The Reform Era in Six Artifacts

Exhibit Labels: Changing America, 1830–1860

1Welcome. Between about 1830 and 1860, thousands of ordinary Americans joined groups that tried to change their society. Some were moved by religious revivals; others pointed to the Declaration of Independence's promise that all are created equal. Reform was not welcome everywhere. Many Americans, in the North as well as the South, saw abolitionists as dangerous troublemakers.

2Artifact A: School bell and McGuffey Reader. This bell hung in a one-room schoolhouse nearby. Beside it is a McGuffey Reader, a schoolbook first printed in Cincinnati in 1836 and later read by millions of children. In 1853 Ohio passed a law using a state tax to support free public schools. Supporters argued that a nation where citizens vote needed citizens who could read. Some taxpayers objected to paying for other families' children.

3Artifact B: Oberlin College register. Most American colleges admitted only white men. Oberlin College, founded in 1833, voted in 1835 to admit students "irrespective of color." In 1837 four women entered its full college course alongside men, and in 1841 three of them graduated, among the first American women to earn bachelor's degrees.

4Artifact C: Antislavery petition, 1837. Women could not vote, but they could sign petitions. In the 1830s antislavery societies sent thousands of petitions asking Congress to end slavery in Washington, D.C., and many signers were women. In 1836 the House of Representatives adopted a "gag rule": petitions about slavery were set aside with no debate. Former President John Quincy Adams, then a congressman, fought the rule until it ended in 1844.

5Artifact D: Photograph card of Sojourner Truth, 1864. Born into slavery in New York around 1797, Truth walked to freedom with her baby daughter in 1826 and became a traveling speaker for abolition and women's rights. She sold cards like this one to pay for her work. Historians are careful with her most famous speech, given at a women's rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. Marius Robinson, an editor who was in the audience, printed his version a few weeks later. In 1863 Frances Gage, who had led the meeting, published a more dramatic version in which Truth asks "Ain't I a woman?" again and again. That line does not appear in Robinson's version, and Gage wrote Truth's words in a Southern accent, though Truth grew up in New York speaking Dutch.

6Artifact E: Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati for many years, across the Ohio River from slave state Kentucky. Angered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to help return people who had escaped slavery, she wrote a novel about enslaved families torn apart. It sold about 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year. Many Northern readers said it opened their eyes; many white Southern readers called it false and unfair.

7Artifact F: Court record, 1859. In 1858 slave catchers seized John Price, a young man who had escaped slavery in Kentucky and was living in Oberlin. They took him to nearby Wellington to wait for a train south. A crowd of Oberlin students, teachers and townspeople, Black and white, followed and freed him, and he was later taken to Canada. A federal grand jury charged 37 rescuers with breaking the Fugitive Slave Act. Two were convicted and served time in jail.