Reformers in the Antebellum Era

In May 1837, members of an array of reform organizations descended on New York City to hold their annual “Anniversary” meetings. Their leaders proclaimed crime, poverty, prostitution, alcohol, ignorance, or slavery as the death knell of the family and the republic, and demanded change. For an entire week, women and men from throughout the Northeast and Midwest attended speeches, rallies, prayer vigils, and business meetings to alert the public to the dangers that plagued the young nation. These activists often embraced different religious beliefs, different goals and strategies, and different visions of the ideal society. Still, they joined in believing that the United States could be improved, uplifted, perhaps even perfected.

It was a difficult year: a financial panic had erupted earlier in 1837 that threatened the work of many reform organizations as wealthy supporters declared bankruptcy, and middle-class advocates cut donations. Passing empty shops and ragged beggars on the streets of New York, prison reformer Catharine Sedgwick noted the “confusion and dismay produced here by the bursting of bubbles.” Still, increases in unemployment, hunger, homelessness, crime, and prostitution only made the need for reform more urgent.

The societies that met in New York in May 1837 had emerged over the past quarter century. Some began as local benevolent or missionary groups; many members of these organizations eventually turned their energy to temperance or prison reform in an effort to address the root causes of poverty and irreligion. By the 1830s, most sought to increase their clout by forming national organizations. For instance, the New York Female Moral Reform Society, whose members sought to eradicate prostitution and the sexual double standard in the city, spawned auxiliaries in dozens of towns and cities and then a national organization.

Other movements, such as antislavery, developed in various places and in different guises. Black women and men organized abolition societies in a number of cities in the 1820s and early 1830s, and some white Quakers also embraced the antislavery movement early on. William Lloyd Garrison drew on the support of these groups when he began publication of The Liberator newspaper in Boston in 1831. By the mid-1830s, an array of antislavery groups had come together under the umbrella of the Garrison-led American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). The AASS advocated rights for free blacks as well as immediate abolition and viewed churches and the government as supporters of the slave system.

Debates over gender and race erupted time and again among antebellum reformers. Charitable, temperance, and moral reform societies were almost always segregated by race and sex, while the most radical peace and abolitionist organizations allowed women and men, black and white, to join, speak, vote, and hold office. In these latter organizations, free blacks joined forces with white Quakers, Unitarians, and Free Will Baptists to challenge the status quo.

Class issues, too, shaped competing visions of antebellum reform. Affluent