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