Antebellum Non Conformists - Transcendentalists and Mormon Pioneers [1820-60]

Two unconventional utopian experiments founded on individual inspiration, self-reliance, dissent, and

nonconformity create a strong sense of unity and shape the American identity

Advanced Placement United States History Exam - May 2007

In what ways did the Second Great Awakening in the North influence TWO of the following?

Abolition

Temperance

The cult of domesticity

Utopian communities

Review: Impact of the Market Revolution: Optimism, Anxiety and Despair   As the workplace becomes less personal, bigger, and uncontrollable.  It leads to the accumulation of great wealth, with fortunes being made in the textile industry and in the railroad industry by the 1840’s and 1850’s.

“Spiritual matters over material matters”  
Stressed the importance of individual inspiration, self-reliance, dissent, and nonconformity?

Emerson evoked a nationalistic spirit of Americans by urging them not to imitate European Culture but to create an entirely new and original American culture

In August of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, chastising his audience for their intellectual dependency on British and European writers. 

TRANSCENDENTALISTS

Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau questioned the doctrines of established churches and capitalistic habits of the merchant class. 

They argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means of discovering one’s inner self looking for the essence of God in nature. They could “transcend” experience and reason though their intuitive powers to discover universal truth.

The Transcendentalists saw beauty in nature, but ugliness in a materialistic society full of greed and avarice (excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain)

UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES

Utopian communities strove to escape the competitiveness of American life, regulate moral behavior, and create co-operative lifestyles. Secular communal experiments including New Harmony (1825 to 1827)  and Oneida communities (1848)

Shakers grew to about 6,000 members in various communities by the 1840’s.  Held property in common and kept men and women strictly separate.

Mormons – The Church of Later Day Saints founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Smith gathered a following in Palmyra NY and eventually migrated to Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and eventually Utah. 

The smoldering spiritual embers of the Burned-Over District kindled Joseph Smith, a rugged visionary, who reported that he had received some golden plates from an angel