Second Great Awakening And Transcendentalism

The basic message of the Second Great Awakening was that individuals must re-admit God and Christ into their daily lives. Many church leaders had growing concern that Americans commitment to the christian faith was weakening, so ministers began to help revive peoples commitment to religion. Charles Grandison Finney was a presbyterian minister who preached that each person contained within himself or herself the capacity for spiritual rebirth and salvation. He helped found modern revivalism. He believed that if Christian ideas reformed people from within, society would become better, but if people remained selfish and immoral, political reforms would not make any difference. Joseph Smith began preaching Mormon ideas in 1830 after claiming to

Transcendentalism urged people to overcome the limits of their minds and let their souls reach out to embrace the beauty of the universe. Henry David Thoreau believed that individuals must fight the pressure to conform. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most influential transcendentalist of the time. He also believed in a simple life and self-religious ideas. In the 1800s, newspapers cost around six cents, which was too much for the average workers. So as more Americans learned to read and earned the right to vote, publishers produced inexpensive newspapers called Penny Papers. This held information that most people wanted to here about like fires, crimes, politics, etc. During this time many American writers came out and started to write. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his essay “Nature,” to write to those who wanted fulfillment should try to commune with nature. Many other writers emerged and wrote many wonderful works, such as Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” and many more. During this time many Americans were doubtful and sad, so by lifting up their spirits these writers and this movement helped them do

The Abolitionist movement grew support, along with other social reforms, from the Second Great Awakening, with its focus on sin and repentance. Abolitionist believed slavery was an enormous evil for which then country needed to repent. William Lloyd Garrison founded the anti-slavery newspaper, the Liberator, which condemned colonization and attacked the Constitution because it did not ban slavery. He believed that slavery was immoral and slaveholders were evil. In 1833, Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Frederick Douglass was one of the most prominent African Americans in the Abolitionist movement. In 1838, Douglass escaped from slavery, and later published his own anti-slavery newspaper, the North Star, and wrote an autobiography which sold about 4,500 copies. The first anti-slavery societies believed that the best solution to end slavery was to send the African Americans back to their ancestral homelands in Africa. Therefore, anti-slavery reformers founded the American Colonization Society to move African Americans to Africa. In the North, mobs frequently attacked abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Garrison was stoned and almost hanged, while Tappan’s home was attacked by a New York mob. The abolitionist movement effect the United States greatly, many people tried to help the African Americans become free, which later they will become free but we still see racism