Reform movements rise

In the early-to-mid 1800s, a wave of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening swept the country, and many Americans came out of it believing society itself could and should be improved. That conviction fed a whole set of reform movements at once. The temperance movement campaigned against the overuse of alcohol, which many reformers blamed for poverty and family breakdown. In education, Horace Mann of Massachusetts pushed for tax-funded "common schools" open to all children, arguing an educated public was essential to a working democracy. In the treatment of the mentally ill, Dorothea Dix investigated horrific conditions in prisons and asylums and successfully lobbied state legislatures for humane treatment and dedicated hospitals instead.

Two movements from this same reforming decade would grow to reshape the whole nation. William Lloyd Garrison founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831, demanding an immediate end to slavery rather than a gradual one, and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. And in 1848, a group of women and men met at Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped write the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled deliberately on the Declaration of Independence, demanding rights for women including the right to vote. These movements did not always agree on tactics or move at the same speed, but they shared a common thread: a belief that the nation's stated ideals of liberty and equality were not yet being lived up to, and that organized effort could close the gap.