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