Important People, 1820’s – 1850’s
Frederick Douglas
Born: 1818 in Maryland
Died: 1895 in Washington, DC
The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey" was born in February of 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He spent his early years with his grandparents and with an aunt, seeing his mother only four or five times before her death when he was seven. (All Douglass knew of his father was that he was white.) During this time he was exposed to the degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand brutal whippings and spending much time cold and hungry. When he was eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. There he learned to read and first heard the words abolition and abolitionists.
Douglass spent seven relatively comfortable years in Baltimore before being sent back to the country, where he was hired out to a farm run by a notoriously brutal "slave breaker" named Edward Covey. On January 1, 1836, Douglass made a resolution that he would be free by the end of the year. He planned an escape. But early in April he was jailed after his plan was discovered. Two years later, while living in Baltimore and working at a shipyard, Douglass would finally realize his dream: he fled the city on September 3, 1838. Traveling by train, then steamboat, then train, he arrived in New York City the following day. Several weeks later he had settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, living with his newlywed bride (whom he met in Baltimore and married in New York) under his new name, Frederick Douglass.
Always striving to educate himself, Douglass continued his reading. He joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church. He attended Abolitionists' meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal, the Liberator.
Despite apprehensions that the information might endanger his freedom, Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. The year was 1845. Three years later, after a speaking tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland, Douglass published the first issue of the North Star, a four-page weekly, out of Rochester, New York.
The Grimke’ Sisters
Born: Sarah 1792; Angelina 1805; in South Carolina
Died: Sarah 1873; Angelina 1879;
The Grimke sisters of South Carolina were two early female abolitionists and women's rights activists, traveling throughout the North, lecturing about their first-hand experiences with slavery on their family plantation. Receiving abuse and ridicule for their abolitionist activity, as later women active in a range of reform activities would find, they both realized that women would have to create a safe space in the public arena if they wanted to be effective abolitionists and reformers.
Sarah Grimke was an abolitionist from an early age: she saw a slave being whipped at age 5 and tried to board a steamer to live in a place where there is no slavery. Later in opposition to southern law, she taught her attendant to read. An early feminist, she wanted to become an attorney and follow in her father's footsteps. He was chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. She studied constantly until her parents found out that she intended to go to college with her brother - then they forbid her to study her brother's books or any language.
Her father, a strong advocate of slavery and of the subordination of women, was a wealthy planter with hundreds of slaves. He fathered at least 14 children. Sarah was the sixth child and Angelina was the youngest. When she was forbidden from studying, Sarah begged her parents to allow her to become Angelina's godmother and she became part mother and part sister to her much younger sibling.
At age 26, Sarah took her father to Philadelphia for medical care where she became acquainted with the Quaker movement. After he died, she returned to Charleston in 1818. Three years later she moved back to Philadelphia to be with her Quaker friends. Sarah visited Charleston for the final time in 1827 when she converted Angelina to the Quaker faith. Angelina joined her in 1829.
In 1829 Angelina wrote a letter to the editor of William Lloyd Garrison's paper which he published without her knowledge. Immediately they were both rebuked by the Quaker community and sought out by the abolitionist movement. The sisters had to choose: recant and become members in good -standing in the Quaker community again or reaffirm the letter and actively work to oppose slavery. They choose the latter course.
Horace Mann
Born: 1796 in Massachusetts
Died: 1859 in Ohio
The Father of American Education"," Horace Mann, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796. Mann's schooling consisted only of brief and erratic periods of eight to ten weeks a year. Mann educated himself by reading ponderous volumes from the Franklin Town Library. This self education, combined with the fruits of a brief period of study with an itinerant school master, was sufficient to gain him admission to the sophomore class of Brown University in 1816”.
Of the many causes dear to Mann's heart, none was closer than the education of the people. He held a keen interest in school policy. April 20, 1837, Mann left his law practice and accepted the post of the newly founded Secretary of Education". During his years as Secretary of Education Mann published twelve annual reports on aspects of his work and programs, and the integral relationship between education, freedom, and Republican government. He wanted a school that would be available and equal for all, part of the birth-right of every American child, to be for rich and poor alike. Mann had found "social harmony" to be his primary goal of the school.
Horace Mann felt that a common school would be the "great equalizer." Poverty would most assuredly disappear as a broadened popular intelligence tapped new treasures of natural and material wealth. He felt that through education crime would decline sharply as would a host of moral vices like violence and fraud. In sum, there was no end to the social good which might be derived from a common school.
"What is most important about Mann's view of the common school is that he saw in it an educational purpose truly common to all". As Secretary of the Board of Education, Mann presided over the establishment of the first public normal school in the United States at Lexington in 1839. Mann also reinvigorated the 1827 law establishing high schools, and fifty high schools were created during his tenure. He also persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to establish a six month minimum school year in 1839. Mann also led the movement to set up teacher institutions throughout the state.
Sequoyah (a.k.a George Gist)
Born: 1776 near Tuskegee, Tennessee
Died: 1843, near Tyler, Texas.
Near the town of Tanasee, and not far from the almost mythical town of Chote lies Taskigi(Tuskegee), home of Sequoyah. In this peaceful valley setting Wut-teh, the daughter of a Cherokee Chief married Nathaniel Gist, a Virginia fur trader. The warrior Sequoyah was born of this union in 1776.
Probably born handicapped, and thus the name Sequoyah (Sikwo-yi is Cherokee for "pig's foot"), Sequoyah fled Tennessee as a youth because of the encroachment of whites. He initially moved to Georgia, where he acquired skills working with silver. While in the state, a man who purchased one of his works suggested that he sign his work, like the white silversmiths had begun to do. Sequoyah considered the idea and since he did not know how to write he visited Charles Hicks, a wealthy farmer in the area who wrote English. Hicks showed Sequoyah how to spell his name, writing the letters on a piece of paper. Sequoyah began to toy with the idea of a Cherokee writing system that year(1809).
He moved to Willstown, Alabama, and enlisted in the Cherokee Regiment, fighting in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which effectively ended the war against the Creek Redsticks. During the war, he became convinced of the necessity of literacy for his people. He and other Cherokees were unable to write letters home, read military orders, or record events as they occurred.
After the war, he began in earnest to create a writing system. Using a phonetic system, where each sound made in speech was represented by a symbol, he created the "Talking Leaves", 85 letters that make up the Cherokee syllabary (he would later add another symbol, making the total 86). His little girl Ayoka easily learned this method of communication. He demonstrated his syllabary to his cousin, George Lowrey by sending Ayoka outside the house, then asking Lowrey to answer a question. Sequoyah wrote the answer down on a piece of paper, then had Ayoka read the answer to Lowrey. Lowrey encouraged Sequoyah to demonstrate the syllabary in public. A short time later in a Cherokee Court in Chattooga, he read an argument about a boundary line from a sheet of paper. Word spread quickly of Sequoyah's invention. In 1821, 12 years after the original idea, the Cherokee Nation adopted Sequoyah's alphabet as their own. Within months thousands of Cherokee became literate.
Joseph Smith
Born: 1805 in Vermont
Died: 1844 in Illinois
Born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, Joseph Smith Jr. grew up on a series of tenant farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. Though in his youth Joseph was largely deprived of a formal education, he was "instructed in reading, writing, and the ground rules of arithmetic." Joseph's mother said that he was often "given to meditation and deep study." Affected by the great religious excitement taking place around his home in Manchester, New York, in 1820, fourteen-year-old Joseph was determined to know which of the many religions he should join.
In 1823, Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him of an ancient record containing God's dealings with the former inhabitants of the American continent. In 1827, Joseph retrieved this record, inscribed on thin golden plates, and shortly afterward began translating its words by the "gift of God." The resulting manuscript, the Book of Mormon, was published in March 1830. On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith organized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and became its first president.
Joseph married Emma Hale on January 18, 1827, and was described as a loving and devoted husband. They had eleven children (two adopted), only five of whom lived past infancy. During the thirty-nine years of his life, Joseph established thriving cities in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois; produced volumes of scripture; sent missionaries throughout the world; orchestrated the building of temples; served as mayor of Nauvoo, one of the largest cities in Illinois, and as general of its militia, the Nauvoo Legion; and was a candidate for the presidency of the United States. He was a controversial figure in American history—beloved of his followers and hated by his detractors. Joseph was persecuted much of his adult life and was killed along with his brother Hyrum by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Born: 1815 in New York
Died: 1902 in New York
Born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, Elizabeth Cady grew up amidst wealth and privilege, the daughter of Daniel Cady, a prominent judge, and Margaret Livingston. In 1826, the death of her brother Eleazar drove her to excel in every area her brother had in an attempt to compensate her father for his loss. She attended the progressive Troy Female Seminary, where she received the best education available for a young woman of the early 1830s.
After her graduation in 1833, she became immersed in the world of reform at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. There she fell in love with the abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. Following their marriage in 1840, she met the woman who would become her most important mentor in her development as a feminist, the abolitionist Lucretia Mott.
When the Stantons moved from Boston to the village of Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847, Elizabeth suffered from the lack of an intellectual community. From this despair emerged her resolution to transform women’s place in society. With Mott and three other women, Elizabeth spearheaded the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in July 1848. At this gathering, she presented their Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, a document she composed. The Declaration and its 11 resolutions demanded social and political equality for all women, including its most controversial claim, the right to vote.
In 1860, following Stanton’s eloquent speech before the New York state legislature, the Married Women’s Property Law of 1860 became law. Married women gained the right to own property, engage in business, manage their wages and other income, sue and be sued, and be joint guardian of their children.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Born: 1811 in Connecticut
Died: 1896 in Connecticut
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, where her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), was a prominent and influential Congregational minister. Her mother, Roxanna Foote Beecher (1775-1816), who died when Harriet was only five, was always interested in improving herself educationally. Harriet pursued this same goal throughout her life.
In 1820 Lyman preached anti-slavery sermons in response to the issue of whether Missouri should be admitted to the union as a slave or a free state. Lyman's dynamic preaching, religious energy and commitment had a profound impact on all of his children. He encouraged an intellectual environment at home and would often lead family debates on important issues of the day. All of Lyman's children carried out Lyman's commitment to their religion, but in a new way. They thought of God as much more loving and forgiving, and believed that the best way of serving God was to take action in society to make a better world. Harriet's career as a writer shows how she acted out this vision.