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The Age of Reform |
HTI LESSON PLAN |
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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. 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.ggw.org/freenet/f/fdm/gallery.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;
“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. |
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This lesson has been recreated from an original site for stability reasons only. No changes in the text have been made by the webmasters of this site. The original can be located at http://history.osu.edu/HTI/Lessons/US.htm |
