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Any common misconceptions, inaccuracies, and/or common struggles students have with the Antebellum Reformers

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Any common misconceptions, inaccuracies, and/or common struggles students have with the Antebellum Reformers

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Eastern State Penitentiary

Eastern State Penitentiary was designed to intimidate prisoners by its appearance. Today a historical society runs tours of the prison, as well as a haunted house around Halloween.

The pretty woman who stood before the all-male audience seemed unlikely to provoke controversy. Tiny and timid, she rose to the platform of the Massachusetts Legislature to speak. Those who had underestimated the determination and dedication of Dorothea Dix, however, were brought to attention when they heard her say that the sick and insane were "confined in this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, beaten with rods, lashed into obedience." Thus, her crusade for humane hospitals for the insane, which she began in 1841, was reaching a climax. After touring prisons, workhouses, almshouses, and private homes to gather evidence of appalling abuses, she made her case for state-supported care. Ultimately, she not only helped establish five hospitals in America, but also went to Europe where she successfully pleaded for human rights to Queen Victoria and the Pope.

Dorothea Dix, a tireless crusader for the treatment of the mentally ill, was made the Superintendent of Nurses for the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war, she retired to an apartment in the first hospital that she had founded, in Trenton, New Jersey.

The year 1841 also marked the beginning of the superintendence of Dr. John Galt at Eastern Lunatic Asylum, in Williamsburg, Virginia, the first publicly supported psychiatric hospital in America. Warehousing of the sick was primary; their care was not. Dr. Galt had many revolutionary ideas about treating the insane, based on his conviction that they had dignity. Among his enlightened approaches were the use of drugs, the introduction of "talk therapy" and advocating outplacement rather than lifelong stays.

In addition to the problems in asylums, prisons were filled to overflowing with everyone who gave offense to society from committing murder to spitting on the street. Men, women, children were thrown together in the most atrocious conditions. Something needed to be done - but what?

Until the 19th century, juveniles offenders were passed into the custody of their parents. During the time of prison and asylum reform, juvenile detention centers like the House of Refuge in New York were built to reform children of delinquent behavior.

After the War of 1812, reformers from Boston and New York began a crusade to remove children from jails into juvenile detention centers. But the larger controversy continued over the purpose of prison - was it for punishment or penitence? In 1821, a disaster occurred in Auburn Prison that shocked even the governor into pardoning hardened criminals. After being locked down in solitary, many of the eighty men committed suicide or had mental breakdowns. Auburn reverted to a strict disciplinary approach. The champion of discipline and first national figure in prison reform was Louis Dwight. founder of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, he spread the Auburn system throughout America's jails and added salvation and Sabbath School to further penitence.

After several bad starts, America finally enjoyed about a decade of real reform. Idealism, plus hope in the perfectibility of institutions, spurred a new generation of leaders including Francis Lieber, Samuel Gridley Howe and the peerless Dix. Their goals were prison libraries, basic literacy (for Bible reading), reduction of whipping and beating, commutation of sentences, and separation of women, children and the sick.

By 1835, America was considered to have two of the "best" prisons in the world in Pennsylvania. Astonishingly, reformers from Europe looked to the new nation as a model for building, utilizing and improving their own systems. Advocates for prisoners believed that deviants could change and that a prison stay could have a positive effect. It was a revolutionary idea in the beginning of the 19th century that society rather than individuals had the responsibility for criminal activity and had the duty to treat neglected children and rehabilitate alcoholics.

In reality it became clear that, despite intervention by outsiders, prisoners were often no better off, and often worse off, for their incarceration. Yet, in keeping with the optimistic spirit of the era, these early reformers had only begun a crusade to alleviate human suffering that continues today.

Medicating the mentally ill is nothing new - Benjamin Hornor Coates, M.D. was working wonders with narcotics way back in 1752.
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Listen up to this radio broadcast about the story of Sing Sing, one of America's most notorious prisons which actually began during the time of reform.
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Prison and Asylum Reform [ushistory.org]

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Eastern State Penitentiary Eastern State Penitentiary was designed to intimidate prisoners by its appearance. Today a historical society runs tours of the prison, as well as a haunted house around Halloween. The pretty woman who stood before the all-male audience seemed unlikely to provoke controversy.

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Women's rights and the Seneca Falls Convention (article) | Khan Academy

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The first women's rights movement advocated equal rights for white women by leveraging abolitionist and Second Great Awakening sentiment.

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- [Voiceover] Hi, this is Becca from Khan Academy, and today I'm going to be talking about temperance. So, what was the temperance movement? In this video, I'll talk a little bit about what temperance was, what its causes were, and how it started to develop in the early-1800s. Temperance was the idea that Americans drank way too much alcohol and needed to temper their consumption. It started as kind of this idea that people should just drink a little bit less, they should drink less whiskey, less rum, less hard alcohol. And then, slowly, it started to take on this kind of prohibitory character. So, again, it was the idea that we just needed to temper our alcohol consumption. And so, how did the temperance movement take root? The temperance movement kinda has three main causes that I like to think about. So, the three main causes were the Second Great Awakening, the Industrial Revolution, and growing nativism and, frankly, racism that started as new immigrants were coming to America in the early-1800s. So, this was all kinda happening right around here, and so I'll talk a little bit more about each of these causes for the temperance movement and how it began. So, I'll start by talking about the Second Great Awakening. So, the Second Great Awakening was this time period in the early-1800s that focused a lot of social reforms around capturing moral good or Christian ideals so Christian ideals, here's the little cross, within our social institutions. So, this happened in education, in prisons, in the first women's rights movement. And so, this was all going on in the 1800s and it was about this idea that we needed to be good and moral people, and we needed our social institutions to reflect that. So, temperance can be seen as a part of the Second Great Awakening. And so, down here, you can kind of see the Second Great Awakening image here. This is the idea that the family was also intimately affected by people being too drunk. Here's the father and he's really drunk and things are kind of going to mayhem. People were just too drunk, and this was tearing apart lots of different institutions, including the family, including education, including the workplace. And so, that's a good transition to talking about the Industrial Revolution. So, the Industrial Revolution was also going on at this time period and people could no longer be drunk on the job, right? So, people used to be artisans. They used to just kind of sit in their home, make their shoes or sew something by hand, and they could be drunk while doing that. But now, if you're kind of in a factory setting, people were getting their fingers cut off by these new machines that were promoted in the Industrial Revolution because they were drunk while trying to operate the machinery. So, with this new industry, workers could no longer be drunk on the job. And so, the final cause is this nativism that people were seeing with new Catholic immigrants. So, there were Catholic immigrants coming into the country. And lots of Protestants were very anti-Catholic and anti-immigration. They decided that the Catholics were drunks. They did drink a lot, but it was definitely this kind of racist sentiment that was percolating within the Protestant community, and this kind of aligned itself with the Whig Party. So, the Whigs became more Protestant; they were really big temperance people. And the Catholics more aligned themselves with the Democrats. The sentiment towards these immigrant populations had this kind of political effect. So, at this time, temperance was starting to become more of a political movement and different social groups were taking this more seriously. There were some state-level organizations. It was just becoming more of a social phenomenon. In 1825, right over here, this really famous preacher, Lyman Beecher, did his six sermons on the sins of alcohol. And so, these sermons in 1825 solidified this idea in the American mind that it was anti-Christian to be a huge drinker, and this idea really took root. This is becoming kind of this larger social phenomenon and there start to be not just more state-level or community-level societies against drinking, you see the first ever national organization. So, the first national temperance society was in 1826, down here, with the American Temperance Society, so the ATS. And I'll talk more about the ATS and the kind of nationalization of the temperance movement in the next video.

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The early temperance movement - origins (video) | Khan Academy

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Voiceover] Hi, this is Becca from Khan Academy, and today I'm going to be talking about temperance. So, what was the temperance movement? In this video, I'll talk a little bit about what temperance was, what its causes were, and how it started to develop in the early-1800s.

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Early abolition (article) | Khan Academy

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The abolition movement sought to end the practice of slavery in the United States.