What was the social structure of the North during the Antebellum period?

[hi]

[jollyteam639]

In the decades preceding the Civil War religion had taken an increasingly large role in American life. Puritan theology had influenced colonial New England in significant ways and many Revolutionary patriots found inspiration in the scriptures and the notion of a chosen people. But in the antebellum period a broad wave of popular religion known as the Second Great Awakening fundamentally democratized American Protestantism.

Revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney preached that individuals were responsible for their own salvation, and undercut the authority of established religious organizations such as that which had thrived in New England for two centuries. Unlike the traditional Calvinism of the religious authorities, the new evangelists told Americans that they could perfect themselves and their society. One upshot of the Second Great Awakening thus became a broad and deep movement of social reform.

As Protestant churches broke away from the familiar New England model and sundered their ties with the state, they opened the way for a new generation of laymen and women to take significant positions in church leadership. These individuals created a new "benevolent empire" of voluntary associations devoted to evangelism and reform, such as temperance, sabbatarianism (policing Sabbath activities) and, abolitionism. This period also saw the growth of a new female ideal. As men moved decisively into the workings of a market economy, moralists like Catharine Beecher reasoned that women took up the work of their "separate sphere," a realm in which women used their native religiosity and morality to raise children, guide their husbands, and uplift society. 1

As the teachings of the Second Great Awakening became established in their religious and cultural life, Americans came to embrace an ideal of Christian civilization. Individuals prided themselves on their resolute conscience, self-control, and benevolence toward those less fortunate than themselves. Working in offices and living in cities, men and women no longer witnessed the farm's familiar cycle of birth and death, harvest and slaughter, and developed a general aversion to suffering and bloodshed. Americans believed that their society had produced a record of moral as well as material progress most evident in individual conscience and benevolence. This synthesis of religious and political thought dominated American public life in the antebellum period.

The Civil War represented a culmination of several of these beliefs. Americans responded to the war's pain and suffering with a new generation of voluntary associations, including the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission. Women found new authority and influence as their familiar sphere expanded with the crisis in public life. Abolitionists' ardent demands for dramatic social reform in the form of freed slaves also seemed to gain recognition as the Union's war aims turned toward emancipation in 1863. Many northern ministers came to see the conflict as an expression of God's will.

But the war also challenged and eroded much of delicate optimism that informed public life in the antebellum North. Many northern ministers and intellectuals entered the war as advocates of "moral suasion" as the only means to social reform. William Lloyd Garrison's vocal, if controversial, wing of the abolitionist movement rejected any collaboration with a corrupt state bound by the Constitution, itself "a covenant with death."

But these idealists faced a legitimate crisis as the war unfolded. They asked themselves several questions. In political terms, was the suppression of the southern rebellion consistent with the Declaration of Independence's right to self-government? In a more specific religious context, two other questions arose. Were Christians to fight for their beliefs or turn the other cheek? If they did fight, could they align their nation's cause with the Bible's teachings?...