Reform 1801-1848 Flashcards
Suffrage Movement
The early 1800 movement for women to get the right to vote.
2nd Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival movement during the early 19th century in the United States. The movement began around 1790, gained momentum by 1800 and, after 1820, membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement.
Mormons
Members of a Christian church that was founded by Joseph Smith in the U.S. in 1830. After Smith was murdered, Brigham Young moved the Church to Utah.
Temperance Movement
The Temperance Movement was the reform to ban alcohol. Beginning in the early 1800s the movement first tried to make people temperate in their drinking—that is to make them drink less. But by the 1820s the movement started to advocate for the total abstinence of all alcohol—that is to urge people to stop drinking completely. The movement was also influential in passing laws that prohibited the sale of liquor in several states.
Horace Mann
Famous educator who formed the first state board of education in the U.S., in Massachusetts in the 1830s. He was a champion of free public schools and campaigned to make going to school required. He also did a great deal to inform the public at large about the benefits of and the need for education. His Common-School Journal was read by thousands of people all over the country. He also served in Congress and was the first president of Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Dorothea Dix
United States social reformer who pioneered in the reform of prisons and in the treatment of the mentally ill; superintended women army nurses during the American Civil War (1802-1887)
Frederick Douglass
African-American who was a leader in the antislavery movement. He protested against segregation policies by sitting in whites-only trains. He founded the North Star, an antislavery newspaper, in Rochester, N.Y. in 1847. His home was a station on the Underground Railroad. He helped recruit African-American soldiers for the Union army and conferred with President Lincoln on slavery many times.
Nat Turner
African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 60 white deaths.
He led a group of other slave followers carrying farm implements on a killing spree. As they went from plantation to plantation they gathered horses, guns, freed other slaves along the way, and recruited other blacks that wanted to join their revolt. At the end of their rebellion they were accused of the deaths of fifty white people. Whites organized militias and called out regular troops to suppress the rising. In addition, mobs attacked blacks in the area killing an estimated total of 100-200, many not involved at all with the revolt.
Turner hid successfully for two months. When found, he was quickly tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators passed new laws to control slaves and free blacks. They prohibited education of slaves and free blacks, restricted rights of assembly for free blacks, withdrew their right to bear arms (in some states), voting, and required white ministers to be present at all black worship services.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was a prominent abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Born a slave in New York State, she had at least three of her children sold away from her. After escaping slavery, Truth embraced evangelical religion and became involved in moral reform and abolitionist work. She collected supplies for black regiments during the Civil War and immersed herself in advocating for freed people during the Reconstruction period. Truth was a powerful and impassioned speaker whose legacy of feminism and racial equality still resonates today. She is perhaps best known for her stirring “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, delivered at a women’s convention in Ohio in 1851.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Prominent 19th century suffragist and civil rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) became involved in the abolitionist movement after a progressive upbringing. She helped organize the world’s first women’s rights convention in 1848, and formed the National Women’s Loyal League with Susan B. Anthony in 1863. Seven years later, they established the National Woman Suffrage Association. With her advocacy of liberal divorce laws and reproductive self-determination, Cady Stanton became an increasingly marginalized voice among women reformers late in life. However, her efforts helped bring about the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave all citizens the right to vote.
Harriet Tubman
Born into slavery in Maryland, Harriet Tubman escaped to become a leading abolitionist, slave smuggler and conductor on the Underground Railroad, Union Army spy, and women’s rights and suffrage leader. After her own escape from slavery, she repeatedly snuck into slave states to lead slaves to freedom in northern states and eventually Canada after the Compromise of 1850 made it dangerous for escaped slaves to remain in the United States. A fervently religious woman who began suffering “visions” after a head injury as a child, she collaborated with the religiously inspired violent abolitionist John Brown, as well as with nonviolent abolitionists, including Quakers, who were prominent within the Underground Railroad. Following the Civil War, Tubman collaborated with Susan B. Anthony and other noted feminists.
Harriet Beecher-Stowe
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. She came from a famous religious family and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It depicts the harsh life for African Americans under slavery.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel “helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War”, according to Will Kaufman.
William Lloyd Garrison
journalist who was a pioneering abolitionist. His newspaper The Liberator was very influential in gathering support for his cause. In 1832, he formed the first society for the immediate abolition of slavery. He distrusted the U.S. government because it permitted slavery but eventually approved of Lincoln’s handling of the slavery question and of the Civil War.
John Brown
Violent abolitionist who wanted to free the slaves at all costs. He took matters in his own hands by leading a band of determined patriots on a mission to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. They wanted to distribute the weapons there to slaves and anyone else who wanted to rise up against slavery. On Oct. 16, 1859, they succeeded in taking over an enginehouse. But the U.S. Army, led by Col. Robert E. Lee, subdued the short-lived rebellion. Brown spoke in his own defense, and Henry David Thoreau issued a plea in Brown’s defense; but Brown was convicted and hanged for treason.
