Politics and Social Reform in Britain and Ireland

Abstract

This chapter explains the rise and significance of various social reform movements in the United States from the early republic through the Civil War. It shows how the American political experiment, with its disestablished religion, gave life to a great experiment in Protestant Dissenting theology. Rather than a marginal, outsider movement—as in much of the rest of the Christian world—Protestant Dissent became the establishment in America. Antebellum America was defined by a relatively weak, decentralized state apparatus. It thus allowed space for many low-church, voluntary Protestants to organize in an effort to address a variety of social questions—chief among them the antislavery crusade, temperance, women’s rights, Sabbatarianism, urban relief, and public institutional reform. The ‘Benevolent Empire’ that championed these causes was by no means unified in politics and theology, but its efforts generally flowed from a belief that moral suasion might help build a more robustly ‘Christian’ America. In the end, moral suasion proved limited. Instead, social reformers became increasingly reliant on direct political strategies to achieve their ends. The greatest social reform accomplishment of the nineteenth century was the abolition of slavery, but it required a two-million-man army and expanded state power to reach that goal. Social reform movements would remain after the American Civil War, with much continuity over time. But the abolition of slavery through war and constitutional amendment provided a model going forward: social reform in America would be achieved not through moral suasion, but through political action.