This document discusses immigration and reform movements in the United States between 1820-1850. It saw a large influx of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and other parts of Europe. The Irish made up the largest group and faced difficult conditions during travel and upon arrival. They established tight-knit communities but faced anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment. Meanwhile, reform movements grew including transcendentalism, temperance, education, women's rights, and abolitionism, reflecting social changes in this period.

1. The Nineteenth Century
Immigration and Reform 1820-
1850

2. The Nineteenth Century
• Immigration
• Reform

3. Immigration
• From 1776-1814 European immigration to
the US was slow.
• From 1783-1819 the US averaged 7,000
immigrants per year.
• Immigration during the 1820’s and
continues to increase in 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.

4. Immigration Statistics
• 1783-1819- 7,000 average per year
• 1825- 10,199 immigrants
• 1830- 23,322
• 1840-84,066
• 1845-1854- 2.6 million

5. Destinations, Sea Coast Cities
• Boston
• Philadelphia
• New York- 1855, Castle Garden-
Immigration receiving center
• Frontier

6. Who made the journey?
• The Irish
• German
• British
• Scandinavian
• Chinese
• Nativists

7. The Irish
• Irish immigrants were the largest group
of foreign born in the United States by
1860, 1.6 million

8. Irish, reasons for leaving Ireland
1. British: Rule, Protestantism, Landlords,
and Taxes.
2. Depression and Social hardship
3. Potato Famine, 1845, over 1 million
peasants died.

9. Irish Immigration
Travel
1. Journey took six weeks
2. Unsanitary conditions- typhus, dysentery and
malnutrition caused thousands to die before
reaching the United States. 1847 40,000 died
“coffin ships”
3. Huddled together in Eastern cities, around
Catholic Churches
4. By the 1850’s the Irish made up over half the
populations of Boston and New York

10. Irish Immigration- Employment
• Construction Gangs, canals and railroads
• Laborers in factories, steel mills and
shipyards
• Women- textile mills, domestic servants

11. Irish in America: “The poorest and most
wretched population that could be found in the
world.” Archbishop of New York, 1850’s
Living Conditions
• Most lived in filthy tenements.
High Rate of:
1. Crime
2. Infant Mortality
3. Infectious disease
4. Prostitution
5. Alcoholism

12. Irish in America: Challenges
• Anti-Catholic sentiment
• “No Irish Need Apply”
• Filthy, Ignorant, Alcoholics
• “Were I asked to say what I believed to be the most serious obstacle
to the advancement of the Irish in America, I would unhesitatingly
answer- Drink; meaning thereby the excessive use, or abuse, of that
which, when taken in excess, intoxicates, deprives man of his
reason, interferes with his industry, injures his health, damages his
position, compromises his respectability, renders him unfit for the
successful exercise of his trade, profession, employment- which
leads to quarrel, turbulence, violence, crime.” Maguire, John
Francis, The Irish in America

13. Irish in America: Success
Tight community/Cultural Identity
• Churches, political groups, saloons, fire companies.
• Powerful voting constituency- local politics, Democratic
Party, by the 1880’s controlled Tammany Hall.
• The Irish pushed the growth of the Catholic Church in
the United States.

14. The Germans
• Many Germans made their way to the
United States due to failed revolutions in
1830 and 1848.
• From the late 1840’s through the 1850’s
over 1 million Germans made their way to
the United States.

15. The Germans: Characteristics
German Immigrants were:
• Educated, cultured professional people,
doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers,
farmers and artisans.
• Politically savvy and opinionated
• Religiously diverse, Catholic, Lutheran,
Jewish, even Atheist and Agnostics

16. German Immigration
• Often immigrated in groups rather than
individuals like the Irish.
• Often looked to the frontier for settlement,
St. Louis, San Antonio, and Milwaukee
• Very independent, skills allowed German
immigrants to capitalize on the American
Economy.

17. German Immigration: Challenges
Prejudice
1. Religion
2. Alcohol
3. Success- economic and political

18. British, Scandinavian, and Chinese
• British, largely professional, farmers and skilled
workers.
• Scandinavians- Swedes and Norwegians, settled in
Wisconsin and Minnesota. By 1860 population was over
72,600.
• Chinese- Treaty of Nanking (1842),Treaty of Tien Tsin
(1858), Unemployed, “Kidnapped” 35,500 by 1860.
Construction gangs, Railroads- Coolie labor

19. The Nativists
• Native born Americans, preferred “native”
Americans to immigrants.
• Feared that immigrants would take their job
opportunities.
• Anti-Catholic- Attack on the Ursiline Convent,
Charlestown, MA
• Native American Association, Order of the Star
Spangled Banner, Know Nothing/American
Party.

20. The Reform Movement
• The Second Great Awakening
• Transcendentalists
• Temperance Movement
• Education
• Women’s Rights
• Abolition

21. Second Great Awakening
• Some Protestants begin to turn away from the
Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
• Evangelical Of, relating to, or being a Christian
church believing in the sole authority and
inerrancy of the Bible, in salvation only through
regeneration, and in a spiritually transformed
personal life.
• New denominations- Baptist, Methodist and
Mormons

22. Transcendentalists
• Transcendentalism asserting the existence
of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends
the empirical and scientific and is
knowable through intuition.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau

23. Transcendentalists
Emerson
1. “Insist on yourself; Never imitate. Your own gift you
can present every moment with the cumulative force
of a whole life’s cultivation;…That which each can do
best, none but his master can teach him.” Emerson,
Self-Reliance
2. Self-Reliance, 1840,- transcendental non-conformity
instead of following the dictates of society.
3. Advocated creating an American identity

24. Transcendentalists
Henry David Thoreau
1. Walden, 1854
2. Resistance to Civil Government, 1849
a. “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey
them, or shall we endeavor to amend them,
and obey them until we have succeeded, or
shall we transgress them at once?
b. Non-violent protest
c. Mohandus Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.

25. Temperance Movement
• American Temperance Society- founded
by Protestant ministers, targeted excessive
drinking. Alcohol led to violence, crime
and had led to a lack of productivity.
• Encouraged abstinence
• States began to ban the sale of alcohol,
others taxed liquor.

26. Education
• Free Public Schools
• Fear of an uneducated poor class, educate
the workforce. Could the family be relied
on as the providers of republican virtue?
• Horace Mann- MA Board of Education

27. Women’s Rights Movement
• Cult of Domesticity
– Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucretia Mott,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Suzan B. Anthony,
Catherine Beecher, Margaret Fuller
• Woman’s Rights Convention, Declaration
of Sentiments and Resolutions
– Equal rights
– Suffrage

28. Abolition Movement
• Movement to abolish slavery is getting
stronger.
• Moral, Social, Political, & Economic Issue
• Pro-slavery arguments
• Anti-slavery arguments
• Abolition Organizations

29. Proslavery Arguments
• Founding Fathers, slavery = necessary evil
• “I hold that in the present state of
civilization, where two races of different
origin, and distinguished by color and
other physical differences, as well as
intellectual, are brought together, the
relation now existing in the slaveholding
states between the two is, instead of an
evil, a good- a positive good.”
• John C. Calhoun, 1837

30. Proslavery Arguments
• “Many in the South once believed that
[slavery] was a moral and political evil….
That folly and delusion are gone; we see it
now in its true light, and regard it as the
most safe and stable basis for free
institutions in the world.”
John C. Calhoun, 1837

31. Proslavery Arguments
Racism
•Blacks were inferior to whites and were unsuited
for life in any other condition
Theological/Bible
•Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he
be unto his brethren
•OT and NT prophets and apostles never
condemned the practice
•Servants should obey their masters

32. Proslavery Arguments
Historical
•All the great civilizations of antiquity
practiced slavery.
•Aristotle- in every organized society men
of superior talents would become masters
over those of inferior talents.

33. Proslavery Arguments
Social
•Without slavery planters would be unable
to take in the arts and sciences and other
civilized pursuits.
•Guaranteed economic equality for whites,
preventing an unskilled labor class- better
than the free labor system

34. Proslavery Arguments
• Paternalism- Slaveholding gentlemen took personal
responsibility for the physical and moral well-being of
their dependents- women, children and slaves. Foner,
Give Me Liberty, p 394
• No element of disharmony. “It is the only condition of
society in which labor and capital are associated on a
large scale in which their interests are combined and
not in conflict. Every plantation is an organized
community… where all work, where each member
gets subsistence and a home.”
• Phrenology

35. Antislavery Arguments
• Slavery = Sin
• The Reform Movement liberating and
perfectionist
• “Slavery was the greatest social evil in the
way of the nation’s moral regeneration.”
(Blum, National Experience, p.273)

36. Abolitionist Groups
American Colonization Society, 1817
•Monrovia, Liberia
American Antislavery Society, 1831
•William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator
Liberty Party
•James Birney
African-Americans
•Fredrick Douglas, The North Star
•Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Still,
Underground Railroad