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Shakers
Religious communities drew people looking for a sanctuary from a world rife with immorality, or, in the words of the Ohio town of Zoar, "a shelter from the miseries of this Sodom. Shakers, the most prosperous of the religious groups, also made a big difference in society. More than 5,000 people lived in cooperative Shaker towns that spanned from Maine to Kentucky at their height in the 1840s. Men/women lived apart in significant dormitory-like buildings and shared dining areas. -
American Colonization Society
This idea's proponents established the American Colonization Society in 1816, which advocated for the gradual abolition of slavery and the colonization of Africa by black Americans. It quickly created Liberia, a colony of the United States with the capital named after President James Monroe, on the coast of West Africa. The American Colonization Society inspired free black people to assert their citizenship rights. -
Communitarianism
The idea that a less competitive and individualistic society could be created by establishing local communities based on common land ownership propelled the nineteenth-century social reform movement. Robert Owen built a replica of a factory community with luxurious housing and free public education. New Lanark became the world's most excellent cotton manufacturing hub in 1815. Owen used communitarianism as a peaceful way to ensure that employees received the total worth of their labor. -
New Harmony
A place Robert Owen establish to make a "new moral world." He bought the Indiana village of Harmony in 1824. George Rapp, a founder of the German Protestant movement, immigrated to America at the beginning of the nineteenth century with his followers. At New Harmony, he promised women would no longer be “enslaved” to their husbands, and “false notions” about innate differences between the sexes would be abandoned. -
Temperance Movement
When the American Temperance Society was established in 1826, it focused on rehabilitating occasional drinkers and habitual drunkards. By the 1830s, it claimed to have convinced hundreds of thousands of Americans to give up alcohol. Alcohol consumption per person had decreased to less than half compared to the decade earlier. The Washingtonian Society collected former drinkers in "experience meetings" during the 1840s, where they shared their past transgressions in front of others. -
Gentlemen of Property and Standing
Mobs that disrupted abolitionist meetings in northern cities. With a rope over his neck, a Boston crowd escorted William Lloyd Garrison through the streets in 1835. The editor almost avoided death. The printing press of James G. Birney, a former enslaver who had been forced to depart Kentucky for the North after being converted to abolitionism by Theodore Weld, was burned by a Cincinnati mob the following year. -
American Anti-Slavery Society
Founded in 1833, the organization sought an immediate end to slavery and the establishment of equality for black Americans. In the years following the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and through the end of the decade, some 100,000 people from the north joined regional abolitionist organizations. The American Anti-Slavery Society was disbanded after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because its members thought their work was done. -
Gag Rule
The House of Representatives introduced a rule barring the consideration of abolitionist petitions in 1836. John Quincy Adams spearheaded the resistance that led to its repeal in 1844. In the North, the gag rule caused a great deal of hostility. The New York Evening Post, scarcely a proponent of abolitionism, declared that "our freedom is at risk" if the government ever starts to differentiate between orthodox. -
Liberty Party
An abolitionist political party that nominated James G. Birney for president in 1840 and 1844 merged with the Free Soil Party in 1848. 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. -
Brook Farm
Near Boston, New England, transcendentalists founded Brook Farm in 1841 to prove that physical and mental labor could coexist peacefully. They based the community in part on the theories of Charles Fourier. The model for Fourier's "phalanxes," as he referred to his towns, was meticulously prepared down to the number of residents and the amount of money that would be made from charging tourists an entrance fee. Brook Farm was like a fun-filled small university. -
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix was a critical factor in raising public awareness of the predicament of those with mental illnesses. She conducted a two-year investigation of how the mentally ill were treated in Massachusetts, presented her findings, and gained the support of prominent reformers. She ultimately persuaded 20 states to change how they handle mentally sick people. -
Oneida
A utopian community founded in 1848, the Perfectionist religious group practiced “complex marriage” under
leader John Humphrey Noyes. Oneida had a somewhat authoritarian atmosphere. A person needed to show mastery of Noyes's spiritual teachings and live by his regulations to join the group. Members closely scrutinized one another's behavior and publicly chastised anyone who disobeyed Noyes's rules. -
Woman Suffrage
The National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led the movement to change the constitution to grant women the right to vote. The seventy-year fight for women's suffrage began in Seneca Falls. However, the vote wasn't the only topic discussed at the conference. The Declaration of Sentiments denounced the system of discrimination that prevented women from accessing jobs and education and deprived women of independent status after marriage. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published as a serial in an anti-slavery newspaper in Washington in 1851 and then as a book the following year, sold more than a million copies by the year 1854 and served as the model for countless theater adaptations. Stowe's story offered the abolitionist message a strong human appeal by depicting slaves as sympathetic men and women and Christians at the mercy of slaveholders who tore families apart. -
Common School
Tax-supported state schools of the early nineteenth century were open to all children. Mann believed that by uniting children from all social groups in a shared educational experience and empowering the least fortunate to climb the social ladder, universal public education might bring equality back to a society that had become divided. Education would "equalize the conditions of men."The early labor movement, made the building of common schools one of its goals -
Summary
American Anti-slave society was the most impactful event during this period. The American Anti-Slavery Society hoped to convince white Southerners and Northerners of slavery's inhumanity. The group wouldn't stop at any cost until they'd achieved their goal. It has impacted today's society because it convinced the majority of America believes that slavery is terrible and unjustified. Even though the other events in this period were significant, this had the greatest effect on today's society.