The democratic upheaval in politics exemplified by Jackson's
election was merely one phase of the long American quest for greater
rights and opportunities for all citizens. Another was the beginning
of labor organization. In 1835 labor forces in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
succeeded in reducing the old "dark-to-dark" workday to a 10-hour day.
New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Ohio and the new state of California, admitted
to the Union in 1850, undertook similar reforms.
The spread of suffrage had already led to a new concept
of education, for clear-sighted statesmen everywhere perceived the threat
to universal suffrage from an untutored, illiterate electorate. These
men -- DeWitt Clinton in New York, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois and Horace
Mann in Massachusetts -- were now supported by organized labor, whose
leaders demanded free, tax-supported schools open to all children. Gradually,
in one state after
another, legislation was enacted to provide for such
free instruction. The public school system became common throughout
the northern part of the country. In other parts of the country, however,
the battle for public education continued for years.
Another influential social movement that emerged during
this period was the opposition to the sale and use of alcohol, or the
temperance movement. It stemmed from a variety of concerns and motives:
religious beliefs, the effect of alcohol on the work force, and the
violence and suffering women and children experienced at the hands of
heavy drinkers. In 1826 Boston ministers organized the Society for the
Promotion of Temperance. Seven years later, in Philadelphia, the Society
convened a national convention, which formed the American Temperance
Union. The Union called for the renunciation of all alcoholic beverages,
and pressed state legislatures to ban their production and sale. Thirteen
states had done so by 1855, although the laws were subsequently challenged
in court. They survived only in northern New England, but between 1830
and 1860 the temperance movement reduced Americans' per capita consumption
of alcohol.
Other reformers addressed the problems of prisons and
care for the insane. Efforts were made to turn prisons, which stressed
punishment, into penitentiaries, where the guilty would undergo rehabilitation.
In Massachusetts, Dorothea Dix led a struggle to improve conditions
for insane persons, who were kept confined in wretched almshouses and
prisons. After winning improvements in Massachusetts, she took her campaign
to the South, where nine states established hospitals for the insane
between 1845 and 1852.