Hi I’m John Green. This is Crash Course U.S. history and today we finally get to talk

about sex. Also some other things. Today we’re gonna

discuss religious and moral reform movements in 19th century America, but I promise there

will be some sex. Mr. Green, Mr. Green. Is it gonna be about

real sex or is it gonna be able people who are obsessed with not having sex?

You got me there, Me from the Past. But how (and whether) we skoodilypoop ends up saying

a lot about America, and also people in general. Intro

So, one response to the massive changes brought about by the shift to an industrialized market

economy was to create utopian communities where people could separate themselves from

the worst aspects of this brave new world. The most famous at the time, and arguably

still, were the Shakers, who were famous for their excellent furniture, so you can’t

say that they really fully withdrew from the market system.

Still Shaker communities did separate themselves from the competition that characterized free

markets, especially in terms of the competition for mates.

They were celibate, and therefore only able to increase their numbers by recruitment,

which was made a little bit difficult by celibacy. But they did do a lot of dancing to sublimate

their libidinous urges, they embraced equality of the sexes, and at their peak they had more

than 6,000 members. Today, they are still one of the most successful

utopian communities to have emerged in the 19th century. They have three members.

Much more successful in the long run were the Latter Day Saints, also called Mormons,

although at the time their ideas were so far out of the mainstream that they were persecuted

and chased from New York all the way to Utah. In addition to the Bible, The LDS Church holds

the Book of Mormon as a holy scripture, which tells of the resurrected Jesus’s visits

to the Americas. And while it was subject to widespread persecution,

and even some massacres, the LDS Church continued to grow, and in fact continues to today.

So, while some of these communities were based in religion, others were more worldly attempts

to create new models of society, like Brook Farm.

Founded in 1841 by a group of transcendentalists, is a dependent clause that always ends in

failure, Brook Farm tried to show that manual labor and intellectual engagement could be

successfully mixed. This community drew on the ideas of the French

socialist Charles Fourier, who as you may recall from Crash Course World History believed—no

joke—that socialism would eventually turn the seas to lemonade.

And much like Fourier’s planned communities, Brook Farm did not work out, largely because—and

I can say this with some authority—writers do not enjoy farming.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, complained about having to shovel horse manure. But if

he’d only kept shoveling horse manure, he might not have shoveled The Blithedale Romances

onto an unsuspecting reading public. I’m sorry, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I do like

The Scarlet Letter, but I feel like the only reason you’re read is because you were,

like, the only author in pre-Civil War America. So either we have to pretend that America

began with Huck Finn’s journey on the Mississippi or else we’re stuck with you.

It was just, like, you, Thomas Paine, Mary Rowlandson, a bunch of printed sermons, and

James Fenimore Pooper. Anyway, the most utopian of the utopian communities

were set up at Utopia, Ohio and Modern Times, New York by Josiah Warren.

Everything here was supposed to be totally unregulated and voluntary including marriage,

which, as you can imagine worked out brilliantly. But, without any laws to regulate behavior,

Warren’s communities were individualism on steroids, so they collapsed spectacularly

and quickly. But these utopian communities were relatively

rare; many more 19th century Americans participated in efforts to reform society rather than just

withdraw from it. And behind most of those reform movements

was religion, particularly a religious revival called the 2nd Great Awakening.

This series of revival meetings reached their height in the 1820s and 1830s with Charles

Grandison Finney’s giant camp meetings in New York. And in a way the 2nd Great Awakening

made America a religious nation. The number of Christian ministers in the United

States went from 2,000 in the 1770s to 40,000 by 1845.

And western New York was the center of this revivalism. That’s where Joseph Smith had

his revelations. It’s also where John Humphrey Noyes founded

his Oneida Community, in which postmenopausal women introduced teenage boys to sex, and

which eventually ceased being a religious community and evolved into—wait for it—one

of the world’s largest silverware companies. That’s right, every time you take a bite

of food with Oneida cutlery, you’re celebrating free love and May-December relationships.

Well, more like February-December relationships. (Libertage: Turning Free Love into Fancy Forks)

So, yes, religious fervor burned so hot in upstate New York that it became known as the

“burned-over district,” and New York remains the heartland of conservative Christianity

to this day. Or not.

The Awakening stressed individual choice in salvation and a personal relationship with

Jesus Christ, and it was deeply influenced by the market revolution.

So, like, while many preachers criticized the selfish individualism inherent in free

market competition, there was sort of a market for new religions and preachers, who would

travel the country drumming up business. Awakening ministers also preached the values

of sobriety, industry and self-discipline, which had become the essence of both the market

economy and the impulse for reform. There are three points I want to make about

the religious nature of all these 19th century reform movements. First, it was overwhelmingly

Protestant. Like, all these “new” religions were protestant

denominations, which meant that they wouldn’t have a lot of appeal to immigrants from Ireland

and Germany who started to pour into the United States in the middle of the 19th century because

A. those people were mostly Catholic, and B. reasons we’ll get to momentarily.

Secondly, many of these reformers believed in perfectionism, the idea that individuals

and society were capable of unlimited improvement. And third, many of the reform movements were

based ultimately on a different view of freedom than we might be used to.

And this is really important to understand, for 19th century reformers, freedom was the

opposite of being able to do whatever you wanted, which they associated with the word

license. They believed that true freedom was like an

internal phenomenon that came from self-discipline and the practice of self control.

Essentially, instead of being free to drink booze, you would be free from the temptation

to drink booze. According to Philip Schaff, a minister who

came to Pennsylvania in the 1840s, “true national freedom, in the American view [is]

anything but an absence of restraint … [It] rests upon a moral groundwork, upon the virtue

of self possession and self control in individual citizens.”

Members of the fastest growing Protestant denominations like Methodists and Baptists

were taught that it wasn’t enough to avoid sin themselves; they also needed to perfect

their communities. And that leads us to America’s great national nightmare, temperance.

Now you’re not going to see me advocate for prohibition of alcohol, but to be fair,

Americans in the first half of the 19th century were uncommonly drunk. In fact, in 1830, per

capita liquor consumption was 7 gallons per year, more than double what it is now.

And that doesn’t even count wine, beer, hard cider, zima, pruno.

By the way, some people like to have home breweries or whatever, but at our office,

Stan’s been making pruno under the couch. The growing feeling among reformers that we

should limit or even ban alcohol appealed to those protestant ideas of restraint and

perfecting the social order. And that’s also precisely why it was so

controversial, especially among Catholic immigrants, who A. came largely from Germany and Ireland,

two nations not known for their opposition to strong drink,

and B. were Catholic and the Catholic church’s morality didn’t view alcohol or dancing

as inherently sinful the way that so many Protestant denominations did.

And then we have the widespread construction of asylums and other homes for outcasts.

Anyone who’s ever done a bit of urban exploring knows that these places were built by the

hundreds in the 19th century—jails, poorhouses, asylums for the mentally ill—and while they

might not seem like places of freedom, to reformers they were.

Remember, freedom was all about not having the choice to sin so you could be free of

sin. Bear in mind, of course, that the crusading

reformers who built these places usually chose not to live in them.

And speaking of places you’re forced to go regardless of whether you want to, the

mid 19th century saw the growth of compulsory state-funded education in the United States.

These new schools were called common schools, and education reformers like Horace Mann hoped

that they would give poor students the moral character and body of knowledge to compete

with upper-class kids. And that worked out great. Just look at where

we are on the equality of opportunity index. Now, this may seem like an obvious win for

all involved, but many parents opposed common schools because they didn’t want their kids

getting moral instruction from the government. That said, by 1860, all northern states had

established public schools. But they were far less common in the South, where the planter

class was afraid of education falling into the wrong hands, like for instance, those

of poor whites and especially slaves. Which brings us to abolition. Let’s go to

the Thought Bubble. Abolitionism was the biggest reform movement

in the first half of the 19th century, probably because—sorry alcohol and fast dancing—slavery

was the worst. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the only challengers to slavery were slaves

themselves, free blacks, and Quakers. But in the early 19th century, colonizationists

began to gain ground. Their idea was to ship all former slaves back to Africa, and the

American Colonization Society became popular and wealthy enough to establish Liberia as

an independent homeland for former slaves. While the idea was impractical, and racist,

it appealed to politicians like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. And some black people, who

figured that America’s racism would never allow them to be treated as equals, did choose

to emigrate to Liberia. But most free blacks opposed the idea; in fact in 1817, 3,000 of

them assembled in Philadelphia and declared that black people were entitled to the same

freedom as whites. By 1830, advocates for the end of slavery

became more and more radical, like William Lloyd Garrison, whose magazine The Liberator

was first published in 1831. Known for being “as harsh as truth and as uncompromising

as justice,” Garrison once burned the Constitution, declaring it was a pact with the devil. Radical

abolitionism became a movement largely because it used the same mix of pamplheteering and

charismatic speechifying that people saw in the preachers of the Second Great Awakening,

which in turn brought religion and abolition together in the North, preaching a simple

message: Slavery was a sin. By 1843, 100,000 Northerners were aligned with the American

Anti-Slavery Society.

What made the radical abolitionists so radical was their inclusive vision of freedom. It

wasn’t just about ending slavery but about equality—the extension of full citizens’

rights to all people, regardless of race.

By the way, it was abolitionists who re-christened the Old State House Bell in Philadelphia the

“Liberty Bell.” Why does all this awesome stuff happen in Philadelphia?

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, needless to say, not all Americans were quite so thrilled about

abolitionism, which is why slavery remained unabolished.

Often, resistance to abolitionism was violent—like, in 1838, a mob in Philadelphia burned down

Pennsylvania Hall because people were using it to hold abolitionist meetings. And you

were doing so well, Philadelphia! A year later, a mob in Alton, Illinois murdered

antislavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy when he was defending his printing press. This

was the fifth time, by the way, that a mob had destroyed one of his newspapers.

Even Congress got in on the “let’s suppress free speech and the press” act by adopting

the gag rule in 1836. The gag rule prohibited members of congress

from even reading aloud or discussing calls for the emancipation of slaves. Seriously.

And you thought the filibuster was dysfunctional. The best known abolitionist was Frederick

Douglass, a former slave whose life story