In what ways were Mormons similar to, and different from, other communal movements of the era?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you lot will exist able to:

• Identify similarities and differences among utopian groups of the antebellum era
• Explicate how religious utopian communities differed from nonreligious ones

Prior to 1815, in the years before the market and Industrial Revolution, most Americans lived on farms where they produced much of the foods and goods they used. This largely pre-capitalist culture centered on large family units whose members all lived in the aforementioned towns, counties, and parishes.

Economical forces unleashed subsequently 1815, however, forever altered that earth. More and more people now bought their nutrient and appurtenances in the thriving market economic system, a shift that opened the door to a new style of life. These economic transformations generated diverse reactions; some people were nostalgic for what they viewed every bit simpler, before times, whereas others were willing to attempt new means of living and working. In the early on nineteenth century, experimental communities sprang upward, created past men and women who hoped not only to create a better fashion of life but to recast American civilization, so that greater equality and harmony would prevail. Indeed, some of these reformers envisioned the creation of alternative means of living, where people could accomplish perfection in human relations. The verbal number of these societies is unknown because many of them were so short-lived, only the movement reached its noon in the 1840s.

RELIGIOUS UTOPIAN SOCIETIES

Virtually of those attracted to utopian communities had been profoundly influenced by evangelical Protestantism, especially the Second Corking Awakening. Still, their experience of revivalism had left them wanting to further reform society. The communities they formed and joined adhered to various socialist ideas and were considered radical, because members wanted to create a new social lodge, not reform the old.

German Protestant migrants formed several pietistic societies: communities that stressed transformative private religious experience or piety over religious rituals and formality. One of the earliest of these, the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania, was founded past a charismatic leader named Conrad Beissel in the 1730s. Past the antebellum era, it was the oldest communal experiment in the United states of america. Its members devoted themselves to spiritual contemplation and a disciplined work regime while they awaited the millennium. They wore homespun rather than buying cloth or premade clothing, and encouraged celibacy. Although the Ephrata Cloister remained pocket-size, it served as an early example of the type of community that antebellum reformers hoped to create.

In 1805, a 2nd German religious social club, led by George Rapp, took root in Pennsylvania with several hundred members called Rappites who encouraged celibacy and adhered to the socialist principle of belongings all appurtenances in mutual (as opposed to allowing individual ownership). They non just congenital the town of Harmony but besides produced surplus goods to sell to the outside world. In 1815, the group sold its Pennsylvanian holdings and moved to Indiana, establishing New Harmony on a twenty-thousand-acre plot along the Wabash River. In 1825, members returned to Pennsylvania, and established themselves in the town chosen Economy.

The Shakers provide another instance of a community established with a religious mission. The Shakers started in England as an outgrowth of the Quaker religion in the centre of the eighteenth century. Ann Lee, a leader of the group in England, emigrated to New York in the 1770s, having experienced a profound religious awakening that convinced her that she was "female parent in Christ." She taught that God was both male and female person; Jesus embodied the male side, while Female parent Ann (as she came to exist known by her followers) represented the female side. To Shakers in both England and the United States, Female parent Ann represented the completion of divine revelation and the beginning of the millennium of heaven on earth.

In this prototype of a Shaker dance from 1840, note the raised arms, indicating emotional expression.

In practice, men and women in Shaker communities were held every bit equals—a radical deviation at the time—and women often outnumbered men. Equality extended to the possession of textile goods too; no ane could hold private property. Shaker communities aimed for cocky-sufficiency, raising food and making all that was necessary, including article of furniture that emphasized fantabulous workmanship equally a substitute for worldly pleasure.

The defining features of the Shakers were their spiritual mysticism and their prohibition of sexual intercourse, which they held as an instance of a lesser spiritual life and a source of conflict betwixt women and men. Rapturous Shaker dances, for which the group gained notoriety, allowed for emotional release. The high point of the Shaker movement came in the 1830s, when about six k members populated communities in New England, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.

Larn more almost the musical heritage of the Shakers, including the well-known song "Simple Gifts," which has become office of American culture.

The Oneida Community was a utopian experiment located in Oneida, New York, from 1848 to 1881.

Some other religious utopian experiment, the Oneida Community, began with the teachings of John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermonter who had graduated from Dartmouth, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale. The Second Smashing Awakening exerted a powerful issue on him, and he came to believe in perfectionism, the idea that information technology is possible to be perfect and free of sin. Noyes claimed to have accomplished this state of perfection in 1834.

Noyes applied his idea of perfection to relationships betwixt men and women, earning notoriety for his unorthodox views on marriage and sexuality. Beginning in his dwelling house boondocks of Putney, Vermont, he began to advocate what he called "complex spousal relationship:" a form of communal wedlock in which women and men who had accomplished perfection could appoint in sexual intercourse without sin. Noyes also promoted "male continence," whereby men would non ejaculate, thereby freeing women from pregnancy and the difficulty of determining paternity when they had many partners. Intercourse became fused with spiritual power amidst Noyes and his followers.

The concept of circuitous wedlock scandalized the townspeople in Putney, so Noyes and his followers removed to Oneida, New York. Individuals who wanted to join the Oneida Community underwent a tough screening process to weed out those who had not reached a state of perfection, which Noyes believed promoted self-control, non out-of-control behavior. The goal was a balance betwixt individuals in a community of love and respect. The perfectionist community Noyes envisioned ultimately dissolved in 1881, although the Oneida Community itself continues to this 24-hour interval.

The most successful religious utopian community to arise in the antebellum years was begun by Joseph Smith. Smith came from a big Vermont family that had not prospered in the new market economic system and moved to the town of Palmyra, in the "burned over district" of western New York. In 1823, Smith claimed to have to been visited past the angel Moroni, who told him the location of a trove of gilded plates or tablets. During the late 1820s, Smith translated the writing on the gilt plates, and in 1830, he published his finding as The Volume of Mormon. That same twelvemonth, he organized the Church of Christ, the progenitor of the Church building of Latter-day Saints popularly known as Mormons. He presented himself as a prophet and aimed to recapture what he viewed equally the purity of the archaic Christian church, purity that had been lost over the centuries. To Smith, this meant restoring male leadership.

Smith emphasized the importance of families beingness ruled by fathers. His vision of a reinvigorated patriarchy resonated with men and women who had not thrived during the market revolution, and his claims attracted those who hoped for a better futurity. Smith's new church placed bully stress on work and field of study. He aimed to create a New Jerusalem where the church exercised oversight of its members.

Smith'south claims of translating the golden plates antagonized his neighbors in New York. Difficulties with anti-Mormons led him and his followers to move to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. Past 1838, as the Usa experienced connected economic turbulence following the Panic of 1837, Smith and his followers were facing financial collapse after a series of efforts in cyberbanking and money-making ended in disaster. They moved to Missouri, but trouble shortly developed in that location as well, as citizens reacted against the Mormons' beliefs. Bodily fighting broke out in 1838, and the ten thousand or and then Mormons removed to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they founded a new center of Mormonism.

By the 1840s, Nauvoo boasted a population of thirty thousand, making it the largest utopian community in the The states. Thanks to some important conversions to Mormonism among powerful citizens in Illinois, the Mormons had virtual autonomy in Nauvoo, which they used to create the largest armed force in the country. Smith also received farther revelations there, including one that immune male church leaders to practice polygamy. He besides declared that all of North and S America would be the new Zion and announced that he would run for president in the 1844 ballot.

Smith and the Mormons' convictions and practices generated a great bargain of opposition from neighbors in surrounding towns. Smith was arrested for treason (for destroying the press press of a newspaper that criticized Mormonism), and while he was in prison, an anti-Mormon mob stormed into his cell and killed him. Brigham Young then assumed leadership of the grouping, which he led to a permanent home in what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.

Carl Christian Anton Christensen depicts The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, circa 1886 (a). On the footing of these plates, Joseph Smith (b) founded the Church of Latter-day Saints. Following Smith's decease at the hands of a mob in Illinois, Brigham Immature took command of the church building and led them west to the Table salt Lake Valley, which at that time was still function of United mexican states.

SECULAR UTOPIAN SOCIETIES

Not all utopian communities were prompted past the religious fervor of the Second Great Enkindling; some were outgrowths of the intellectual ideas of the fourth dimension, such as romanticism with its accent on the importance of individualism over conformity. 1 of these, Brook Farm, took shape in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. It was founded by George Ripley, a transcendentalist from Massachusetts. In the summer of 1841, this utopian community gained support from Boston-expanse thinkers and writers, an intellectual group that included many important transcendentalists. Brook Farm is best characterized equally a customs of intensely individualistic personalities who combined manual labor, such as the growing and harvesting nutrient, with intellectual pursuits. They opened a school that specialized in the liberal arts rather than rote memorization and published a weekly periodical called The Harbinger, which was "Devoted to Social and Political Progress." Members of Brook Subcontract never totaled more than one hundred, but it won renown largely considering of the luminaries, such as Emerson and Thoreau, whose names were attached to it. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Massachusetts writer who took issue with some of the transcendentalists' claims, was a founding fellow member of Brook Subcontract, and he fictionalized some of his experiences in his novel The Blithedale Romance. In 1846, a burn destroyed the main building of Brook Farm, and already hampered by financial problems, the Brook Farm experiment came to an terminate in 1847.

Beck Farm printed The Straw (a) to share its ethics more widely. George Ripley (b), who founded the farm, was burdened with a huge debt several years later when the community collapsed.

Robert Owen, a British industrialist, helped inspire those who dreamed of a more equitable world in the face of the changes brought most by industrialization. Owen had risen to prominence before he turned 30 by running cotton fiber mills in New Lanark, Scotland; these were considered the most successful cotton mills in Great Uk. Owen was very uneasy nearly the conditions of workers, and he devoted both his life and his fortune to trying to create cooperative societies where workers would lead meaningful, fulfilled lives. Unlike the founders of many utopian communities, he did non gain inspiration from religion; his vision derived instead from his faith in human being reason to brand the world amend.

This 1838 engraving of New Harmony shows the ideal commonage customs that Robert Owen hoped to build.

When the Rappite customs in Harmony, Indiana, decided to sell its holdings and relocate to Pennsylvania, Owen seized the opportunity to put his ideas into action. In 1825, he bought the twenty-g-acre bundle in Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. Later on only a few years, nonetheless, a series of bad decisions past Owen and infighting over issues like the elimination of individual belongings led to the dissolution of the community. Simply Owen's ideas of cooperation and back up inspired other "Owenite" communities in the United states, Canada, and Great United kingdom.

A French philosopher who advocated the creation of a new type of utopian community, Charles Fourier likewise inspired American readers, notably Arthur Brisbane, who popularized Fourier'southward ideas in the United states of america. Fourier emphasized collective attempt past groups of people or "associations." Members of the association would exist housed in large buildings or "phalanxes," a type of communal living arrangement. Converts to Fourier's ideas about a new science of living published and lectured vigorously. They believed labor was a type of capital, and the more unpleasant the job, the college the wages should be. Fourierists in the U.s.a. created some twenty-eight communities between 1841 and 1858, simply by the late 1850s, the movement had run its course in the The states.

Section Summary

Reformers who engaged in communal experiments aimed to recast economical and social relationships by introducing innovations designed to create a more stable and equitable gild. Their ideas found many expressions, from early socialist experiments (such as by the Fourierists and the Owenites) to the dreams of the New England intellectual elite (such every bit Brook Farm). The Second Great Awakening also prompted many religious utopias, like those of the Rappites and Shakers. By whatsoever measure, the Mormons emerged as the most successful of these.

https://www.openassessments.org/assessments/987

Review Question

1. How were the reform communities of the antebellum era treated past the full general population?

Answer to Review Question

1. Many reform communities were shunned, peculiarly those that emphasized different forms of marriage (similar the Oneida Customs) or a difference from mainstream Protestantism. The Mormons, in particular, were forced to motion e'er further westward in their endeavour to find a place to practise their organized religion in peace.

Glossary

Mormonsan American denomination, also known as the Latter-day Saints, that emphasized patriarchal leadership

pietisticthe stressing of stressed transformative private religious experience or piety over religious rituals and formality

Shakersa religious sect that emphasized communal living and celibacy

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