19th Century Reform Movements in America

19th Century Reform Movements in America

A reform movement is a type of social movement that aims to bring a social or political system closer to the community’s ideals. There were many different types during the 19th century in America.

Temperance Movement

The temperance movement sought to limit or even ban the consumption of alcohol. Strongly supported by American Protestants, there were thousands of individual temperance societies at the local level by the 1830s. Temperance group members could be affiliated with any political party; the movement was not structured around partisanship. Although it took nearly a century, the temperance movement was finally successful with the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919. Commonly called ‘Prohibition,’ the measure caused a set of unforeseen problems and was repealed during the Great Depression.

Public Education Reform

In early America, few schools existed outside of Massachusetts; children were taught at home by parents or tutors or were sent away to a boarding school. By the 1830s, a growing number of concerned Americans began to advocate at all levels for free public education, at least for white boys. In 1837, Horace Mann took control of the new Massachusetts Board of Education and pursued free, equal, non-religious schooling for all social classes, provided by trained, well-paid, professional teachers. His reforms set the standard for public education in the United States, and by 1870, all states had at least some free elementary schools.

Other Reform Movements

There was also the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement that sought equal rights between all people, no matter gender or skin color. These reforms influenced the way America is today, and without them, who knows what America would be like.

Other Influential Causes

Other causes are states’ rights, expansion, and the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

• States’ Rights: The idea of states’ rights was not new to the Civil War. Since the Constitution was first written, there had been arguments about how much power the states should have versus how much power the federal government should have. The southern states felt that the federal government was taking away their rights and powers.

• Westward Expansion: As the United States continued to expand westward, each new state added to the country shifted the power between the North and the South. Southern states began to fear they would lose so much power that they would lose all their rights. Each new state became a battleground between the two sides for power.

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in serial form in an anti-slavery newspaper in 1851 and in book format in 1852. Within two years, it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. The book succeeded at its goal, which was to start a wave of anti-slavery sentiment across the nation. Upon meeting Stowe, President Lincoln remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”