Chapter Outline

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13.1 An Awakening of Religion and Individualism {{link: https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:df78c6f4-e93d-468b-9d19-ed3295937cc6#93697}}
13.2 Antebellum Communal Experiments {{link: https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:03f1e9a9-b0d0-4a81-9c40-caf83c502b15#39286}}
13.3 Reforms to Human Health {{link: https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:aa778fb1-ab89-4819-b7e6-4a70d5e760ce@8#1816}}
13.4 Addressing Slavery {{link: https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:b863a1fb-8afd-4dd0-b550-8a92d4ea2055@8#85635}}
13.5 Women’s Rights {{link: https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:153116e2-91da-4658-b75a-50ce0e6d296f@8#24006}}
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13.1 An Awakening of Religion and Individualism {{link this chapter heading to https://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@9.7:df78c6f4-e93d-468b-9d19-ed3295937cc6#93697 so that it opens in a new tab}}
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the connection between evangelical Protestantism and the Second Great Awakening
Describe the message of the transcendentalists
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{{(Dr. S Note: Put this whole paragraph in italics, please.)}} A timeline shows important events of the era. In 1827, the American Temperance Society is formed. In 1830, Joseph Smith founds the Church of the Latter Day Saints. In 1831, Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion; an illustration depicting scenes from the rebellion is shown. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison founds the American Anti-Slavery society; a photograph of Garrison is shown. In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes “Self-Reliance”; a photograph of Emerson is shown. In 1848, supporters of women’s rights gather at Seneca Falls; the official announcement for the convention is shown. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. In 1855, most northeastern states “go dry” by prohibiting alcohol.

Protestantism shaped the views of the vast majority of Americans in the antebellum years. The influence of religion only intensified during the decades before the Civil War, as religious camp meetings spread the word that people could bring about their own salvation, a direct contradiction to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Alongside this religious fervor, transcendentalists advocated a more direct knowledge of the self and an emphasis on individualism. The writers and thinkers devoted to transcendentalism, as well as the reactions against it, created a trove of writings, an outpouring that has been termed the American Renaissance.
THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING
The reform efforts of the antebellum era sprang from the Protestant revival fervor that found expression in what historians refer to as the Second Great Awakening. (The First Great Awakening of evangelical Protestantism had taken place in the 1730s and 1740s.) The Second Great Awakening emphasized an emotional religious style in which sinners grappled with their unworthy nature before concluding that they were born again, that is, turning away from their sinful past and devoting themselves to living a righteous, Christ-centered life. This emphasis on personal salvation, with its rejection of predestination (the Calvinist concept that God selected only a chosen few for salvation), was the religious embodiment of the Jacksonian celebration of the individual. Itinerant ministers preached the message of the awakening to hundreds of listeners at outdoors revival meetings.
An engraving depicts a Methodist camp meeting. Listeners sit, stand, and recline in a large outdoor area; trees and tents are visible in the background. On a central stage, a preacher enthusiastically addresses the crowd, with an arm raised.
The burst of religious enthusiasm that began in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s and early 1800s among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians owed much to the uniqueness of the early decades of the republic. These years saw swift population growth, broad western expansion, and the rise of participatory democracy. These political and social changes made many people anxious, and the more egalitarian, emotional, and individualistic religious practices of the Second Great Awakening provided relief and comfort for Americans experiencing rapid change. The awakening soon spread to the East, where it had a profound impact on Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The thousands swept up in the movement believed in the possibility of creating a much better world. Many adopted millennialism, the fervent belief that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth and that God would reign on earth for a thousand years, characterized by harmony and Christian morality. Those drawn to the message of the Second Great Awakening yearned for stability, decency, and goodness in the new and turbulent American republic.
The Second Great Awakening also brought significant changes to American culture. Church membership doubled in the years between 1800 and 1835. Several new groups formed to promote and strengthen the message of religious revival. The American Bible Society, founded in 1816, distributed Bibles in an effort to ensure that every family had access to the sacred text, while the American Sunday School Union, established in 1824, focused on the religious education of children and published religious materials specifically for young readers. In 1825, the American Tract Society formed with the goal of disseminating the Protestant revival message in a flurry of publications.
Missionaries and circuit riders (ministers without a fixed congregation) brought the message of the awakening across the United States, including into the lives of slaves. The revival spurred many slaveholders to begin encouraging their slaves to become Christians. Previously, many slaveholders feared allowing their slaves to convert, due to a belief that Christians could not be enslaved and because of the fear that slaves might use Christian principles to oppose their enslavement. However, by the 1800s, Americans established a legal foundation for the enslavement of Christians. Also, by this time, slaveholders had come to believe that if slaves learned the “right” (that is, white) form of Christianity, then slaves would be more obedient and hardworking. Allowing slaves access to Christianity also served to ease the consciences of Christian slaveholders, who argued that slavery was divinely ordained, yet it was a faith that also required slaveholders to bring slaves to the “truth.” Also important to this era was the creation of African American forms of worship as well as African American churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black Protestant church in the United States. Formed in the 1790s by Richard Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal Church advanced the African American effort to express their faith apart from white Methodists.
In the Northeast, Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney rose to prominence as one of the most important evangelicals in the movement. Born in 1792 in western New York, Finney studied to be a lawyer until 1821, when he experienced a religious conversion and thereafter devoted himself to revivals. He led revival meetings in New York and Pennsylvania, but his greatest success occurred after he accepted a ministry in Rochester, New York, in 1830. At the time, Rochester was a boomtown because the Erie Canal had brought a lively shipping business.
The new middle class—an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution—embraced Finney’s message. It fit perfectly with their understanding of themselves as people shaping their own destiny. Workers also latched onto the message that they too could control their salvation, spiritually and perhaps financially as well. Western New York gained a reputation as the “burned over district,” a reference to the intense flames of religious fervor that swept the area during the Second Great Awakening.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Beginning in the 1820s, a new intellectual movement known as transcendentalism began to grow in the Northeast. In this context, to transcend means to go beyond the ordinary sensory world to grasp personal insights and gain appreciation of a deeper reality, and transcendentalists believed that all people could attain an understanding of the world that surpassed rational, sensory experience. Transcendentalists were critical of mainstream American culture. They reacted against the age of mass democracy in Jacksonian America—what Tocqueville called the “tyranny of majority”—by arguing for greater individualism against conformity. European romanticism, a movement in literature and art that stressed emotion over cold, calculating reason, also influenced transcendentalists in the United States, especially the transcendentalists’ celebration of the uniqueness of individual feelings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emerged as the leading figure of this movement. Born in Boston in 1803, Emerson came from a religious family. His father served as a Unitarian minister and, after graduating from Harvard Divinity School in the 1820s, Emerson followed in his father’s footsteps. However, after his wife died in 1831, he left the clergy. On a trip to Europe in 1832, he met leading figures of romanticism who rejected the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment, emphasizing instead emotion and the sublime.
When Emerson returned home the following year, he began giving lectures on his romanticism-influenced ideas. In 1836, he published “Nature,” an essay arguing that humans can find their true spirituality in nature, not in the everyday bustling working world of Jacksonian democracy and industrial transformation. In 1841, Emerson published his essay “Self-Reliance,” which urged readers to think for themselves and reject the mass conformity and mediocrity he believed had taken root in American life. In this essay, he wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” demanding that his readers be true to themselves and not blindly follow a herd mentality. Emerson’s ideas dovetailed with those of the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the “tyranny of the majority” in his Democracy in America. Tocqueville, like Emerson, expressed concern that a powerful majority could overpower the will of individuals.


Visit Emerson Central to read the full text of “Self Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. How have Emerson’s ideas influenced American society?
Emerson’s ideas struck a chord with a class of literate adults who also were dissatisfied with mainstream American life and searching for greater spiritual meaning. Many writers were drawn to transcendentalism, and they started to express its ideas through new stories, poems, essays, and articles. The ideas of transcendentalism were able to permeate American thought and culture through a prolific print culture, which allowed magazines and journals to be widely disseminated.
Among those attracted to Emerson’s ideas was his friend Henry David Thoreau, whom he encouraged to write about his own ideas. Thoreau placed a special emphasis on the role of nature as a gateway to the transcendentalist goal of greater individualism. In 1848, Thoreau gave a lecture in which he argued that individuals must stand up to governmental injustice, a topic he chose because of his disgust over the Mexican-American War and slavery. In 1849, he published his lecture “Civil Disobedience” and urged readers to refuse to support a government that was immoral. In 1854, he published Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, a book about the two years he spent in a small cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau had lived there as an experiment in living apart, but not too far apart, from his conformist neighbors.
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Photograph (a) is a portrait of Henry David Thoreau. Image (b) shows the cover of Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
Margaret Fuller also came to prominence as a leading transcendentalist and advocate for women’s equality. Fuller was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and other intellectuals of her day. Because she was a woman, she could not attend Harvard, as it was a male-only institution for undergraduate students until 1973. However, she was later granted the use of the library there because of her towering intellect. In 1840, she became the editor of The Dial, a transcendentalist journal, and she later found employment as a book reviewer for the New York Tribune newspaper. Tragically, in 1850, she died at the age of forty in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York.
Walt Whitman also added to the transcendentalist movement, most notably with his 1855 publication of twelve poems, entitled Leaves of Grass, which celebrated the subjective experience of the individual. One of the poems, “Song of Myself,” amplified the message of individualism, but by uniting the individual with all other people through a transcendent bond.
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Recap Quiz
Which of the following is not a characteristic of the Second Great Awakening?
greater emphasis on nature
greater emphasis on religious education of children
greater church attendance
belief in the possibility of a better world
2. Transcendentalists were most concerned with ________.
the afterlife
predestination
the individual
democracy
3. What do the Second Great Awakening and transcendentalism have in common?
4. Which religious community focused on the power of patriarchy?
Shakers
Mormons
Owenites
Rappites
Critical Thinking Questions
In what ways did the Second Great Awakening and transcendentalism reflect and react to the changes in antebellum American thought and culture?
What did the antebellum communal projects have in common? How did the ones most influenced by religion differ from those that had other influences?
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{{please put the following into a two column table, ex: "Name" in the left column, "Introduction" in the right column}}

More Information

Name: Introduction

ID: 623e350f-625b-4195-89d4-0e2e00ff3772@7

Language: English (English)

Summary: An Awakening of Religion and Individualism
Antebellum Communal Experiments
Reforms to Human Health
Addressing Slavery
Women’s Rights

Subjects: Social Sciences

Keywords: TranscendentalistTranscendentalismTranscendental

License: Creative Commons Attribution License (by 4.0) {{and link this to open in a new tab http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/}}

Authors: OpenStax

Copyright Holders: Rice University

Publishers: OpenStax OpenStax College History

Latest Version: 7

First Publication Date: May 4, 2014

Latest Revision: Aug 19, 2019
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