The Abolition Movement

Your social problem is the issue of slavery and the cause of the abolition movement. This became a growing concern the 19th century and reformers like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass tried to get America . Read the following passages regarding this topic.

Abolitionism

The abolitionist movement sought to eradicate slavery in the United States. Prominent leaders in the movement included Theodore Weld, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Elijah P. Lovejoy, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others. (Check out their bios on Biography.com link to the right) Garrison, a radical abolitionist who called for immediate emancipation, became infamous when he started an antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. His articles were so vitriolic that warrants for his arrest were issued in the South. Garrison and Weld also founded the American Anti-slavery Society in 1833.

Abolitionist Propaganda and Politics

Because William Lloyd Garrison published the first edition of The Liberator the same year as Turner’s uprising, many southerners jumped to the conclusion that Garrison had incited the rebellions with his antislavery rhetoric.

Furthermore, former slave Frederick Douglass became a celebrity in the North when he published his experiences in A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845.

As the abolitionist movement grew, it became more of an organized political force. The movement grew to be so noisome that the House of Representatives actually passed a gag resolution in 1836 to squelch all further discussion of slavery. Several years later, in 1840, the abolitionists organized into a party, the Liberty Party.

Read the Frederick Douglass document and look for information in your textbook, and Libguide resources to answer the following questions:

1. Why do you think Frederick Douglass was a convincing spokesperson for the cause of abolition?

2. What do you think he meant in his quote, "―I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs"?

3. What strategies does Douglass use to convince people of the need for change?

4. Frederick Douglass wrote, "―Without a struggle, there can be no progress." Do you think this is true? Explain your answer.

Prison and Asylum Reform 

Your social problems are the mentally ill and prisons. This became a growing problem in the 19th century and reformers like Dorothea Dix tried to settle the problem. You will read the following passages as well as the material from your textbook regarding this topic. Here is a brief description of the movement.

Prison Reform

Reformers during this era also launched campaigns against the prison system, where conditions were horrible. Debtors’ prisons were still common and housed the majority of American ―criminals‖—mostly the poor, who sometimes owed creditors only a few dollars. Over time, reformers were able to change the system. Debtors’ prisons gradually began to disappear, and activists succeeded in convincing many that the government should use prisons to help reform criminals, not just lock them away.

Reform for the Mentally Ill

Often working hand-in-hand with prison reform was the movement to help the mentally ill. The common belief during this era was that the mentally ill were willfully crazy or that they were no better than animals. As a result, thousands were treated as criminals and thrown into prisons. The leader of the reform cause was Dorothea Dix, who compiled a comprehensive report on the state of the mentally ill in Massachusetts. The report claimed that hundreds of insane women were chained like beasts in stalls and cages. Dix’s findings convinced state legislators to establish one of the first asylums devoted entirely to caring for the mentally ill. By the outbreak of the Civil War, nearly thirty states had built similar institutions.

Now read the Primary Source ―Dorothea Dix’s Report to the Massachusetts Legislature and and look for information in your textbook, and Libguide resources to answer the following questions:

1. According to Dix’s report, how were the mentally ill forced to live?

2. Why do you think Dix took her findings to the Massachusetts’s legislature?

3. What possible solutions do you see to the problems Dix lists?

4. Why do you think there was such similarity between the prison reform movement and the movement to help improve conditions for the mentally ill?

Women’s Rights

Your social problem is the rights of women (or lack thereof). This became a growing concern the 19th century and reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were vocal in American society about a need for equal rights for women. Read the following passages as well as the material in your textbook to help understand the issues facing women in the 19th century.

Women’s Suffrage

In addition to educational opportunities, many women began to demand political rights, especially the right to vote, or women’s suffrage. Under leaders Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, the movement gained substantial momentum during the antebellum era. Stanton and Mott astounded Americans and Europeans alike when they organized the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. There, women leaders heard Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were equal to men in every way. Of the many sentiments declared, the most shocking was the call for full suffrage for all women.

After reading the Declaration of Sentiments, look for information in your textbook, libguide resources and answer the following questions:

1. What are the main arguments in this document?

2. Why do you think women used the Declaration of Independence as their main inspiration?

3. What tactics do you think women groups could use to get their message across?

4. What do you think the goals of this movement will be?

The Temperance Movement

The temperance movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries was an organized effort to encourage moderation in the consumption of intoxicating liquors or press for complete abstinence. The movement's ranks were mostly filled by women who, with their children, had endured the effects of unbridled drinking by many of their menfolk. In fact, alcohol was blamed for many of society's demerits, among them severe health problems, destitution and crime. At first, they used moral suasion to address the problem.

Temperance efforts existed in antiquity, but the movement really came into its own as a reaction to the pervasive use of distilled beverages in modern times. The earliest organizations in Europe came into being in Ireland in the 1820s, then swept to Scotland and Britain. Norway and Sweden saw movements rise in the 1830s. In the United States, a pledge of abstinence from drinking had been taken by various preachers at the beginning of the 1800s. Thanks largely to the lead from the pulpit, some 6,000 local temperance groups in many states were up and running by the 1830s.

The movement existed in a matrix of unrest and intellectual ferment in which such other social ills as slavery, neglect and ill-treatment of marginalized people, were addressed by liberals and conservatives alike. Sometimes called the First Reform Era, running through the 1830s and '40s, it was a period of inclusive humanitarian reform.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League quickly gained followers in the late 1800’s. As these groups gathered political power, their strategy changed from moral suasion to agitation for government control of liquor, using social, educational and political tactics. In fact, they succeeded in getting many liquor laws passed nationwide, partly thanks to backing from churches as well as industrialists who faced poor worker productivity and absenteeism.

Some of the most notable figures associated with the U.S. temperance movement were Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard and Carry A. Nation. The effects of their efforts and thousands of other advocates included:

• Government regulation

• Instruction on alcoholism in schools

• Energized study of alcoholism.

The temperance movement crested when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution (Prohibition, 1919-33) was passed and ratified. The frank failure of Prohibition (repealed by the 21st Amendment) sealed the movement's fate as it lost steam.

The most well-known temperance effort since the movement's heyday has been Alcoholics Anonymous. This widespread and venerable organization advocates total abstinence, but treats alcoholism as a disease and does not seek governmental control of the liquor industry.

Now read the primary source ―Youth's Temperance Lecture‖ by Charles Jewett and look for information in your textbook, and Libguide resources to answer the following questions:

1. What is temperance?

2. What type of people led the temperance movement? Why?

3. What effect did the temperance crusaders have on the issue?

4. The primary source Youth's Temperance Lecture by Charles Jewett is from a children’s book. What do you think was its purpose?

Education Reform

Your social problem is the need for education. This became a growing concern the 19th century and reformers like Horace Mann tried to fix the problem. You will read the following passages as well as the material in your textbook regarding this topic. Here is a brief description of the education reform movement:

Education Reform

Reformers also sought to expand public education during the antebellum era, because many at the time considered public schooling to be only for the poor. Wealthier Americans could pay for their children to attend private schools and academies but disdained the idea of paying higher taxes to educate the poor. Over the course of the antebellum period, however, more and more cities and states began to realize that education was essential to maintain a democracy.

Horace Mann was one of the greatest champions of public schools. As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann fought for higher teacher qualifications, better pay, newer school buildings, and better curriculum. Catherine Beecher, sister of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, also crusaded for education but believed that teachers should be women.

Horace Mann was an important advocate for free public schools. Here are three passages from a report he wrote in 1848. As you read, think about this question: How did Mann believe that education could improve the nation’s social and political life?

If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue [rest] of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents [servants] and subjects of the former. But, if education be equally diffused [spread], it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor….

―Education... is a great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery. [It] gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor.... The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate [erase] factitious [artificial] distinctions in society.

[The] establishment of a republican government, without well-appointed and efficient means for the universal education of the people, is the most rash and foolhardy experiment ever tried by man. Such a Republic may grow in numbers and in wealth.... Its armies may be invincible, and its fleets may strike terror into nations on the opposite sides of the globe, at the same hour.... But if such a Republic be devoid of [without] intelligence, such a Republic, with all its noble capacities for beneficence [ability to do good], will rush with the speed of a whirlwind to an ignominious end; and all good men of after-times would be fain [eager] to weep over its downfall, did not their scorn and contempt at its folly and its wickedness, repress all sorrow for its fate.

Read through the above, read in your textbook, and search through Libguide resources to answer the following questions:

1. What were Horace Mann’s major goals?

2. Why do you think he felt education was important?

3. List four reasons using Mann’s own words that explain why he thought education was important.

4. Why do you think it was difficult for Mann to convince some people for the needs for publicly funded education?

Factory and Workplace Reform

Your social problem is the need for factory reform due to harsh conditions for workers. This became a growing concern the 19th century and reformers the Lowell Female Labor Association tried to fix the problem. Use your textbook and the provided information to help regarding this topic. Here is a brief description of the movement:

The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was founded in 1844 by the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts and headed by Sarah Bagley. The association was one of the first American labor organizations organized by and for women.

In the 1800's the textile mills of Lowell employed many unmarried young women from the surrounding countryside. Families cautiously allowed their daughters to work a few years before marriage, but the working conditions were difficult and few girls stayed long. The average mill girl stayed at her job for just three years.

Sarah Bagley became the first President of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Bagley even testified about the working conditions in the mills before the Massachusetts legislature. In the end, however, the LFLRA was unable to bargain with the mill owners; so they joined with the New England Workingmen's Association. Despite this lack of effect, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was the first organization of working women in the United States to try to bargain collectively for better working conditions and higher pay.

Major Players

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Great Mill Disaster

Airdrie Cotton Works

Now read the primary source document on ―Female Workers of Lowell and look for information in your textbook, and Libguide resources to answer the following questions:

1. What were the conditions like for early factory workers?

2. Why do you think women especially were mistreated in the workplace?

3. What methods could women use to change the conditions of the factories?

Magazine Cover Rubric