Abolition is the goal of abolishing, or completely eliminating, slavery.
There were two significant eras of abolition in the United States. The
early movement took place between 1770 and 1830 and focused on
eliminating the African slave trade. Abolitionists of this early era assumed that prohibiting the importation of slaves from other countries
would eventually result in eliminating slavery altogether. Thus, when the
United States prohibited the foreign slave trade in 1808, many early abolitionists lost interest in the abolitionist cause. A second phase of the abolition movement—the “new abolitionism”—began in the 1830s and
continued until the American Civil War ended in 1865. New abolition ists opposed gradual methods. They wanted immediate, unconditional emancipation (freeing
of slaves). Other antislavery forces developed in
this era that sought restrictions on slavery and
were more agreeable to gradual emancipation
through political negotiation.
Early abolitionism
The first group to speak out against slavery in
the United States was the Quakers, a Christian
group founded in England on the belief that
each individual is able to communicate with
God and understand right and wrong through
his or her own “inner light,” or conscience.
Beginning in the 1750s, Quakers in England
took a strong moral stand against slavery. They
helped to abolish the slave system in the British
Empire by 1833. Quakers took early leadership
in American antislavery activities beginning in
the mid-eighteenth century. They were largely
responsible for the first American abolition society, called the Society for the Relief of Free
Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, which
was founded in 1775.
The American Revolution (1775–83) gave
the United States even more reasons to oppose the injustices of slavery.
Slavery not only violated the law of God, it contradicted the rights of
human beings spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.
Opposition to slavery was widespread in the new nation. By the 1780s,
abolitionist societies had formed in most states, including the upper
South. In the decades after the Revolution, many northern states abolished slavery. In New Jersey and New York, legislation demanding immediate emancipation failed. There, abolition groups passed laws freeing
slaves when they reached a certain birthday.
In 1808, the U.S. Congress prohibited foreign slave trade, although
people could still buy and sell slaves within the United States. The abolitionists’ hopes that this act would result in the end of slavery proved to
be unfounded. The South resisted pressure to emancipate slaves. Most Americans assumed that the U.S. Constitution left the issue of slavery
to state governments and that the U.S. Congress could abolish slavery
only in new territories. Many people in the North and South accepted
slavery as a necessary evil.
American Colonization Society
In the early nineteenth century, a plan for ending slavery arose that appealed to slaveholders and abolitionists alike: freeing African slaves and
then sending them to live somewhere outside of the United States. Most
reasons for relocation were based on racism. Many whites—Southerners
and Northerners alike—were uncomfortable with the idea of having
freed slaves living and working in their communities. If former slaves
could be relocated outside the United States, slaveholders might be less
reluctant to free them, and nonslaveholding whites might be less anxious
about competition for work. Some Northern reformers approved of relocation on the grounds that it would be kinder to the freed slaves, since
they believed American society would never treat black people fairly or
accept them as equals.
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816
as the major relocation, or colonization, organization for freed slaves. It
acquired land in Liberia, Africa, for its proposed colony of freed slaves
and rapidly won the approval of church and government leaders in the
North and South. But the efforts of the ACS were slow; it sent only a few
thousand blacks to Liberia before 1830. Enthusiasm for the movement
faded as doubts grew about its practicality. A large group of black and
white abolitionists united in their opposition to sending freed slaves to
Africa.
Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society
By 1830, abolitionists who rejected the idea of relocating former slaves
had set a new goal: the immediate, unconditional end of slavery.
Characterizing their strategy for achieving this end as “moral suasion,” or
persuasion by appealing to people’s conscience, the new abolitionists employed agents to work throughout the country as missionaries in the antislavery cause. These missionaries converted as many people as they
could to abolitionism and organized their converts into local antislavery
societies. The new abolition movement spread rapidly. In 1832, eleven
persons formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society; by 1837, Massachusetts had 145 societies, New York had 274, and Ohio had
213. In December 1833, sixty-three men (only three of them black)
formed the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). By 1838, the AASS
claimed 1,350 affiliated societies, with membership approaching a quarter million participants.
The best-known of the new abolitionists was William Lloyd
Garrison (1805–1879). Garrison had formed strong alliances with black
abolitionists such as James E. Forten (1766–1842), a wealthy black
Philadelphian, in the anticolonization campaign. Garrison launched a
Boston-based abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, in 1831; the great
majority of its readers were black. Garrison’s book Thoughts on African
Colonization (1832) persuaded many young reformers to change loyalties and follow Garrison’s course, calling for the immediate abolition of
slavery and rejecting all compromises or half measures.
Garrison and the AASS used tactics of moral suasion and not politics in their war against slavery. Through speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and individual contact, they spread the word to the nation that
slavery was a sin. They hoped that clergymen and other opinion leaders
would be persuaded and exert pressure on slaveholders. Their movement
gained the greatest following in the Northeast. A growing middle class
deemed slavery at odds with its religious beliefs and the free-labor system. Churches, though, generally remained aloof from the movement,
and community leaders were generally hostile to the ardent reformers.
Abolitionists were denounced as troublemakers who wanted to interfere
with local authorities.
Political abolitionism
When the churches failed to respond to their message, some abolitionist
leaders began to press for change through political legislation. These abolitionists tended to be less uncompromising than Garrison and his followers. They wanted to focus on restricting slavery and were not willing
to engage in some of the other reforms Garrison had taken up, such as
women’s rights. In 1840, when Garrison appointed a woman to a committee, a conflict arose among leaders of the AASS over the role of
women within the organization. A second abolitionist group, the
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, split from the AASS.
Members of this new group favored a political strategy to end slavery.
They supported the new Liberty Party in 1840 and 1844. By 1846, support for that party had faded, and most political abolitionists gave their
votes to the new antislavery Free Soil Party in 1848.
The Free Soil Party grew dramatically in the 1850s, due mainly to
the outrage of Northerners over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which
required people in nonslaveholding states to return runaway slaves to
their owners in slaveholding states. (See Fugitive Slave Laws.) At this
time, there was also a huge public response to the abolitionist novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), written by Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811–1896). When chaos and violence broke out in the new territory
of Kansas between those who wanted slavery and those who opposed it,
antislavery sentiments in the North soared. Unlike Garrison and the
AASS, the political abolitionists compromised on their goals, generally
accepting slavery in the states in which it already existed and even in
some new territories. Garrison, by contrast, had counseled abolitionists
to stick to the moral high ground by firmly denouncing the injustice of
all slavery and racism.
Black abolitionism
Black abolitionists tended to favor political action, but they complained
repeatedly that white abolitionist organizations put blacks primarily in
supporting roles. After 1840, black abolitionists met more frequently
within their own organizations, held their own conventions, and supported their own newspapers, such as Samuel E. Cornish (c. 1795–c.
1858) and John Brown Russwurm’s (1799–1851) Freedom’s Journal and
abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass’s (c. 1817–1895) North Star.
Douglass had been closely allied with Garrison and the AASS, but
by the 1840s he turned more frequently to separate “Negro
Conventions” as the best institution through which to organize against
slavery and racial prejudice. Like Douglass, other black abolitionists garnered significant support. Among the more popular speakers were former slaves William Craft (c. 1824–1900), Ellen Craft (c. 1826–c. 1897,
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), and William Wells Brown (c.
1815–1884). Each was skilled at depicting the horrors of slavery, and
they all sold personal narratives and gathered funds to support the movement. The appeal of violence
By 1850, many black leaders ceased talking about “moral suasion” and
began to talk about violent rebellion. If whites did not concede to blacks
the right to self-defense, some leaders asked, and if blacks never showed
their willingness to fight, then how could Southern slavery and Northern
injustice ever end? Even white abolitionists began to contemplate warfare. Those who followed Garrison believed proslavery leaders dominated the political system. At one public meeting in 1854, Garrison
denounced the Fugitive Slave Act and burned the Constitution. White
abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) was so convinced that violence
was the only way to achieve abolition that he planned an all-out war
against slavery in the South. In 1859, he led a raid on a federal arsenal
in the city of Harpers Ferry, in what is now West Virginia, intending to
steal weapons to give to slaves. (See Harper’s Ferry Raid.) The raid was
a dismal failure, but it drew the divided nation’s attention to the urgency
of the problem.
The end of slavery
In 1854, political abolitionists formed the Republican Party, which was
dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery into the western territories.
In 1856, this party carried eleven northern states in the presidential election, and numerous Republicans were elected to the U.S. Congress and
state offices. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate and later as a presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) never came out against
slavery in existing states, but he did insist that slavery be prohibited in
the new western lands, a point that many Southerners interpreted as a
clear antislavery stance. When he was elected president, seven southern
states seceded, or withdrew, from the United States. Four more seceded
when Lincoln began to gather his army for war in 1861.
The onset of the American Civil War (1861–65) unified the antislavery factions. White and black abolitionists joined Douglass and
Garrison in lobbying for immediate emancipation and the enlistment of
free blacks in the Union (Northern) army. Other abolitionists focused on
organizing aid for the thousands of former slaves who, as soon as war
broke out, had fled to the Northern states. Sponsored by church groups
and freedman’s aid societies, reformers moved to Washington, D.C.;
New Orleans, Louisiana; and Port Royal, South Carolina, to be near the former slaves and to provide material aid and basic schooling. These
efforts continued and expanded after the war.
Midway through the war, Lincoln took two giant steps toward freedom for African Americans. In January 1863, Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in the United States. He
also announced the formation of black military units. All abolitionists
hailed the passage in January 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment to
the Constitution, prohibiting slavery in the United States, as completing
the legal process of abolition.