Chapter 12: The changing, industrializing America of the 1830s inspired a Second Great Awakening and religious and secular social-reform movements ranging from temperance and women's rights to utopianism, Transcendentalism, and abolitionism. Though widely disparate in beliefs and tactics, what all of the movements shared was a faith in the individual as the source of salvation and a desire to perfect that individual and society. Similar focus on the importance of the individual may be seen in the campaigns of Andrew Jackson, who cloaked himself in the rhetoric of the "common man." While president, Jackson, a states' rightist, faced the Nullification Crisis, backed Indian removal to west of the Mississippi in defiance of Supreme Court rulings, and revoked the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, a move that helped bring on the panic of 1837 and a seven-year depression.
