Reformers in a Changing Nation
1In the early 1800s, a wave of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening spread across the United States. Many people who took part believed that individuals could improve themselves and that society could be improved too. Some reformers worked to limit drinking, in a movement called temperance. Dorothea Dix visited jails in Massachusetts and urged lawmakers to build hospitals for people with mental illness instead of locking them up with prisoners.
2Other reformers focused on schools. In 1837 Horace Mann became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. He pushed for free public "common schools" paid for by taxes, longer school years and training for teachers. Mann argued that a republic needed educated citizens. Not everyone agreed. Some taxpayers did not want to pay to school other families' children. Many schools shut out Black children or placed them in separate schools, and Southern states often made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read.
3The most divisive reform was abolition, the movement to end slavery. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began printing The Liberator, a newspaper that demanded an immediate end to slavery. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery in 1838, became a famous speaker and in 1847 began his own newspaper, The North Star. Many white Southerners and many Northerners opposed the abolitionists, and mobs sometimes broke up their meetings.
4Women did much of the work of reform, yet they could not vote, and in most states a married woman's property and wages belonged to her husband. In 1840 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled to London for a world antislavery meeting. The women delegates there were not allowed to take part fully and had to sit in a separate section. Mott and Stanton began to talk about holding a meeting on the rights of women.
5That meeting came in July 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. About 300 people attended over two days. Stanton wrote most of a document called the Declaration of Sentiments. One hundred people, 68 women and 32 men, signed it. The resolution calling for women's right to vote was the most debated, and it passed only after Frederick Douglass spoke in favor of it. Many newspapers mocked the meeting, and some signers later asked to have their names removed.