The Market Revolution, Moral Reform, and the Making of Northern Culture

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The Market Revolution, Moral Reform, and the
Making of Northern Culture

• History 3.3, 4 Dec. 2001

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I. The Market Revolution Northern Social
Change

• Went along with Industrial Revolution, westward
  expansion, urbanization, democratization,
  represented triumph of capitalism over cultural
  tradition rural isolation.
• Changes especially strong along new
  transportation routes like the Erie Canal, where
  market forces were felt most strongly new
  cities sprung up overnight. Small-town social
  controls gone.
• Economic social life became more competitive,
  entrepreneurial, individualistic, but also more
  highly organized institutionalized.
• Examples Decline of just price. Rise of
  private corporations.
• More people became wage laborers consumers
  rather than independent producers, such as
  farmers or artisans (craftsmen).
• Factory work for some, middle-class white
  collar occupations (businessmen, clerks,
  professionals) for others.
• Ideology that anyone could succeed/rise in a
  free labor society.
• Sites of home and work separated. Role of family
  home changed from economic production to
  emotional nurture and moral teaching. Home life
  became private life.
• Cult of domesticity Middle-class women lost
  some economic political roles but gained new
  prestige as chief nurturers teachers in new
  private households. Restrained male immorality.

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II. Religious Revival Moral Reform

• Problem was that new capitalist society (along
  with numerous aspects of old one) did follow new
  middle-class morality.
• Examples national drinking binge, toleration of
  prostitution, disrespect for religion/Sabbath.
• Particular concern in Greater New England,
  where churches had just lost tax support
  Unitarianism was rising.
• Solution were emotional religious revivals that
  tried to restore update Puritan faith
  morality.
• Most successful revivalist was Charles G. Finney
  of NY, beg. 1825.
• Dropped harsher aspects of Calvinism like
  original sin predestination, made conversion
  much easier, a simple decision to reject sin.
  Idea of moral free agency.
• Used capitalist methods, money (Tappans)
  aggressive marketing, hard-sell tactics.
• Very popular with middle-class women.
• Swept through North, especially areas settled by
  New Englanders.

Charles Grandison Finney
Arthur Tappan
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II. Religious Revival Moral Reform (cont.)

• Rise of Benevolent Empire New evangelical
  religion inspired wave of well-funded movements
  to reform society acc. to Christian values
  middle-class morality.
• Doctrines of free moral agency, perfectionism,
  held out possibility of perfectly moral society,
  if only people would decide not to sin. Some felt
  (following old Yankee traditions) that it might
  be governments duty to prevent sin altogether.
• Examples Sabbatarianism, Sunday Schools,
  temperance, elimination/criminalization of
  prostitution, missionary work (among foreigners,
  Indians, frontier, urban poor), Antimasonry,
  insane asylums, penitentiaries, and the new
  immediate abolitionism.
• Methods national organizations w/local chapters,
  networks of newspapers, direct mail, touring
  speakers, popular culture (prints songs).
• Hostile to immigrants, Catholicism, Democrats,
  sinning workers.
• Women involved in these movements ( snubbed by
  men in them) become the first feminists
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

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III. Conclusion The Making of Northern Society

• Taken together, Market Rev., revivals, reforms
  helped establish key aspects of northern society.
• Personality plain-living, self-controlling,
  future-oriented, self-reliant, hard-working,
  inner-directed (motivated by shame, not honor),
  law-bound (seeking impersonal peaceful means
  for solving conflicts).
• Moral economic order preferred by middle-class
  Christians increasingly enforced by government.
  Rise of police forces.

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Abolitionist Popular Culture
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The Hutchinson Family singers Greatest
Abolitionist Hits