Lecture: Reform, Religion & Reawakening
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 10
Opening
Think about a nursing student asking how a town should care for a neighbor with a mental illness, or a future teacher standing in a free public school. Now think about anyone who has ever passed around a petition. Each of them is doing something people in this lecture were doing in the 1830s: banding together to change their country. That's the thread I want you to hold.
In Week 1 you learned the four moves for reading a source: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration. In Week 3 you met the First Great Awakening and read an oral account as a primary source. In Week 5 you read the Declaration of Independence of 1776. In Week 9 the vote widened for white men, canals tied towns to markets, and the decade closed with the nullification crisis.
In this lecture I'll stay in those same decades but turn from politics to belief and reform. We'll start with religious revivals, follow them into movements against drinking and for free schools and better asylums, and then hear the abolitionists. After that we'll read one life story, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, slowly. We'll end at a chapel in Seneca Falls. Next, in Week 11, the course follows the country west.
1. Revivals and camp meetings: the Second Great Awakening
Picture a farm family in Kentucky around 1800. They load food and blankets into a wagon and drive for a day. At the end of the road is a field full of tents and thousands of people. Preachers speak under the trees, morning and night, for days.
That gathering has a name. A camp meeting is an outdoor revival lasting several days, at which families camped in tents on the grounds to hear preaching. A revival is a religious meeting or series of meetings meant to stir listeners to conversion and a renewed faith. And the whole wave has a name too. The Second Great Awakening was the wave of Protestant religious revivals that began around 1800 and ran through the first half of the nineteenth century. In it, many preachers taught that a person could choose conversion and live a more moral life.
Let me be plain about how we study this. A historian reads what people believed, what they did, and what the sources show. I won't tell you whether any belief was right, and the course won't ask you to decide. We read belief as evidence.
The Library of Congress explains that revivals began around 1800 in New England and in Kentucky, and the Kentucky revivals produced the camp meeting. The Cane Ridge revival of 1801 was one. The National Park Service adds the idea that drove the preaching: men and women could learn not to sin. That broke with an older teaching that each soul's fate was settled in advance. Upstate New York saw so many revivals that people called it the Burned-Over District.
There's a harder part of the story. An architect's sketch of a Methodist camp meeting in Virginia in 1809 shows seats and tents divided by sex and by race. Black Methodists who faced that kind of segregation formed their own churches. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia.
Pause and try this. A revival preacher's sermon survives in print. Is it better evidence of what the preacher taught, or of what every listener believed?
Think about who wrote the words down, and who didn't.
Here's the answer. It's better evidence of what the preacher taught, because the sermon records the preacher's message and not each listener's private faith.
Hold on to that habit. It comes back in every section.
2. From revival to reform: temperance, schools, and asylums
Now picture a reform society meeting in a canal town. Its members are mostly churchgoers. They've raised money for one cause this year. Someone wants a temperance hall. Someone wants a free school. Someone wants a better asylum.
Here's the plain idea: if a person could change, maybe a town could change too. Many people who joined a church in these years also joined a benevolent society. That's a voluntary group of private citizens in the early nineteenth century that worked to spread religion or cure a social ill, for example by printing tracts or campaigning for sobriety. The Library of Congress ties those societies straight to the revivals. A converted person, the evangelists taught, should show it by helping others.
Three reforms grew from that energy. Temperance is the reform movement that urged people to drink less alcohol or to give it up entirely, often through pledges, lectures, and local societies. A common school is a free public school paid for by taxes and open to the children of a town. And asylum reform is the movement to move people with mental illness out of jails and almshouses and into state hospitals, then called asylums, where reformers hoped they would be treated humanely.
One woman gave asylum reform its voice. Massachusetts opened its first state asylum, at Worcester, in 1833. In 1843 Dorothea Dix presented a memorial, a formal written statement of facts presented to a legislature to ask it to act. The National Park Service reports that her memorial documented the poor conditions most towns provided for their residents with disabilities.
Pause and try this. Most reforms in these years began in one of two places: a government office, or a voluntary society of private citizens. Which one?
Picture the reform society's meeting room before you reply.
Here's the answer. Most began in voluntary societies of private citizens, and laws came later, if they came at all.
That's why I keep asking who started an effort before asking who passed the law.
3. Abolitionists and Black leadership
Think about an editor of a small Northern newspaper. A reader brings in a letter that calls slavery a sin that must end now. The editor knows subscribers may cancel, and some may throw stones through the window. Many editors in the 1830s said no.
The movement that letter belonged to is abolitionism, the movement to end slavery in the United States; in the 1830s its leading wing demanded immediate abolition. Immediate abolition is the demand that slavery end at once, without delay and without payment to enslavers. It grew through newspapers, lecture tours, and petitions. It pushed against two older ideas. Gradual emancipation was a plan to end slavery slowly over years or decades. The colonization movement was the effort to send free Black Americans to Africa, which most Black Americans opposed because the United States was their home.
Now the people. Black abolitionists were free and formerly enslaved Black Americans who fought to end slavery as writers, speakers, organizers, and editors, and who were among the movement's leading voices. In 1829 David Walker, a free Black man in Boston, published Walker's Appeal, urging Black Americans to resist slavery and racism. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began The Liberator in Boston. The National Park Service writes that Garrison had once backed gradual emancipation and colonization, and that contact with Black Americans in Boston and Baltimore led him to reject both. In 1832 and 1833 Maria W. Stewart, a free Black woman, lectured in Boston to audiences of men and women, when few women of any race spoke in public.
So who led whom? Walker's demand came 2 years before Garrison's newspaper. Black abolitionists didn't follow the movement. They helped start it.
Pause and try this. A classmate says most Northerners were abolitionists before the Civil War. Is that right?
Remember what the editor feared from his own readers.
Here's the answer. No, immediate abolition stayed a minority movement in the North, and many Northerners opposed it.
A state without slavery was not a state full of abolitionists.
4. A told story: sourcing a dictated narrative
Imagine a grandmother telling her life story while her grandchild types it. The grandchild picks the order, fixes the grammar, and adds a line about how brave she was. Years later a stranger reads the printed pages. Whose words is the stranger reading?
That's the question for this week's Primary Source Workshop document. A dictated narrative is a life story told aloud by one person, the teller, and written down by another, the writer, so that a careful reader names both and asks whose words are on the page. The teller is the person whose life a dictated narrative tells and who spoke it aloud. The writer is the person who set it down on paper and chose its words.
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the dictated narrative of 1850 in which Sojourner Truth told her life and Olive Gilbert wrote it down. The Avalon Project keeps the text. Truth was born Isabella, enslaved in Ulster County, New York, and Dutch was her first language. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843.
Let's source it out loud. Teller: Sojourner Truth. Writer: Olive Gilbert. Date: 1850. Type: a dictated narrative. Host: the Avalon Project.
Now close reading. The first pinned passage says she was born, as near as she can now calculate, between the years 1797 and 1800. Listen to one small word in that line. It says she. The narrative speaks about Truth, not as Truth. The words on the page are Gilbert's report of what Truth told her.
The numbers matter too. The narrative gives a range, not a year, and 1800 minus 1797 is 3 years of uncertainty. When the book appeared in 1850, Truth was between 50 and 53 years old.
Pause and try this. Who is the teller and who is the writer of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth?
Name two people, not one.
Here's the answer. Sojourner Truth is the teller and Olive Gilbert is the writer, because Truth spoke her life and Gilbert put it on paper.
Here's the plain sentence for the reading. The narrative shows how Truth's life was told through Gilbert's pen in 1850; it is evidence of Truth's account as Gilbert wrote it, not a text in Truth's own written words.
5. Two dates kept apart: the promise and the State
Picture a manager who promises a worker a raise one year before the union contract requires it. The promised day comes, and the manager refuses. Later the contract's date arrives anyway. If the worker told that story years afterward, there would be two dates, and a listener could mix them up.
Truth's narrative carries the same two dates. In paraphrase, its second pinned passage says she was to have been free on 4 July 1827. That was the day her enslaver had promised her free papers, a written document that recorded a person's legal freedom. He promised them a year before the date the State had fixed, and when the day came he refused to keep his word. Elsewhere, the narrative places her emancipation by the State in 1828.
So keep them apart. The year 1827 dates a broken promise. The year 1828 dates the State's action, as the narrative tells it. That's the year-long gap the narrative describes. And from the promised day to the printing of the book is 23 years, so the narrative remembers events from decades earlier.
Now corroborate. The National Park Service dates New York's final emancipation day to 1827, under a state law of 1817, and it says Truth freed herself and her infant daughter in 1826. That account complicates the narrative's own dating. You don't have to settle which date is right. You have to say which event each date belongs to, where each date comes from, and that another source disagrees.
Pause and try this. In the narrative, what event does the year 1827 belong to?
Think about who made the promise.
Here's the answer. It belongs to the promise of free papers her enslaver refused to keep, while the narrative gives 1828 for her emancipation by the State.
Whatever year you settle on, the evidence is grave: a man who held Truth in slavery broke his word, and she took her freedom for herself.
6. Seneca Falls and the Declaration of Sentiments
Imagine a small chapel in a mill town in New York, packed with women and men who've come to talk about something new. The year is 1848. The document they discuss sounds almost like one every person there grew up hearing.
The women's rights movement is the movement that began in the 1840s to win women equal rights in law, property, wages, schooling, marriage, the church, and voting. Its roots ran through abolition. In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, refused to seat women delegates, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met there.
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. About 300 people attended, the National Park Service reports, and 68 women and 32 men, 100 in all, signed its declaration. Frederick Douglass attended and signed. The Declaration of Sentiments is the statement adopted there, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that listed women's grievances and demanded equal rights, the vote among them.
Set the model beside the copy. The Declaration of Independence, of 1776, says that all men are created equal. The Sentiments, in paraphrase, repeats that line with women added beside men. The two documents sit 72 years apart. Then it lists grievances. Women were denied the elective franchise, the right to vote in elections. Married women lost their property and wages. Colleges were closed to them. They held a lesser place in the church. Divorce and custody laws ignored them.
Pause and try this. Was the women's rights movement at Seneca Falls only about the vote?
Count the grievances you heard.
Here's the answer. No, the declaration listed property, wages, divorce, schooling, and the church beside the vote.
The vote became the most famous demand, but it was never the only one.
7. Sorting the sources: primary or secondary
Last step. Picture a library cart with two things on it: an encyclopedia page about a famous survey, and a tape of an elderly woman telling a researcher about her childhood. Which one was made by someone who lived through what it describes?
You've sorted sources since Week 1. A primary source was made during the period being studied. A secondary source is a later account that interprets primary evidence. The course's source-sorting set gives us two illustrative items. Item 11 is an online encyclopedia entry summarizing the census, and it's secondary. Item 12 is an oral account recorded in the 1930s from a person born into slavery, and it's primary for that person's own experience, read with the gap in time in mind.
Truth's narrative works like item 12. It's a teller's own account set down by someone else. A writer's pen doesn't turn it into a secondary source. It does mean you name both people.
Pause and try this. Is The Narrative of Sojourner Truth a primary or a secondary source for Truth's own life?
Ask whose experience the narrative reports.
Here's the answer. It's primary for her own experience, because it carries her account of her own life, read with the writer and the gap in time in mind.
Closing
Let me pull it together in the order we went. The Second Great Awakening was a wave of revivals from around 1800, and we read its beliefs as history, not as verdicts. The revivals fed benevolent societies and the reforms of temperance, common schools, and asylum care. Immediate abolition grew in the 1830s, and Black abolitionists like Walker and Stewart helped lead it, though it stayed a minority movement in the North. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth has a teller and a writer, and you name both. Its 1827 dates a broken promise and its 1828 dates the State's action, and another source disagrees. The Declaration of Sentiments borrowed the Declaration of Independence's form and asked for far more than the vote. And a told story, set down by a writer, is still primary for the teller's own life.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. In Week 11 the course follows the country west, into manifest destiny and expansion.
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