The Abolition Movement
The drive to end slavery in the United States during the antebellum years was known as the abolition movement, or abolitionism.
The movement's antecedents included Quaker antislavery activities that began as early as the 1680s, as well as colonial antislavery literature like The Selling of Joseph, by Judge Samuel Sewall. Later, such leaders of the American Revolution as Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson (himself a slave owner) also spoke out against the institution. In 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in Philadelphia, and Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, by Dr. Samuel Hopkins, appeared in 1776.
After independence, the slavery debate polarized the new nation. The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia nearly broke up over the demand from Southern delegates that slavery be protected in the Constitution. A compromise was reached that allowed slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation.
But even as the North compromised with Southern slaveholders, early activists spoke out against the immorality of slavery. Benjamin Lundy, an abolitionist from about 1815, helped to form the Union Humane Society in Ohio. In 1820, writer and editorElihuEmbree founded what is believed to be the first periodical publication devoted to ending slavery, The Emancipator, in Tennessee. Eleven years later, the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery publication The Liberator appeared.
A founder, with fellow abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Arthur Tappan, of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, Garrison is perhaps the best-known abolitionist. His antislavery editorials for the Baltimore Genius of Universal Emancipation in the 1830s earned him a prison sentence for libeling slave traders. In Boston in 1835, he was nearly lynched by a mob of slavery advocates after giving a speech that proclaimed that "all men were created equal." Moreover, at an open-air rally in Massachusetts in 1854, Garrison publicly burned the Constitution as an evil document. His fiery brand of activism was shunned by more moderate abolitionists who wanted a slow approach to ending slavery without breaking up the Union.
The abolitionist movement also included such women activists as the sisters Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone. In addition, many free African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, fought to liberate Southern slaves.
Many abolitionists paid a price for their outspokenness. In 1837, for example, Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy, editor of the antislavery journals St. Louis Observer and the Alton Observer, had founded the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. Slavery advocates wrecked Lovejoy's presses in Alton, set his shop afire, shot him to death, and hauled him through the streets.
In the 1830s, the abolitionist movement separated into two camps, known as the "moral" and the "political" abolitionists. The moralists felt that with moral persuasion, slavery would slowly be rooted out. By contrast, the political wing embraced electoral success as the only way to end slavery. The latter group formed the Liberty Party in New York in 1839. The party collapsed in 1848 and was replaced by the more moderate Free Soil Party.
Meanwhile, after 1838, Northern anger over slavery grew. The appearance of the Underground Railroad, congressional legislation like the Missouri Compromise and the horrific Fugitive Slave Act (1850), and the U.S. Supreme Court decisions inPrigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Scott v. Sandford (1857) all served to divide opinion and to threaten the integrity of the Union. The match to the powder keg was the publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a best-selling book that illustrated the evils of slavery.
In 1854, abolitionist delegates from the Whig Party, the Democratic Party, and the Free Soil Party founded the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin. Although the Republicans' first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, came in second in 1856, the party was victorious in 1860 with Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln's election, Southern states chose to leave the Union rather than give up their "peculiar institution," and the move precipitated the Civil War. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the Southern states, but it was not until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 that all slaves were freed forever.
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