Chapter 5: The Young Republic;

Sections 3 and 4

Bell Work
p. 203
“Overland Trails West” Map
Answer the 2 questions
Religious Revival

Second Great Awakening
– Charles G. Finney –
successful revivalist preacher
– Unitarianism develops
– Joseph Smith – started
Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Mormons)
– Lyman Beecher –
Presbyterian minister who
urged citizens to be
responsible for building a
better society

Benevolent societies sprang up in
cities worked primarily by women
 Literature

Transcendentalism – the idea that one can
overcome the mind's limits
– Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature
– Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden
 Americana
– James Fenimore Cooper wrote The
Last of the Mohicans
– Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The
Scarlet Letter
– Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick
– Edgar Allen Poe wrote macabre poetry
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote
“Paul Revere's Ride” and “Song of
Hiawatha”
– Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass
Social Reform
 Some Americans sought utopia
or ideal society such as Brook
Farm outside of Boston
– Rejected private
property
– Cooperative living
 The American Temperance
Union fought to outlaw alcohol;
some states and towns signed
on in the 1850s
 Many states began updating
prisons and focusing on
rehabilitation
 Education
 Why is education so important in a
democracy?

Horace Mann

– Helped create the Massachusetts

Board of Education
– Served as the Board's Secretary
where he doubled teachers'
salaries and opened 50 new high
schools
– Established normal schools for
training educators

Women (could not yet vote)

– Emma Willard and Mary Lyon

(Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
pictured) found girls' boarding
schools
– Taught academic subjects in
addition to cooking and etiquette
Women's Movement

Catherine Beecher (daughter of
Lyman Beecher) wrote in “A
Treatise on the Domestic
Economy” that could find fulfillment
in childcare, cooking, and health
matters
 Lucrecia Mott and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton organize the Seneca Falls
Convention to organize the
women's movement

The Convention issued a
Declaration of Sentiments and
Resolutions or Seneca Falls
Declaration opening with, “We hold
these truths to be self evident, that
all men and women are created
equal...”
 Abolition
 The American Colonization Society was an
antislavery group who helped about 16,000 slaves
relocate to west Africa to a new nation named
Liberia
 William Lloyd Garrison

– Founded the Liberator, an

abolitionist newspaper
– Advocated emancipation of slaves
– Founded the American Antislavery
Society in 1833 and by 1838 had
over 250,000 members
 Fredrick Douglas published the North Star and an
autobiography
 Sojourner Truth gave antislavery speeches that
drew large crowds

Northern whites were afraid of the effect on their
economy, but hated slave catchers

Southern whites saw slavery as essential to their
way of life and railed against abolitionists
 Westward Expansion
 Manifest Destiny – the idea that the nation was meant
to spread to the Pacific Ocean
 Pre-emption Act allows squatters to buy 160 acres
 Oregon Trail and others like it took settlers to the west
coast
 The trip took 5 to 6 months at a wagon's pace of 15
miles/day

1851 – the Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed 8 plains
tribes certain land that would remain theirs forever
Texas
 Mexico contracted empresarios like Stephen
Austin to encourage immigration to Texas

When Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna stopped
immigration in 1830, settlers were furious

After Austin's attempt at negotiations fail, and
being jailed for 18 months, Santa Anna
declared himself dictator

Texas quickly raised an army and less than
200 settlers held out for 13 days at the Alamo

Texans surprised the Mexican army at the
Battle of San Jacinto where Santa Anna was
captured and forced to give Texas its
independence
 This created the Republic of Texas

Texas voted for annexation into the United
States, but Jackson and Tyler could not get it
done because Texas wanted to enter as a
slave state
 James K. Polk
#11 (1845-1849)
They Might Be Giants (1996) To bring about victory
Fulfill our manifest destiny
In 1844, the Democrats were split And annex the land the Mexicans command
The three nominees for the presidential And when the votes were cast the winner was
candidate Mister James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump
Were Martin Van Buren, a former president
and an abolitionist
In four short years he met his every goal
James Buchanan, a moderate
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Louis Cass, a general and expansionist
Made sure the tarriffs fell
From Nashville came a dark horse riding up
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He was James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term
Austere, severe, he held few people dear
But precious few have mourned the passing of
His oratory filled his foes with fear
Mister James K. Polk, our eleventh president
The factions soon agreed
Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump
He's just the man we need