Examples of antebellum reform in the following topics:
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- The change in women's roles came mostly from their participation in increasingly formalized missionary and reform societies.
- During the antebellum period, the Second Great Awakening inspired advocacy for a number of reform topics, including women's rights.
- Antebellum reform in areas such as women's rights was affected not only by political enthusiasm, but also by religious or spiritual enthusiasm.
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- The reform efforts of the antebellum years, including abolitionism, aimed to perfect the national destiny and redeem the souls of individual Americans.
- Some reformers targeted what they perceived as the shallow, materialistic, and democratic market culture of the United States and advocated a stronger sense of individualism and self-reliance.
- Women’s rights, temperance, health-care issues, and a host of other efforts also came to the forefront during the heyday of reform in the 1830s and 1840s.
- Evangelical Protestantism pervaded American culture in the antebellum era and fueled a belief in the possibility of changing society for the better.
- Many reformers of the time engaged in communal experiments aimed to recast economic and social relationships by introducing innovations designed to create a more stable and equitable society.
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- Antebellum society in the South consisted of a class of wealthy plantation-owners, a middle class of yeomans, poor whites, and slaves.
- Second, free small farmers in the South often embraced hysterical racism, making them unlikely agents of internal democratic reforms in the South.
- In many areas, small farmers depended on local planter elites for vital goods and services including (but not limited to) access to cotton gins, access to markets, access to feed and livestock, and even for loans, since the banking system was not well developed in the antebellum South.
- Only a small minority of free white Southerners owned plantations in the antebellum era.
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- The Second Great Awakening spurred waves of social change and reform.
- The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
- Thus, evangelical converts were leading figures in a variety of 19th century reform movements.
- They began efforts to reform prisons and care for the handicapped and mentally ill.
- Antebellum American witnessed a surge in the number of denominations of Christianity.
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- Grassroots movements championing women's rights, including women's suffrage, developed in the antebellum period.
- However, the real triumph was the success reformers had in placing the issue of women's oppression in the national consciousness and establishing a movement that would continue to change American attitudes for years to come.
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- It was most prevalent in the antebellum South where it was
seen as an integral component of the booming agricultural economy, and by
extension, central to the health of the U.S. economy overall.
- Historians distinguish
between moderate antislavery reformers who favored gradual abolition as a means
of stopping the spread of slavery, and radical abolitionists whose demands for
unconditional emancipation merged with a concern for African-American civil
rights.
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- While the term "planter" has no universally accepted definition, historians of the antebellum South have generally defined it in the strictest definition as a person owning property and 20 or more slaves, as noted by Peter Kolchin in his 1993 survey of American slavery.
- Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.
- Only a small minority of free white Southerners owned plantations in the antebellum era.
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- "Poor whites" were the lowest white class in the antebellum south; in spite of their poverty, most still supported the Confederacy.