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Transcendentalist
Transcendentalists believed that through a process of spiritual discovery and insight, people could rise above, or transcend, the material world. Transcendentalists taught that people should live self-reliant, moral lives, to many this meant helping to reform society. Two transcendentalist writers became renowned figures. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden earned them worldwide fame as well as a place in the American literary tradition. -
Abolitionist
abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. -
Temperance
The reformers of the temperance movement believe that problems like the breaking up of families, insanity, and crimes were caused by the use of alcoholic beverages. -
Seneca Falls
The Seneca Falls Convention was an early and influential women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19–20, 1848. It was organized by local New York women upon the occasion of a visit by Philadelphia-based Lucretia Mott, a Quaker famous for her speaking ability, a skill rarely cultivated by American women at the time. -
Progressives
income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment -
Radical Republicans
believed that Lincoln’s plan was too lenient: they wanted to punish the South for secession from the Union, transform southern society, and safeguard the rights of former slaves. As an alternative to the Ten-Percent Plan, Radical Republicans and their moderate Republican allies passed the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864. -
Labor Union
They wanted to have a revolutions. -
Populists
They called for the election of US senators by popular vote, rather than by state legislatures. They demanded the universal use of the secret ballot, to prevent employers from forcing workers to vote a certain way. -
Free Soils Party
A Political party that opposed the extension of slavery into the Western territories .
