Chapter 12: The Ferment of Reform 1820-1860 Expanded Timeline

Chapter 12: The Ferment of Reform 1820-1860 Expanded Timeline

Northerners who wanted to remove free African-Americans from northern society and southerners who felt that blacks could not cope in a free society joined to create the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to send African-Americans to Africa. Its supporters eventually founded the colony of Liberia.

This pamphlet by a free African-American living in Boston advocated and threatened a slave rebellion. When the pamphlet began to reach southern free African-Americans, the white      South’s fear of slave violence increased. Walker and other African-American abolitionists called a national convention at which free blacks condemned northern discrimination as well as slavery. They advocated legal means to improve their situation.

Responding to angelic revelation, Smith told of Christ’s visit to the western hemisphere. His book became the founding doctrine for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism.

Garrison’s paper gave him a national forum in which to demand an immediate end to slavery and condemn colonization. Garrison’s passionate abolitionism led him to criticize the Constitution because it recognized slavery. The Liberator made him a leader among radical abolitionists and helped convince white southerners that the North was hostile to them.

Turner, an educated, favored slave with deep Christian beliefs, felt himself to be entrusted with a divine mission to organize a slave rebellion. He and his small force killed almost sixty white southerners before they dispersed and were hunted down by the militia. White southerners reacted by passing harsher laws to maintain slavery and using terror as a deterrent to other would-be rebels.

Emerson’s resignation marked the beginnings of the transcendentalist movement, as he left organized religion and chose to emphasize individuality, self-reliance, dissent, and nonconformity in his popular public lectures and writings.

William Lloyd Garrison founded this organization to press politically for the immediate abolition of slavery. The group embraced his radical approach to reform.

From their position as society’s moral guardians, women reformers attempted to protect the home through public action. The New York Female Moral Reform Society was the first major women’s organization that tried to end prostitution. Women reformers also tried to improve the conditions in mental asylums and jails.

The "gag rule" allowed southern congressmen to table all antislavery petitions so that they could not be debated or even acknowledged. This suppression of free speech shocked many northerners.

Founded by moderate abolitionists who had split with Garrison, the Liberty party was the first political party to focus on abolition. It was relatively unsuccessful until it changed its emphasis to criticizing slavery as a threat to republican ideals.

Brook Farm was an attempt by transcendentalists to create a society based on individual self-realization and harmony, as opposed to conformism and commercialism. The enterprise failed for many reasons, particularly its inability to achieve economic self-sufficiency.

Dix’s work started with her investigation into the conditions in a Massachusetts jail for women. She went on to reform thousands of prisons and asylums for the mentally ill.

Fuller’s work, which asserted the equality of women with men, was based on the transcendentalist faith in individualism.

Thoreau’s experiences living on Walden Pond became the basis for Walden, in which he celebrated simplicity and a nature mysticism that exalted self-discovery over the demands of civilized society.

Seeking religious independence and physical safety, Brigham Young assumed leadership from the murdered Joseph Smith and led over 10,000 Mormon followers across the plains from Illinois.

Oneida was a utopian community based on cooperation and Christian ethics. Noyes believed that perfection—freedom from sin—was possible and attempted to achieve this goal through his advocacy of "complex marriage," which became a scandal to mainstream society.

This first meeting of women’s rights supporters outlined a program for equality that was rooted in the republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence.

This American classic attacked individualism and self-reliance, the transcendentalists’ creed, as dangerously mad.

With experience in antislavery and temperance reform movements, Anthony committed her organizational talents to the women’s cause. She helped organize a network of women across New York state who involved themselves in politics to advocate legal rights for women.

Stowe’s emotional book criticized slavery for its destruction of the slave family and the degradation of slave women. In the North, it became one of the most popular books of its day.

Whitman published the first edition of his poetic celebration of individualism and American democracy.

Pressured by churches and political opponents who opposed the Mormon practice of polygamy, President Buchanan sent federal troops into Utah after removing Brigham Young as territorial governor; however, he withdrew troops in the face of Mormon refusal to end polygamy fearing that forcing the end of polygamy might require him to force the end of slavery, too.