Second Great Awakening Dbq

Behind most of the reform movements of the 19th century was a religious revival called the Second Great Awakening which made the United States a religious nation. The Second Great Awakening stressed individual choice in salvation and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and was deeply influenced by the Market Revolution. While many preachers criticize the selfish individualism inherent in free market competition, there was sort of a market for new religions and preachers who would travel the country, drumming up business. Awakening ministers also preached the values of sobriety, industry, and self-discipline, which had become the essence of both the market economy and the impulse for reform. However, the movement was overwhelmingly protestant

But in the early 19th century, colonizationists created a new movement. Their idea was to ship all former slaves back to Africa, and the American Colonization Society became popular and wealthy enough to establish Liberia as an independent homeland for former slaves. While the idea was impractical and racist, it appealed to politicians like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, and even some freed slaves who figured that America's racism would never allow them to be treated as equals, did choose to emigrate to Liberia. However, most free blacks opposed the idea. In fact, in 1817, 3,000 of them assembled in Philadelphia and declared that black people were entitled to the same freedom as whites. By 1830, advocates for the end of slavery became more and more radical, like William Lloyd Garrison, whose magazine The Liberator was first published in 1831. Known for being "as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice," Radical abolitionism became a movement largely because it used the same mix of pamphleteering and charismatic speechifying that people saw in the preachers of the Second Great Awakening, which, in turn, brought religion and abolition together in the North, preaching a simple message: Slavery was a sin. By 1843, 100,000 northerners were aligned with the American Anti-Slavery Society. What made the abolitionists so radical was their inclusive vision of

In 1838, a mob in Philadelphia burned down Pennsylvania Hall because people were using it to hold abolitionist meetings. A year later, a mob in Alton, Illinois murdered anti-slavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy when he was defending his printing press. The best-known abolitionist was Frederick Douglas, a former slave whose life story is well-known because he wrote the brilliant "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave." In his 1852 Independence Day address Frederick Douglass said, "Would you argue with me that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." However, he wasn't the only former slave to write about the calamities of slavery. Josiah Henderson's autobiography was probably the basis for the most famous anti-slavery novel in American history: Uncle Tom's Cabin. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more than a million copies between 1851 and 1854 and the book depicted the evils of slavery so well that it became banned in the South. But while based on a black man's story, Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by a white woman, named Harriet Beecher Stowe which shows us that black abolitionists were battling not only slavery, but near pervasive