The 19th Century Comes Together

Never before have I begun to piece together various issues, events, and literary works during a given time period as I have recently. What used to be a 19th century jumble of abolition, women’s rights, spiritual revival, travel literature, educational reform, and those wild Transcendentalist fellers has now begun settling into an intricate web of cause and effect that links these together tidily, so that they make sense as a whole. I think one of the most visible threads that connects the whole would have to be the pronounced religious fervor of the time, as it seems to have worked its little tendrils into just about everything else. The Second Great Awakening and its religious fervor tied into and influenced an expanding sense of the world, as people, especially people with financial means, began traveling to Europe and in some cases beyond Europe, scribbling out travel literature which was all the vogue. An emphasis on missionary work to bring the gospel to less “spiritually advanced” peoples was the result now that such races could be physically reached, an emphasis that reinforced for people of white Christian cultures, the idea that people of less technologically advanced cultures and were heathens. Such beliefs would have made marginalization of these people a natural result; the practices of slavery and relocation of Native Americans like the tribes of Chief Seattle onto increasingly smaller and more remote land parcels would have been a short step and an entirely defendable one in the eyes of the 19th century white American.

The influence of religious revival can also be traced—ironically so—to the abolitionist movement (which cited Christian compassion as cause for freeing one’s fellow man) as well as its proslavery opposition (which claimed a concern for the black slave’s soul and well-being, which could only be protected and guided properly by white masters and mentors).

The strong religious movement also served as a check, though not a total deterrent, to those pesky women like Lydia Sigourney and Fanny Fern, who having once discovered their own power to move heaven and earth in defense of worthy causes like abolition and educational reform, began applying that power and methods of reform on their own behalf, despite the admonitions of church, family and society to settle down and behave like the self-sacrificing, nurturing, mild, obedient, sentimental creatures the good Lord had seen fit to create them. Pesky women. Sunday schools, created to ensure that children would have the ability to read scripture and as a training ground in Christian morals, values, and behavior, became part of a bigger educational reform movement, as an effort was made to increase education for the poor and for children in remote areas of the frontier. Here, too, women provided a strong push for change and improvement, especially in the cities, where large populations of factory workers with very few financial or social resources were seen to be in need of lifting up through education and Christian charity provided by their sisters.

I’ll never be able to look at the 19th century again as a piecemeal scattering of events and literature, I’m afraid, since now I can see that 19th century social concerns (educational reform, the role of women), political issues (abolition vs. sanctioned slavery, Native American relocation) and geographical expansion (both visiting foreign lands and the American expansion westward) were all linked inextricably to each other, tangled like a woman’s knitting basket visited by a litter of kittens.

I’ve focused here on how the tendrils (or tentacles—you choose your metaphor) of the Second Great Awakening permeated the 1800’s. For an overview of how the woman question did the same, try watching this YouTube video by John Green.

Source:
Green, John. " Women in the 19th Century: Crash Course US History #16." Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 23 May. 2013. Web. 7 June. 2014.