- Frederick Douglass IV
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1817 on a tobacco plantation in eastern Maryland. His mother was hired out when he was still an infant. He later recalled that he did not see his mother "more than four or five times in my life." When Douglass was about six years old, he was sent to a nearby plantation where he ran errands and performed simple chores. Douglass learned in 1825 that he was to be sent away from the plantation to Baltimore. - Abraham Lincoln
Reviews Lincoln's early years as a farmer and his significant impact on U.S. agriculture, including the establishment of the USDA and the beginnings of the National Agricultural Library. Also includes various full text documents and agricultural Acts from the 1860s. - John Brown
John Brown (May 9, 1800 - December 2, 1859) was the first white American abolitionist to advocate and practice insurrection as a means to the abolition of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln said he was a "misguided fanatic" and Brown has been called "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans." His attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved blacks in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the nation, … - William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison (December 12, 1805-May 24, 1879) was a prominent United States abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper, "The Liberator", and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. - Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (1820 - 1913) escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849 and traveled north. She then helped hundreds of other slaves flee to the north to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Mrs. Tubman helped John Brown recruit soldiers for his raid on Harpers Ferry (1859). She spied for the Union (in South Carolina ) during the US Civil War. After the war, she lived in Auburn, New York , and founded the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged Negroes. - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain. It made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the North. It angered and embittered the South. - Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an American abolitionist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her best-known speech, which became known as "Ain't I a Woman?", was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Before she became a well known abolitionist she was a follower of "The Kingdom of Matthias," an evangelical cult of the Second Great Awakening of America. - Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (April 17 1790) was one of the most critical Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, inventor, civic activist, environmentalist, and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As a political writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented the idea of an American nation, … - William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 - 29 July 1833) was a British politician, philanthropist, and abolitionist who led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade. - Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 - March 13, 1906) was a prominent, independent and well-educated American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to secure women's suffrage in the United States. She traveled thousands of miles throughout the United States and Europe, and gave 75 to 100 speeches per year on women's rights for some 45 years. Susan B. Anthony died in Rochester, New York, … - Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine (Thetford, England, 29 January 1737 - 8 June 1809, New York City, USA) was a pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, and intellectual. Born in Great Britain, he lived in America, having migrated to the American colonies just in time to take part in the American Revolution, mainly as the author of the powerful, widely read pamphlet, "Common Sense" (1776), advocating independence for the American Colonies from the Kingdom of Great Britain. - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, (November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902), was an American social activist and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States. Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, … - Wendell Phillips
Wendell Phillips (29 November 1811 - 2 February 1884) was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, and orator. "The printing press has done for the mind what gunpowder has done for war." - Charles Sumner
Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811 - March 11, 1874) was an American politician and statesman from Massachusetts. An academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the United States (U.S.) Senate during the American Civil War and Reconstruction along with Thaddeus Stevens. He jumped from party to party, gaining fame as a Republican. One of the most learned statesmen of the era, … - Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and philosopher who is best known for "Walden", a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, "Civil Disobedience", an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. - Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins (May 19, 1795 - December 24, 1873) was a wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist of nineteenth century Baltimore, now most noted for his philanthropic creation of the institutions that bear his name, such as the Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Johns Hopkins, whose nickname was "Johnsie", was the second of eleven children in his Quaker family, … - Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811 - November 29, 1872) was an American editor of a leading newspaper, a founder of the Republican party, reformer and politician. His "New York Tribune" was America's most influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and "established Greeley's reputation as the greatest editor of his day." Greeley used it to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as antislavery and a host of reforms. - Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Coffin Mott was an American Quaker minister, abolitionist, social reformer and proponent of women's rights. She is credited as the first American "feminist" in the early 1800s but was, more accurately, the initiator of women's political advocacy. - Thomas Clarkson
Thomas Clarkson (28 March 1760 - 26 September 1846), abolitionist, was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, and became a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. - John Newton
John Newton (July 24, 1725 - December 21, 1807) was an Anglican clergyman who had, at one time, been a slaveship master. He is best known as the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace". - Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 - 31 March 1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent people of African heritage involved in the British debate for the abolition of the slave trade. He wrote an autobiography that depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawmakers to abolish the slave trade in 1807. In addition to being a slave as a young man, he was also a slaver, seaman, merchant, and explorer in South America, … - Henry Ward Beecher
Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 - March 8, 1887) was a prominent, theologically liberal American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, abolitionist, and speaker in the mid to late 19th Century. He was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the son of evangelist Lyman Beecher. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin") and Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist. - Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker (August 24 1810, Lexington, Massachusetts - May 10 1860, Florence, Italy) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. In 1850, Parker was the first to use the phrase, "of all the people, by all the people, for all the people" which later influenced Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In words made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later, … - David Walker
David Walker was an American black abolitionist, most famous for his pamphlet "Walker's Appeal", which called for black pride, demanded the immediate and universal emancipation of the slaves, and defended violent rebellion as a means for the slaves to gain their freedom. Walker was born as free black in Wilmington, North Carolina, to an enslaved father and a free mother. - Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. on January 17, 1942) is a retired American boxer and former three-time World Heavyweight Champion and winner of an Olympic gold medal. In 1999, Ali was crowned "Sportsman of the Century" by "Sports Illustrated" and the BBC. Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was named after his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., who was named for the 19th century abolitionist and politician Cassius Clay. - Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe (May 271819 - October 171910) was a prominent American abolitionist, social activist, and poet most famous as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Born Julia Ward in New York City, she was the fourth of six children born to Samuel Ward (1786 - 1839) and Julia Rush Cutler. Her father was a well-to-do banker. - John Jay
John Jay (1817-94) was an American lawyer and diplomat, son of William Jay and a grandson of Chief Justice John Jay. He was born in New York City, graduated at Columbia College in 1836, and was admitted to the bar three years later. He early became intensely interested in the antislavery movement, and while still in college (1834) was president of the New York Young Men's Antislavery Society. He was active in the Free Soil Party movement, … - John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 - September 7, 1892) was an American Quaker poet and forceful advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. - Lucy Stone
Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 - October 18, 1893, died at age 75) was a prominent American suffragist. She was the wife of abolitionist Henry Brown Blackwell (1825-1909) (the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell) and the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell, another prominent suffragette, journalist and human rights defender. Stone was best known for being the first recorded American woman to keep her own last name upon marriage. </tr> <tr> <td><center></center></td> </table> - Gerrit Smith
Gerrit Smith (March 6, 1797 - December 28, 1874) was a leading United States social reformer, abolitionist, politician, and philanthropist. He was an unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States in 1848, 1852, and 1856 Smith spent significant time and money during his life working towards social progress in the nineteenth century United States. Besides making significant donations of both land and money to the African American community in North Elba, New York, … - Salmon P. Chase
Salmon Portland Chase (January 13, 1808 - May 7, 1873) was an American politician and jurist in the Civil War era who served as U.S. Senator from Ohio and Governor of Ohio; as U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln; and as Chief Justice of the United States. Chase articulated the "Slave Power conspiracy" thesis well before Lincoln did, and he coined the slogan of the Free Soil Party, "Free Soil, Free Labor, … - Horace Mann
Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 - August 2, 1859) was an American education reformer and abolitionist. He was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a brother-in-law to author Nathaniel Hawthorne, since their wives were sisters. - Benjamin Rush
Dr. Benjamin Rush (December 24 1745 - April 19 1813) was a Founding Father of the United States. Rush lived in the state of Pennsylvania and was a physician, writer, educator, and humanitarian, as well as the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Rush was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence and attended the Continental Congress. Later in life, he became a professor of medical theory and clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania. - Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens, was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. He, Charles Sumner, and John C. Frémont were the powerful leaders of the Radical Republicans during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. His biographer characterizes him as, "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, … - Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government. - William H. Seward
William Henry Seward, Sr. (May 16, 1801 - October 10, 1872) was a Governor of New York, United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. - Granville Sharp
Granville Sharp (10 November 1735 - 6 July 1813) was a British campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade, and classicist. - William Still
William Still (November 1819 or October 7, 1821 - July 14, 1902) was an African-American abolitionist, conductor on the Underground Railroad, writer, historian and civil rights activist. - Ioan Gruffudd
Ioan Gruffudd (born October 6 1973) is a British actor from Wales. Educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he came to international attention as Fifth Officer Harold Lowe in the film "Titanic" (1997). However, he is probably best known for playing the role of Horatio Hornblower in Hornblower, the made-for-TV films (1998-2003) based on C.S. Forester's novels. Gruffudd's recent notable film roles include Lancelot in "King Arthur" (2004), … - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 - May 9, 1911) was an American author, abolitionist, and soldier.
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