• What were the major movements and goals of antebellum reform?
• What were the different varieties of abolitionism?
• How did abolitionism challenge barriers to racial equality and tree speech?
• What were the diverse sources of the antebellum women's rights movement and its significance?
Among the many Americans who devoted their lives to the crusade against slavery, few were as selfless or courageous as Abby Kelley. Born in Massachusetts in 1811, she was educated at a Quaker boarding school in Rhode Island. As a teacher in Lynn, Massachusetts, she joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society and, like thousands of other northern women, threw herself into the abolitionist movement. In 1838, Kelley began to give public speeches about slavery. Her first lecture outside of Lynn was literally a baptism of fire. Enraged by reports that abolitionists favored “amalgamation” of the races—that is, sexual relations between whites and blacks—residents of Philadelphia stormed the meeting hall and burned it to the ground.
For two decades, Kelley traveled throughout the North, speaking almost daily in churches, public halls, and antislavery homes on “the holy cause of human rights.” Her career illustrated the interconnections of the era’s reform movements. In addition to abolitionism, she was active in pacifist organizations—which opposed the use of force, including war, to settle disputes—and was a pioneer in the early struggle for women’s rights.
“In striving to strike [the slave’s] irons off,” she wrote, women “found most surely that we were manacled ourselves.” Kelley was not the first American woman to speak in public. But she covered more miles and gave more speeches than any other female orator. She forthrightly challenged her era’s assumption that woman’s “place” was in the home. More than any other individual, remarked Lucy Stone, another women’s rights advocate, Kelley “earned for us all the right of free speech.”
Abby Kelley’s private life was as unconventional as her public career. She enjoyed a long and happy marriage to Stephen S. Foster, a strong-willed abolitionist given to interrupting Sunday sermons to denounce ministers who failed to condemn slavery. She gave birth to a daughter in 1847 but soon returned to lecturing. When criticized for not devoting herself to the care of her infant, Kelley replied: “I have done it for the sake of the mothers whose babies are sold away from them. The most precious legacy I can leave my child is a free country.”
“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.” 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. 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.
A rare photograph of an abolitionist meeting in New York State around 1850. The woman at the center wearing a bonnet map be Abby Kelley. Frederick Douglass sits immediately to her right.
Nearly all these groups worked to convert public opinion to their cause. They sent out speakers, gathered signatures on petitions, and published pamphlets. Like Abby Kelley, many reformers were active in more than one crusade. Some reform movements, like restraining the consumption of liquor and alleviating the plight of the blind and insane, flourished throughout the nation. Others, including women’s rights, labor unionism, and educational reform, were weak or nonexistent in the South, where they were widely associated with antislavery sentiment. Reform was an international crusade. Peace, temperance, women’s rights, and antislavery advocates regularly crisscrossed the Atlantic to promote their cause.
Reformers adopted a wide variety of tactics to bring about social change. Some relied on “moral suasion” to convert people to their cause. Others, like opponents of the “demon rum,” sought to use the power of the government to force sinners to change their ways. Some reformers decided to withdraw altogether from the larger society and establish their own cooperative settlements. They hoped to change American life by creating “heavens on earth,” where they could demonstrate by example the superiority of a collective way of life. Reformers never amounted to anything like a majority of the population, even in the North, but they had a profound impact on both politics and society.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, dozens of utopian communities were established in the United States, where small groups of men and women attempted to establish a more perfect social order within the larger society.
About 100 reform communities were established in the decades before the Civil War. Historians call them “utopian” after Thomas More’s sixteenth-century novel Utopia, an outline of a perfect society. (The word has also come to imply that such plans are impractical and impossible to realize.) 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.
Nearly all the 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. 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. Most utopian communities also tried to find substitutes 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 ah insisted that the abolition of private property must be accompanied by an end to men’s “property” in women.