Pre-Civil War Reformers
1820 - 1860
Charles Grandison Finney
Famous PreacherFigure in the Second Great Awakening & Revival Movement
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
Mormon leadersLed followers west to escape persecutionSettled near Great Salt Lake Utah
Dorothea Dix
Prison reformerPromoted hospitals for mentally ill (rather than using prisons)
Horace Mann
Educational reformerpromoted public schools and teacher training programs
Reverend Lyman Beecher
Leader in the Temperance MovementLittle or no use of alcohol
Emily Dickinson
Poetry reflects lonelinessNot publicly recognized during her lifetime
William Lloyd Garrison
White abolitionist leaderPublished “The Liberator”
Frederick Douglass
Black abolitionist leaderPublished “The North Star”
Sojourner Truth
Former slaveAbolitionist and Women’s Rights activist
Nat Turner
Led unsuccessful slave revolt in 1831Strengthened Southern support to defend slavery
Harriet Tubman
Former slaveFamous conductor in Underground RailroadAbolitionist public speaker
Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote Uncle Tom’s CabinBook’s impact was one of the causes of the Civil War
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Leader at Seneca Falls Convention in 1848Co-wrote “The Declaration of Sentiments”
Lucretia Mott
Leader at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848Co-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 CodeImproved communication and commerce
Elias Howe and I.M. Singer
Invented sewing machine with foot treadleReduced time needed to make shoes and clothes
John Deere
Invented steel plowReduced time needed to plantOpened up more land for farming
Cyrus McCormick
Invented mechanical reaperReduced time required for harvestMade larger farms possible
Robert Fulton
Advanced the design of the steamboatLed to improvements in transportation and commerce
Charles Goodyear
Invented vulcanized rubberDoes not freeze or melt at extreme temperatures
James Fenimore Cooper
First major American novelistWrote about frontier life/adventuresThe Last of the Mohicans
Washington Irving
Father of the American short story“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Edger Allen Poe
Father of American Mystery writersKnown for horror stories“The Tell Tale Heart”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
American authorWrote “The Scarlett Letter”
Herman Melville
American author famous for novels of the seaWrote Moby Dick
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
American poetKnown for Mother Goose Nursery RhymesWrote “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 poetryWrote openly about death, sexuality, and equality of racesFamous work: Leaves of Grass
John James Audubon
-published Birds of America, an art book showing North American birdsPromoted the preservation of nature
Photo of White Gyrfalcons
George Catlin
Documented tribal life of Native Americans
White Cloud, Chief of the Iowas
Top Related