Pre-Civil War Reformers
1820 - 1860
Charles Grandison Finney
Famous Preacher
Figure in the Second Great Awakening & Revival Movement
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
Mormon leaders
Led followers west to escape persecution
Settled near Great Salt Lake Utah
Dorothea Dix
Prison reformer
Promoted hospitals for mentally ill (rather than using prisons)
Horace Mann
Educational reformer
promoted public schools and teacher training programs
Reverend Lyman Beecher
Leader in the Temperance Movement
Little or no use of alcohol
Emily Dickinson
Poetry reflects loneliness
Not publicly recognized during her lifetime
William Lloyd Garrison
White abolitionist leader
Published “The Liberator”
Frederick Douglass
Black abolitionist leader
Published “The North Star”
Sojourner Truth
Former slave
Abolitionist and Women’s Rights activist
Nat Turner
Led unsuccessful slave revolt in 1831
Strengthened Southern support to defend slavery
Harriet Tubman
Former slave
Famous conductor in Underground Railroad
Abolitionist public speaker
Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Book’s impact was one of the causes of the Civil War
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Leader at Seneca Falls Convention in 1848
Co-wrote “The Declaration of Sentiments”
Lucretia Mott
Leader at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848
Co-wrote “The Declaration of Sentiments”
Elizabeth Blackwell–1st female doctor in
United States–Opened her own
clinic
Margaret Fuller–Advocated that
women could have opinions outside the Cult of Domesticity
–Advocated for birth control
Samuel F.B. Morse
Inventor of telegraph and Morse Code
Improved communication and commerce
Elias Howe and I.M. Singer
Invented sewing machine with foot treadle
Reduced time needed to make shoes and clothes
John Deere
Invented steel plow
Reduced time needed to plant
Opened up more land for farming
Cyrus McCormick
Invented mechanical reaper
Reduced time required for harvest
Made larger farms possible
Robert Fulton
Advanced the design of the steamboat
Led to improvements in transportation and commerce
Charles Goodyear
Invented vulcanized rubber
Does not freeze or melt at extreme temperatures
James Fenimore Cooper
First major American novelist
Wrote about frontier life/adventures
The Last of the Mohicans
Washington Irving
Father of the American short story
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Edger Allen Poe
Father of American Mystery writers
Known for horror stories
“The Tell Tale Heart”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
American author
Wrote “The Scarlett Letter”
Herman Melville
American author famous for novels of the sea
Wrote Moby Dick
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
American poet
Known for Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
Wrote “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”
Ralph Waldo Emerson–Chief spokesperson
for Transcendentalism (reaction against the scientific rationalism)
– wrote Walden Pond
Peter Cooper–1st American Steam
locomotive (1830)
Henry David Thoreau–Protested the
Mexican War by refusing to pay his taxes
–Wrote Duty of Civil Disobedience
"That government is best which governs least"
Walt Whitman
Father of “free verse” in poetry
Wrote openly about death, sexuality, and equality of races
Famous work: Leaves of Grass
John James Audubon
-published Birds of America, an art book showing North American birds
Promoted the preservation of nature
Photo of White Gyrfalcons
George Catlin
Documented tribal life of Native Americans
White Cloud, Chief of the Iowas