of the American Civil War. This offended most people of America, especially Northerners. People who are against slavery and are willing to take action and end the practice of slavery are known as abolitionists. These “anti-slaveryites” took huge risks and went through drastic punishments all to end the very nuisance that flawed America, slavery.

    Read More

  • Girl Interrupted And American Horror Story: Insane Asylum

    1971 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mental illness has been around as long as people have been. However, the movement really started in the 19th century during industrialization. The Western countries saw an immense increase in the number and size of insane asylums, during what was known as “the great confinement” or the “asylum era” (Torrey, Stieber, Ezekiel, Wolfe, Sharfstein, Noble, Flynn Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill). Laws were starting to be made to pressure authorities to face the people who were deemed insane by family members and hospital administrators. Because of the overpopulation in the institutions, treatment became more impersonal and had a complex mix of mental and social-economic problems. During this time the term “psychiatry” was identified as the medical specialty for the people who had the job as asylum superintendents. These superintendents assumed managerial roles in asylums for people who were considered “alienated” from society; people with less serious conditions wer...

    Read More

  • Antebellum Era Essay

    1237 Words  | 3 Pages

    “If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side...when the glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time...is a very good one.”

    Read More

  • The Age of Reform

    1122 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Age of Reform throughout 1825-1850 was a great turning point for American society. The ideas and beliefs throughout the reform movements greatly expanded the democratic ideals. Reform movements in the United States sought to express ideas through religion and education, start movements through abolition and temperance acts, expand beliefs by caring for the insane, and take a stand by speaking up for personal rights .

    Read More

  • 1800-1850

    975 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout the first half of the 19th century, and especially after the War of 1812, America has taken on yet another revolution. In this time period, the country saw a rapid expansion in territory and economics, as well as the extension of democratic politics; the spread of evangelical revivalism; the rise of the nation’s first labor and reform movements; the growth of cities and industrial ways of life; a rise in abolitionism and reduction in the power of slavery; and radical shifts in the roles and status of women.

    Read More

  • Abolitionists

    991 Words  | 2 Pages

    Abolitionist Movement was a reform movement during the 18th and 19th centuries. Often called the antislavery movement, it sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americas, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Many people participated in trying to end slavery. These people became known as the abolitionists. The three well-known abolitionists are Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown.

    Read More

More about The Antebellum Era: Major Social Reform Movements

Open Document