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Communitarianism
Communitarianism, promoted by Robert Owen, was a peaceful means of ensuring that workers received the full value for their labor. Owen was a British factory owner and had strict rules of work discipline with comfortable housing and free public education. His 1,500 employees made New Lanark the largest center of cotton manufacturing in the world. -
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American Colonization Society
The American Colonization Society promoted the gradual abolition of slavery and the settlement of black Americans in Africa. The society’s program focused on purchasing and freeing slaves. They also paid for their passage to the west coast of Africa, and assisted them after their arrival there. They were able to establish Liberia and continued on with their goal from there. -
New Harmony
New Harmony is a utopian community founded in 1825. Robert Owen purchased the Harmony community founded by George Rapp, and Owen later changed the communities name to New Harmony. Owen's founded New Harmony to establish a model community where education and social equality would thrive. -
Temperance Movement
The Temperance Movement was a movement created in 1826 to limit the amount of drinking in the U.S. The movement helped people drink in moderation or go into complete abstinence from consuming alcoholic beverages. -
Common School
Common Schools are tax-supported state school systems open to all children. The leading educational reformer, Horace Mann, hoped that universal public education could restore equality to a fractured society by bringing the children of all classes together in a common learning experience and equipping the less fortunate to advance in the social scale. He ended up being able to help and educate many children that were not able to get any education themselves. -
American Anti-Slavery Society
The American Anti-Slavery Society was an abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. The society's goal was to immediately and unconditionally abolish slavery. 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. -
Gentleman of Property and Standing
The gentleman of property and standing were mobs of merchants with close commercial ties to the South that disrupted abolitionist meetings in Northern cities. In 1835, they William Loyd Garrison, one of the leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, through the streets with a rope on his neck. In 1837, anti-slavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed by a mob while he was defending his press. -
Gag Rule
The Gag Rule was a law that forbade the House of Representatives from considering anti-slavery petitions. This caused many people to become really angry with the government and was soon repealed in 1844. -
Shakers
The Shakers were a Protestant sect first founded in England in 1747. The Shakers later peaked during the 1840s with members totaling over 5,000. The Shakers believed that God had a “dual” personality, both male and female, and thus the two sexes were spiritually equal. Their numbers were increased unnaturally through the attraction of converts and the adoption of children in orphanages. Their community economically, however, was very successful and their woodwork is still widely admired today. -
Liberty Party
The Liberty Party was created by abolitionists who believed in political action to further antislavery goals. The Liberty Party advocated for the abolitionist cause, and broke away from the American Anti-Slavery Society. The party advocated that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document. -
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix was a Massachusetts schoolteacher that was the leading advocate of more humane treatment of the insane. In 1841, Dorothea began teaching classes at the Cambridge Jail and was horrified to find that the mentally ill were kept alongside prisoners, with no support or health care. Thanks to her efforts over the years, 28 states constructed mental hospitals before the Civil War. -
Brook Farm
Brook Farm was established in 1841 by the New England transcendentalists. They hoped to demonstrate that manual and intellectual labor could coexist harmoniously. Brook Farm was like an exciting miniature university because of the leisure time devoted to music, dancing, dramatic reading, and intellectual discussions. However, Brook Farm attracted mostly writers, teachers, and ministers, some of whom disliked farm labor. Brook Farm was later disbanded after a few years. -
Oneida
Oneida, founded in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes, was an influential and controversial utopian community. Noyes took the idea that man could achieve moral perfection to an atypical extreme. He preached that he and his followers had become so perfect that they had achieved a state of complete "purity of heart." Oneida was an extremely dictatorial environment that ended up surviving until 1881. -
Woman Suffrage
Woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and it first began after the Seneca Falls convention. Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the 70-year struggle that was about to happen for woman's suffrage. The Declaration of Sentiments condemned the entire structure of inequality that denied women access to education, employment, and more. Women continued to fight for equal rights in the early movement for women's rights, and equal rights meant claiming access to everything about freedom. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was an anti-slavery novel published in 1852. This book was about the struggles of a slave, Tom, who had been sold numerous times and had to endure physical brutality by slave drivers and his masters. This book was so popular that it sold more than 1 million copies by 1854. It portrayed slaves as sympathetic men and women, who were at the mercy of slaveholders who split up families and tortured them.