Resources for Teachers

The story of the Northampton Association that your students are developing on their walking tour intersects with a number of key topics in U.S. history. It is useful to list those topics and describe how they connect with our curriculum. We also suggest outside resources that help introduce students to these areas of study. Themes and questions will emerge out of the study of our small slice of history that will be revisited in class time and again.

SLAVERY

The Northampton Association was founded by a group of people who were dedicated to abolishing slavery in the United States. The history your students are presenting therefore makes no sense without some background knowledge of the institution of slavery. Unlike the other areas of study discussed in this section, this subject cannot be taught alongside the curriculum – it must be introduced beforehand.

An excellent online resource for teachers is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Hard History/American Slavery”. This work is largely based on Understanding and Teaching American Slavery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).

We agree with the SPLC that teaching slavery in the classroom cuts across every facet of American history. It is hard and indispensable history that cannot be presented as a side-bar lesson or as a stand-alone unit confined to one time-period. We subscribe to the Ten Key Concepts (page 16) and the Seven Key Problems (page 10) behind teaching slavery in the classroom outlined in “Teaching Hard History”. We also encourage teachers to reference exciting new scholarship that introduces African-American perspectives from history. Introducing institutionalized tyranny and cruel exploitation into the heart of our national narrative is a complicating factor to say the least. The alternative is to minimize what happened and allow the forces unleashed by history into our lives unexplained and unaccounted for.

THE ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT

“To be an abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted”.
Herbert Aptheker (1941)

Our curriculum offers direct entry into studying the abolitionist movement and social reform movements in the antebellum period more generally. The Northampton Association was bound together by its shared commitment to the anti-slavery cause. Several of the figures profiled in the Source Packets were key players in the movement.

Students learn about the movement while creating and sharing their profiles in the curriculum, but some background knowledge of abolition in the 1830s-40s is useful. A very good resource is the PBS series “Africans in America”, particularly “Part Four: Judgment Day”. The series has a website with an excellent “Resource Bank”. The original sources and historians cited here are first rate. The introduction to “Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War” provides a conceptual framework for teaching this topic. Henry Mayer’s All On Fire (New York: St. Martin’s Griffen, 1998) gives a highly readable overview of the abolitionist movement.

We like to emphasize several key points when we approach this subject with students. The abolitionist movement persevered over decades and there was no end in sight to slavery right up to the eve of the Civil War. Abolitionists were widely reviled, ridiculed and marginalized in their day. American slavery was firmly entrenched economically, politically and socially and those few who dared challenge the status quo were met with indifference at best and hostility and violence at worst. They continued to appeal to their fellow citizens’ “better angels” time and again against all odds.

This was the first inter-racial social movement in American history. Free Blacks played a critical role in the push to end slavery and also organized to protect their own communities from harm. Famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison stood squarely on the shoulders of David Walker and African-Americans were his core supporters. Our curriculum introduces students to important Black activists including Frederick Douglass, who had close connections to Florence.

This was also a foundational social movement in American history. It drew on energy and ideas from other reform movements of the time (widely represented at the Association) and then created a template for all major social and political movements to follow. Anti-war, liberation and civil rights causes from then until now have all drawn inspiration and insight from the organized struggle to end slavery.

UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES

“Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1840)

Our curriculum also offers direct entry into the proliferation of utopian experiments in the antebellum period. Most of the figures your students are profiling were members of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry founded in 1842. They were both abolitionists and “communitarians”: reformers who identified social ills and then looked for solutions by forming model societies in miniature. They were early proponents of what became a national movement in the 1840s-50s.

The Introductions to two new books provide an overview of the subject. Eric Reece wrote in Utopia Drive (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016) that the “air of inevitability” that hangs over the nation today propelled him on a historical odyssey to explore what else is possible. Chris Jennings puts the utopian movement into historical context in Paradise Now (New York: Random House, 2016). To understand what lay behind the formation of the Association in Northampton, read the first chapter in Christopher Clark’s The Communitarian Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

The communitarians of the 1840s were drawn to form into groups by a shared vision that a better world was possible. They were both profoundly alienated from existing social arrangements and truly hopeful that they could help create a better future for everyone. They imagined a better way to organize ourselves into society and then created a living laboratory in microcosm. As Clark put it: they “stepped outside society in an effort to change it”. They withdrew not to escape from society but to create a “heaven on earth” that would replicate itself. The times called for bold action and they were all in – it no longer sufficed to work at incremental improvements from inside mainstream society.

The Northampton experiment stood out in the broad sweep of this movement in several important ways: It was pragmatic, not dogmatic; it had no charismatic leader; and it was non-sectarian. It practiced “radical equality”, or one person/one vote regardless of race, gender, religion or class. It was racially integrated, an extreme rarity at the time even among utopian communities. It was overtly political in its abolitionist stance. Finally, it confronted social shortcomings associated with industrialization by operating its own industrial enterprise and organizing it along democratic principles. These were not “back to the land” communitarians – they embraced technology and sought to use it to create a better way of life.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

“And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark satanic mills?”
William Blake (1804)

The founders of the Northampton Association were on the leading edge of an industrial transformation that swept the nation in the 1840s. They bought a new “manufactory” outfitted with state-of-the-art machinery and planned to support the Community this way. They drafted their own constitution that decried the ill effects of industrialization and proposed an alternative model for how to organize production. (See “Suggested Introductory Lesson”) Their example serves as an effective foil in studying the onset of the market economy and the industrial process.

The founders linked their objections to slavery to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. They saw growing inequality both under the plantation system in the South and in the factory system in the North. The term “millionaire” first appeared in print in 1840. They did not approve of the rampant speculation that resulted in the Panic of 1837, the nation’s first economic “bust”. They observed degrading effects both on factory owners, who had too much, and on wage laborers, who had narrowing prospects for “self-improvement” in every sense of the term. What the founders proposed in microcosm was a “moral economy” in place of an unregulated “market economy”. They wished to create an island of cooperation in a sea of ruthless competition. The same moral imperative that compelled them to work to abolish slavery, also compelled them to form an industrial model in which workers enjoyed “freedom from care, anxiety, dependence, and oppression”.

The Association created what we today would call a “worker owned and operated cooperative”. Workers and investors entered into a power-sharing agreement that protected “personal autonomy” in the workplace and eventually abolished paying wages in favor of a profit-sharing arrangement. (See “The Coup”) This was done in the spirit of experimentation: they literally made things up as they went along. It’s worth noting these were highly capable, principled and hard-working men and women whose efforts are not to be taken lightly. Studying this experiment at the dawn of the industrial era presents an opportunity to introduce issues and themes that are re-visited after the Civil War.

THE WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT

“They have changed the household utensil to a living, energetic being; and they have no spell to turn it into a broom again.”
Lydia Maria Child (1840)

Half of the people your students are profiling on their walking tour are women who were on the cutting edge of reimagining gender roles in the 1840s. Two of them were national figures in the new arena of women’s rights: Lydia Maria Child and Sojourner Truth. Our curriculum presents an opportunity to introduce students to the struggle for women’s rights in America where it started.

The early movement for women’s rights grew directly out of the movement to abolish slavery. Northern women were drawn into various moral reform societies that included anti-slavery work in the 1830s. They soon took on leadership roles as organizers, fundraisers and spokespersons for the cause. Their increased visibility in these roles met with fierce opposition and “the woman question” was added to the agenda of social reforms. (See “The Schism”)

A new version of womanhood emerged at the Northampton Association. Women had rights they were steadfastly denied everywhere else: they voted and presented arguments at official meetings; they got equal pay including for domestic work; they got equal access to education; and they spoke at public anti-slavery meetings held outside the Community. Sojourner Truth began her remarkable political career this way.