Faith, Family, and Social Reform

How did western expansion affect the sectional tensions between the North and South?

11. Faith, Family, and Social Reform

I. The Reform Impulse
[EMERSON AND TOCQUEVILLE SLIDE]
a. “In the history of the world,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841, “the doctrine of reform has never such hope as at the

present hour.”
b. Abolitionism was only one of the era’s numerous efforts to improve American society. During his visit in the early 1830s,

Alexis de Tocqueville noted how in the absence of a powerful national government, Americans’ political and social activities were

organized through voluntary associations—churches, fraternal orders, political clubs, and the like.
c. The reform impulse was part of this proliferation of voluntary groups. Americans established organizations that worked to

prevent the manufacture and sale of liquor, end public entertainments and the delivery of the mail on Sunday, improve conditions in

prisons, expand public education, uplift the condition of wage-laborers, and reorganize society on the basis of cooperation rather

than competitive individualism.
d. Nearly all of these groups worked to convert public opinion to their cause. They sent out speakers, gathered signatures on

petitions, and published pamphlets.
e. Much like politics, reform movements saw sectional divides. Some reform movements like temperance and alleviating the

plight of the blind and insane, flourished throughout the nation. Others, including the women’s movement, labor unionism, and

educational reform, were weak or nonexistent in the South, where they were widely associated with antislavery sentiment.
f. Many of these activists took up multiple causes and became increasingly involved in the community. Some reformers decided

to withdraw altogether from the larger society and establish their own cooperative settlements.

II. Utopian Communities
a. Reformers who formed these utopian communities hoped to create “heaves on earth” where they could demonstrate by example

the superiority of a collective way of life.
b. About 100 reform communities were established in the decades before the Civil War. Historians call them “utopian” after

Thomas More’s 16th century novel Utopia, an outline of a perfect society.
c. These communities differed greatly in structure and motivation. Some were subject to the iron discipline of a single

leader, while others operated in a democratic fashion. Most arose from religious conviction, but others were inspired by the

secular desire to counteract the social and economic changes set in motion by the market revolution.
d. Nearly all communities set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis, hoping to restore social harmony to a world of

excessive individualism and to narrow the widening gap between rich and poor.
e. Through their efforts, the words “socialism” and “communism,” meaning a social organization in which productive property is

owned by the community rather than private individuals, entered the language of politics.
f. Most utopian communities also tried to find substitutions for conventional gender relations and marriage patterns. Some

prohibited sexual relations between men and women altogether; others allowed them to change partners at will. But nearly all

insisted that the abolition of private property must be accompanied by the end to men’s “property” in women.

III. The Shakers
[SHAKER SLIDE]
a. Religious communities attracted those who sought to find a retreat from a society permeated by sin, “a refuge from the

evils of this Sodom,” as the founders of Zoar, in Ohio, put it.
b. But the Shakers, the most successful of the religious communities, also had a significant impact on the outside world.
c. At their peak during the 1840s, cooperative Shaker settlements, which stretched from Maine to Kentucky, included more than

5,000 members.
d. The Shakers were founded in the late eighteenth century by Mother Ann Lee, the daughter of an English blacksmith, who

became a religious exhorter and claimed that Chris had directed her to emigrate with her followers to America. The first Shaker

community was established in upstate New York in 1787.
e. Because of their members’ selfless devotion to the teachings and rules laid down by their leader, spiritually oriented

communities often achieved remarkable longevity. The Shakers survived well into the twentieth century. Communities with a more

worldly orientation tended to be beset by internal divisions and therefore lasted for much shorter periods.

IV. Religion and Reform
[REVIVAL SLIDE]
a. Most Americans saw the ownership of property as the key to economic independence—and, therefore, to freedom—and marriage as

the foundation of the social order. Few were likely to join communities that required them to surrender both.
b. Far more typical of the reform impulse were movements that aimed at liberating men and women either from restraints

external to themselves, such as slavery and war, or from forms to internal “servitude” like drinking, illiteracy, and a tendency

toward criminality.
c. Drinkers, proclaimed one reformer, could not be considered free: they were “chained to alcohol, bound to the demon rum.”

Many of these reform movements drew their inspiration from the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.
d. The popular religious revivals that swept over the country during the Second Great Awakening added a religious underpinning

to the celebration of personal self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination. These revivals, which began at the turn of

the century, were originally organized by establishing religious alarmed by low levels of church attendance in the young republic.
e. But they quickly expanded far beyond existing churches. They reached a crescendo in the 1820s and early 1830s, when the

Reverend Charles Grandison Finney held months-long revival meetings in upstate New York and New York City.
f. The son of Connecticut farmers, Finney had been inspired to preach after attending a religious revival in 1821. Like the

evangelists (traveling preachers) of the first Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, Finney warned of hell in vivid

language while offering the promise of salvation to converts who abandoned their sinful ways.
g. He became a national celebrity after his success in Oneida County in upstate New York. After Finney’s preaching, according

to one report, the area had been “completely overthrown by the Holy Ghost.”
h. The Second Great Awakening spread to all regions of the country and democratized American Christianity, making it a truly

mass enterprise. Between independence and 1845, the number of preaching ministers grew from 2,000 to 40,000.
[GROWTH OF DENOMINATIONS CHART]
i. Evangelical denominations like the Methodists and Baptists enjoyed explosive growth in membership, and smaller sects

proliferated. By the 1840s, Methodism, with more than 1 million members, had become the country’s largest denomination. Deism, a

form of religious belief hostile to organized churches, had been prominent among the generation of the founding fathers. It now

waned, and Christianity became even more central to American culture.
j. Even more than its predecessor of several decades earlier, the Second Great Awakening stressed the right of private

judgment in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works.
k. Revivalist ministers seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to spread their message. They raised funds,

embarked on lengthy preaching tours by canal, steamboat, and railroad, and flooded the country with mass-produced, inexpensive

religious tracts. The revivals’ opening of religion to mass participation and their message that ordinary Americans could shape

their own spiritual destinies resonated with the spread of market values.
l. To be sure, evangelical preachers can hardly be described as cheerleaders for a market society. They regularly railed

against greed and indifference to the welfare of others as sins. Yet the revivals thrived in areas caught up in the rapid expansion

of the market economy, such as the region of upstate New York along the path of the Erie Canal.
m. The Second Great Awakening illustrated how the end of governmental support for established churches promoted religious

pluralism. Competition among religious groups kept religion vibrant and promoted the emergence of new denominations such as

Mormonism.
n. Many of the leaders of reform movements had had transformative religious experiences.

V. The Temperance Movement
[TEMPERANCE PLEDGE]
a. To members of the North’s emerging middle-class culture, reform became a badge of respectability, an indication that

individuals had taken control of their own lives and had become morally accountable human beings.
b. The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, directed its efforts to redeeming not only habitual drunkards but also

the occasional drinker.
c. It claimed by the 1830s to have persuaded hundreds of thousands of Americans to renounce liquor. By 1840, the consumption

of alcohol per person had fallen to less than half the level of a decade earlier.

VI. Critics of Reform
a. The temperance crusade and other reform movements aroused considerable hostility.
b. Many Americans saw the reform impulse as an attack on their own freedom. Drinking was a prominent feature of festive

celebrations and events like militia gatherings. Taverns were popular meeting places for workingmen in early nineteenth-century

towns and cities, sites not only of drinking, but also of political discussions, organizational meetings, and popular recreations.

VII. Reform Institutions
[INSANE ASYLUM]
a. The tension between liberation and control in the era’s reform movements was vividly evident in the proliferation of new

institutions that reformers hoped could remake human beings into free, morally upright citizens.
b. In the 1830s and 1840s, Americans embarked on a program of institution building—jails for criminals, poorhouses for the

destitute, asylums for the insane and orphanages for children without families.
c. These institutions differed in many respects, but they shared with communitarians and religious believers in

“perfectionism,” the idea that social ills once considered incurable could in fact be eliminated.
d. The way to “cure” undesirable elements of society was to place afflicted persons and impressionable youths in an

environment where their character could be transformed.
e. Prisons and asylums would eventually become overcrowded places where rehabilitating the inmates seemed less important than

simply holding them at bay, away from society.
f. At the outset, however, these institutions were inspired by the conviction that those who passed through their doors could

eventually be released to become productive, self-disciplined citizens.
[COMMON SCHOOL SLIDE]
g. The largest effort at institution building before the Civil War came in the movement to establish common schools—that is,

tax-supported state school systems open to all children.
h. In the early nineteenth century, most children were educated in locally supported schools, private academies, charity

schools, or at home, and many had no access to learning at all.
i. School reform reflected the numerous purposes that came together in the era’s reform impulse. To some extent, the schools’

“silent curriculum”—obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, organizing one’s day according to predetermined time periods

that changed at the ringing of a bell—helped to prepare students for work in the new industrial economy. Moreover, the common

school movement created the first real career opportunity for women, who quickly came to dominate the ranks of teachers.

VIII. The Crusade Against Slavery
[ABOLITION SLIDE]
a. Compared with drinking, Sabbath-breaking, and illiteracy, the greatest evil in American society at first appeared to

attract the least attention from reformers. For many years, it seemed that the only Americans wiling to challenge the existence of

slavery were Quakers, slaves, and free blacks.
b. After the antislavery impulse spawned by the Revolution died out, the slavery question faded from national life, with

occasional eruptions like the previously mentioned Missouri controversy of 1819-1821.
c. The abolitionist movement that arose in the 1830s differed profoundly from its genteel, conservative predecessor.
d. Drawing on the religious conviction that slavery was an unparalleled sin and the secular one that it contradicted the

values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, a new generation of reformers rejected the traditional approach of gradual

emancipation and demanded immediate abolition.
e. Also unlike its predecessors, they directed explosive language against slavery and slaveholders and insisted that blacks,

once free, should be incorporated as equal citizens of the republic rather than being deported.
f. White abolitionists themselves were hardly free of the racism that pervaded American society. Nonetheless, nearly all

abolitionists insisted that economic, civil, and political rights in the United States should be equally enjoyed without regard to

race.
g. Perfecting American society, they insisted, meant rooting out not just slavery, but racism in all its forms.
[DAVID WALKER SLIDE]
h. The first indication of the new spirit of abolitionism came in 1829 with the appearance of An Appeal to the Coloured

Citizens of the World by David Walker, a free African American who had been born in North Carolina and now operated a used-clothing

store in Boston. A passionate indictment of slavery and racial prejudice, An Appeal, called on black Americans to mobilize for

abolition—by force if necessary—and warned whites that the nation faced divine punishment if it did not mend its sinful ways.
i. Walker’s language alarmed both slaveholders and many white critics of slavery. When free black sailors secretly distributed

the pamphlet in the South, some southern states put a price on Walker’s head. Walker, however, did not create an abolitionist

organization, and he died in mysterious circumstances in 1830.

IX. The Abolitionist Movement Spreads
[WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON]
a. Beginning with a handful of activists, the abolitionist movement expanded rapidly throughout the North.
b. Antislavery leaders took advantage of the rapid development of print technology to spread their message. Abolitionists

seized upon the recently invented steam printing press to produce millions of copies of pamphlets, newspapers (including William

Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator), petitions, novels, and broadsides.
c. Abolitionists adopted the role of radical social critics. Their language was deliberately provocative, calculated to seize

public attention. “Slavery,” said William Lloyd Garrison, “will not be overthrown without excitement, without a most tremendous

excitement.”
d. The abolitionist crusade both reinforced and challenged common understandings of freedom in Jacksonian America.

Abolitionists helped to popularize the concept, fortified by the market revolution, that personal freedom derived not from the

ownership of productive property such as land, but from ownership of one’s self and the ability to enjoy the fruit’s of one’s

labor.
e. Abolitionists argued that slavery was so deeply embedded in American life that its destruction would require fundamental

changes in the North as well as in the South. They insisted that the inherent, natural, and absolute right to personal liberty,

regardless of race, took precedence over other forms of freedom, such as the right to own property.

X. Abolition and Race
[LYDIA MARIE CHILD’S TREATISE SLIDE]
a. In a society in which the rights of citizenship had become more and more closely associated with whiteness, the antislavery

movement sought to reinvigorate the idea of freedom as a truly universal entitlement.
b. The origins of the idea of an American people unbounded by race lies not with the founders, who by and large made their

peace with slavery, but wit the abolitionists.
c. The antislavery crusade viewed slaves and free blacks as members of the national community, a position summarized in the

title of Lydia Maria Child’s popular treatise of 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Child’s text

insisted that blacks were fellow countrymen, not foreigners or a permanently inferior caste. They should no more be considered

Africans than whites were Englishmen.
d. The idea that birthplace alone, not race, should determine who was an American, later enshrined in the Fourteenth

Amendment, represented a radical departure from the traditions of American life.
[BRANDING SLIDE]
e. Abolitionist literature also helped to expand the definition of cruelty. The graphic descriptions of the beatings,

brandings, and other physical sufferings of the slaves helped to popularize the idea of bodily integrity as a basic right that

slavery violated.
f. Despite being denounced by their opponents as enemies of American principles, abolitionists consciously identified their

movement with the revolutionary heritage. The Declaration of Independence was not as fundamental to public oratory in the early

republic as it would later become. Abolitionists seized upon it, interpreting the document’s preamble as a condemnation of slavery.
g. Black Abolitionists
[ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY SLIDE]
i. Blacks played a leading role in the antislavery movement. Even before the appearance of The Liberator, northern free blacks

had organized in opposition to the Colonization Society, a group who believed African Americans should be sent back to a colonized

area in West Africa.
ii. As late as 1834, northern blacks, attracted by William Lloyd Garrison’s rejection of colonization and his demand for equal

rights for black Americans, made up a majority of the journal’s subscribers.
iii. Several blacks served on the board of directors of the American Anti-Slavery Society, one of the most prominent

abolitionist organizations in the United States of America during the early nineteenth century. And northern born blacks and

fugitive slaves quickly emerged as major organizers and speakers.
iv. The organization sent lecturers across the North to convince people of slavery’s brutality. The speakers hoped to convince

people that slavery was immoral and ungodly and thus should be outlawed. The American Anti-Slavery Society also bombarded the

United States Congress with petitions calling for the end of slavery.
v. Rather than addressing the slavery issue, Congress imposed “the gag rule.” The gag rule stated that Congress would not

accept any petitions from the people of the United States that pertained to slavery. This aroused considerable resentment in the

North. “If the government once begins to discriminate as to what is orthodox and what is heterodox in opinion,” wrote the New York

Evening Post, hardly a supporter of abolitionism, “farewell, a long farewell to our freedom.”
vi. Unlike earlier organizations, American Anti-Slavery Society members called for an immediate end to slavery. Most of the

society’s members also demanded that African Americans receive the same political, economic, and social rights as white people.
vii. Frederick Douglass was only one among many former slaves who published accounts of their lives in bondage; these accounts

convinced thousands of northerners of the evils of slavery.
[ABOLITIONIST EMBLEM SLIDE]
viii. The first racially integrated social movement in American history and the first to give equal rights for blacks a central

place in its political agenda, abolitionism was nonetheless a product of its time and place. Racism, as we have seen, was pervasive

in nineteenth-century America, North as well as South. White abolitionists could not free themselves entirely from the prejudice.

The monopolized the key decision-making posts and relegated blacks to “mere secondary, underlying position[s].”
ix. What is remarkable, however, is not that white abolitionists reflected the prejudices of their society, but the extent to

which they managed to rise above them. “While the word ‘white’ is on the statute-book of Massachusetts,” declared Edmund Quincy, an

active associate of William Lloyd Garrison, “Massachusetts is a slave state.”
x. Defying overwhelming odds, abolitionists launched legal and political battles against racial discrimination in the North.
xi. The abolitionist emblem—a portrait of a slave in chains coupled with the motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—challenged

white Americans to face up to the reality that men and women no different from themselves were being held in bondage.

XI. Anti-abolition Tactics
[GAG RULE SLIDE]
a. In addition to Washington’s implementation of the “gag rule” several grassroots efforts to end abolition and intimidate

abolitionists occurred during the early 19th century.
b. At first, abolitionism aroused violent hostility from northerners who feared that the movement threatened to disrupt the

Union, interfere with profits wrested from slave labor, and overturn white supremacy.
c. Led by “gentlemen of property and standing” (often merchants with close commercial ties to the South), mobs disrupted

abolitionist meetings in northern cities. In 1835, a Boston crowd led William Lloyd Garrison through the streets with a rope around

his neck. The editor barely escaped with his life.
[ANTI ABOLITION POST]
d. Elsewhere, crowds of southerners, with the unspoken approval of Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general, Amos Kendell, burned

abolitionist literature that they had removed from the mails.
e. Far from stemming the movement’s growth, however, mob attacks and attempts to limit abolitionists’ freedom of speech

convinced many northerners that slavery was incompatible with the democratic liberties of white Americans.
f. The abolitionist movement now broadened its appeal so as to win the support of northerners who cared little about the

rights of blacks but could be convinced that slavery endangered their own cherished freedoms.
g. For many years, the American public sphere excluded discussion of slavery. The fight for the right to debate slavery openly

and without reprisal led abolitionists to elevate “free opinion”—freedom of speech and of the press and the right to petition—to a

central place in what Garrison called the “gospel of freedom.” In defending free speech, abolitionists claimed to have become

custodians of the “rights of every freeman.”

XII. The Origins of Feminism
[WOMEN AGAINST INDIAN REMOVAL SLIDE]
a. “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written,” Frederick Douglass later recalled, “women will occupy a

large space in it pages.” Much of the movement’s grassroots strength derived from northern women, who joined by the thousands.
b. The public sphere was open to women in ways government and party politics were not. Women’s letters and diaries reveal a

keen interest in political issues, from slavery to presidential campaigns. Long before they could vote, women circulated petitions,

attended mass meetings, marched in political parades, delivered public lectures, and raised money for political causes.
c. Women organized a petition campaign against the policy of Indian removal. Although unsuccessful, the experience helped to

produce a generation of women who then turned their attention to abolitionism, temperance, and other reforms.
d. Harriet Beecher (later the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) participated in the movement against Indian removal—of which her

sister, Catharine, was a major organizer.
[DOROTHEA DIX SLIDE]
e. Dorothea Dix, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, for example, was the leading advocate of more humane treatment of the insane,

who at the time generally were placed in jails alongside debtors and hardened criminals. Thanks to her efforts, twenty-eight states

constructed mental hospitals before the Civil War.
f. In 1834, middle-class women in New York City, organized the Female Moral Reform Society, which sought to redeem prostitutes

from lives of sin and to protect the morality of single women. They attacked the era’s sexual double standard by publishing lists

of men who frequented prostitutes or abused women. By 1840, the society had been replicated in hundreds of American communities.
g. All of these activities enabled women to carve out a place in the public sphere. But it was participation in the

abolitionist movement that inspired the early movement for women’s rights. In working for the rights of the slave, many women

developed a new understanding of their own subordinate social and legal status.

XIII. The Seneca Falls Convention
[ELIZABETH CADY STANTON]
a. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the key organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, were veterans of the

antislavery crusade. In 1840, they had traveled to London as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, only to be barred from

participating because of their sex.
b. The Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering on behalf of women’s rights held in the upstate New York town where Stanton lived,

raised the issue of woman’s suffrage for the first time. Stanton, the principal author, modeled the Seneca Falls Declaration of

Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence, adding “women” to Jefferson’s axiom “all men are created equal.” In place of a list

of grievances against King George III, it condemned the “injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”
[SENECA FALLS SIGNERS]
c. Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the seventy-year struggle for woman’s suffrage. The vote, however, was hardly the only

issue raised at the convention. The Declaration of Sentiments condemned the entire structure of inequality that denied women access

to education and employment, gave husbands control over the property and wages of their wives and custody of children in the event

of divorce, deprived women of independent legal status after they married, and restricted them to the home as their “sphere of

action.”
d. Equal rights became the rallying cry of the early movement for women’s rights, and equal rights meant claiming access to

all the prevailing definitions of freedom.

XIV. Women and Work
[SOJOURNER TRUTH SLIDE]
a. Women also demanded the right to participate in the market revolution.
b. At an 1851 women’s rights convention, the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth insisted that the movement devote attention to

the plight of poor and working-class women and repudiate the idea that women were too delicate to engage in work outside the home.

Born a slave in New York around 1799, Truth did not obtain her freedom until the state’s emancipation law of 1827. A listener at

her 1851 speech (which was not recorded at the time) later recalled that Truth had spoken of her years of hard physical labor, had

flexed her arm to show her strength and exclaimed, “and aren’t I a woman?”
c. Participants in Seneca Falls and the women’s movement at large rejected the notion of the home as the women’s “sphere.”

Women, wrote Pauline Davis in 1853, “must go to work” to emancipate themselves from “bondage.”
d. In one sense, feminism demanded an expansion of the boundaries of freedom rather than a redefinition of the idea. Women, in

the words of one reformer, should enjoy “the rights and liberties that every ‘free while male citizen’ takes to himself as god-

given.”
e. But even as it sought to apply prevailing notions of freedom to women, the movement posed a fundamental challenge to some

of society’s central beliefs—that the capacity for independence and rationality were male traits, that the world was properly

divided into public and private realms, and that issues of justice and freedom did not apply to relations within the family. In

every realm of life, including the inner workings of the family, declared Elizabeth Cady Stanton, there could be “no happiness

without freedom.”

XV. The Slavery of Sex
a. The dichotomy between freedom and slavery powerfully shaped early feminists’ political language. Just as the idea of “wage

slavery” enabled northern workers to challenge the inequities inherent in market definitions of freedom, the concept of the

“slavery of sex” empowered the women’s movement to develop an all-encompassing critique of male authority and their own

subordination.
[MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SLIDE]
b. Feminist abolitionists did not invent the analogy between marriage and slavery. The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft had

invoked it as early as the 1790s in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. But the analogy between free women and slaves gained

prominence as it was swept up in the accelerating debate over slavery.
c. Marriage was not, literally speaking, equivalent to slavery. The married woman, however, did not enjoy the fruits of her

own labor—a central element of freedom. Beginning in Mississippi in 1839, numerous states enacted married women’s property laws,

shielding property brought into a marriage by his wife from a husband’s creditors. Such laws initially aimed not to expand women’s

rights as much as to prevent families from losing their property during the depression that began in 1837.
d. But in 1860, New York enacted a more far-reaching measure, allowing married women to sign contracts, buy and sell property,

and keep their own wages. In most states, however, property accumulated after marriage, as well as wages earned by the wife, still

belonged to the husband.
XVI. “Social Freedom”
a. Influenced by abolitionism, women’s rights advocates turned another popular understanding of freedom—self-ownership, or

control over one’s own person—in an entirely new direction.
b. The emphasis in abolitionist literature on the violation of the slave woman’s body by her master helped to give the idea of

self-ownership a concrete reality that encouraged application to free women as well.
c. The law of domestic relations presupposed the husband’s right of sexual access to his wife and to inflict corporal

punishment on her. Courts proved reluctant to intervene in cases of physical abuse so long as it was not “extreme” or

“intolerable.”
d. The issue of women’s private freedom revealed underlying differences within the movement for women’s rights. Belief in

equality between the sexes and in the sexes’ natural differences coexisted in antebellum feminist thought.
[WOMAN SPEAKING SLIDE]
e. Allowing women a greater role in the public sphere, many female reformers agreed, would bring their “inborn” natural

instincts to bear on public life, to the benefit of the entire society.
f. Even feminists critical of the existing institution of marriage generally refrained from raising in public the explosive

issue of women’s “private” freedom. The question frequently arose, however, in the correspondence of feminist leaders.
g. Not until the twentieth century would the demand that freedom be extended to intimate aspects of life inspire a mass

movement. But the dramatic fall in the birthrate over the course of the nineteenth century suggests that many women were quietly

exercising “private freedom” in their most intimate relationships.

XVII. The Abolitionist Schism
a. Organized abolition split into two wings in 1840. The immediate cause was a dispute over the proper role of women in

antislavery work.
b. Behind the split lay the fear among some abolitionists that radicalism on issues like women’s rights impeded the movement’s

growth.
c. While the achievement of most of their demands lay far in the future, the women’s rights movement succeeding in making “the

woman question” a permanent part of the transatlantic discussion of social reform.
d. As for abolitionism, although it remained a significant presence in northern public life until emancipation was achieved,

by 1840 the movement had accomplished its most important work.
e. It awakened the moral issue of slavery throughout the North. The abolitionists’ greatest achievement lay in shattering the

conspiracy of silence that had sought to preserve national unity by suppressing public debate over slavery.

Once again, note that these events are also taking place during the first half of the nineteenth century.