Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers

by Steven Mintz

The decades before the Civil War saw the first secular efforts in history to remake society through reform. Reformers launched unprecedented campaigns reform criminals and prostitutes, to educate the deaf and the blind, guarantee women's rights, and abolish slavery. Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons, and hospitals for the mentally ill are all legacies of this era. Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform―combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analysis of religion, politics, and society. Arguing that the reform impulse grew out of the era's peculiar mix of fear and hope, Steven Mintz shows that reform arose not only from fears of social disorder, family fragmentation, and widening class divisions, but also from a millennialist sense of possibility rooted in new religious and philosophical ideas. He then examines three distinct responses to pre-Civil War America's pressing social problems. Moral reform sought to create a Christian moral order using moral suasion. Social reform combatted poverty, crime, and ignorance through new institutions offering non-authoritarian forms of social control. Radical reform sought to regenerate American society by eliminating fundamental sources of inequality such as slavery and racial and sexual discrimination. In an epilogue, Mintz fits antebellum reform into the larger context of America's liberal tradition. Mintz concludes that America's pre-Civil War reformers were at once moral critics and cultural modernizers. As exponents of a distinctly modern set of values, reformers attacked outmoded customs, smoothed the transition from a preindustrial to an industrial order, and devised modern bureaucratic systems of criminal justice, public education, and social welfare. The first comprehensive account antebellum reform to appear in twenty years, Moralists and Modernizers is a rich and rewarding work of synthesis and interpretation which draws upon the most recent historical research. "This book charts a middle ground between those who regard reform as a form of class-based social control and those who stress reformers' benevolent intentions. It emphasizes the duality of antebellum reform, which blended impulses toward social and moral uplift with impulses to impose new codes of personal conduct, shape character, and construct new institutions of social control."―from Moralists and Modernizers

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Steven Mintz is an American historian at the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to a commitment to pedagogy, interests on which he has published widely include the history of the American family and children, film and history, immigration and ethnic history.

A cultural historian trained in the methods of the new social history, he is the author and editor of 14 history books, focusing on such topics as families and children, antebellum reform, slavery and antislavery, ethnicity, and film.

Reviews

[David Withun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Chandler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this text for a class I took in college and only was assigned to read a fraction of it. So, when I looked at my bookshelf to see what I was going to read next, I decided to give this one a try. Mintz attempts to take a look at the religious, societal and moral reform that took place in the antebellum era of the United States. He attempts to take a balanced look at what was a somewhat fractured idea. Using religion to alleviate society's ills, and using different capitalist or societal run institutions to help the poor and destitute may seem like an oxymoron or a useless venture to those people of today, but this came from a time where if you saw a problem, you tried your best to fix it your self as opposed to lobbying it on the Senate floor (although there was plenty of that too). The result of these ideas and efforts can be seen in everything today from public education to the proper treatment of poverty stricken families.

Still, this book does have it’s flaws. One of these is the organization and focus of the book. He barely mentions or goes into any detail on the possible reasons for all of these social ills in the first place. Why was there a sudden influx of immigration into the US? What caused the widespread poverty in many metropolitan areas? What effect did the Market Revolution have on the working class family? What was education like before the creation of some kind of public education system? These questions are not answered satisfactorily, if they are answered at all.

Another problem is the style of writing, namely, that it only takes a surface look at the problem, and gives a surface look at the solution. It may give a few dates and numbers, for context's sake, but this leads to a brief summarization of the many problems that plagued America during this time period. There are very few quotes from those people involved in the movement, indeed, very few people are looked at in any depth at all. For a book of this size, I can think of several others that do what this book does in even greater depth. If you want a book on the temperance movement that also looks at the influence on women’s right to vote, read Last Call: Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. If you want to look at the history of public education and teaching in America, then I’d look at The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein. Both of these books go into detail what Mintz covers only in a few pages, at best. I am sure that there are many more that can do what Mintz only barley attempts to do with regards to poverty, the Market revolution, and the other questions asked above. A simple search on Goodreads or Amazon will show that there are plenty.

For me, what makes me rate it what I do is the style of summation, over explanation. I read a book to see an author’s opinion on what caused certain historical events, or to see what a person says about a controversial subject. Here however, little detail is given beyond dates and numbers. Therefore my number is two. Two out of five. If you want to read it, go ahead, but there are probably better books on a more specific topic worth your time.

[Greg Peterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The point is in the title. The author is setting up how the reformers in the mid 1800's in America were traditionalists and in trying to assert their morals they inadvertently were modernizers through the institutions they built.

Mintz tries to take an unbiased view in his book, acknowledging that many historians have either viewed these people as well-spirited people that helped the destitute of America or class supremacists who impressed their middle class culture on the rest of society. But he makes no effort to reconcile the two.

The problem was that after every section I would be asking questions that Mintz never answered. When he would talk about the influx of orphans or the disabled or other socially marginalized groups he would rarely ask why there were these people in the first place. He does mention that there were more poor due to the Panic of 1819 but the first time he even mentions capitalism and its effects on society is in the epilogue. I felt he should have gotten to that point a lot earlier.

[Jonas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fairly innocuous review of the historical dynamic workings of antebellum reform movements and their connection to ideas of modernity. If you need to write a paper on this topic, you could do worse than starting here.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mintz sets out to identify how people who pulled backwards ended up leading a charge forward; regardless of a narrow niche, he does this expertly

[Marsha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mintz disproves his own thesis.