Abolition refers to the immediate and unconditional end to SLAVERY. In the United States, abolition movements offered varied plans of reform, with conservative, moderate, and radical approaches. Many abolitionists, although not all, believed in racial equality; many also cooperated with international efforts to halt slavery.
Opposition to African slavery in North America dates to the 17th century, when some Protestant denominations, particularly Methodists and the Society of Friends (Quakers), condemned the practice. Until the Revolutionary War, abolitionist views were not widespread among Britain’s North American colonists. However, calls for liberty and consent provoked some colonists to take abolition arguments more seriously. During the 1780s, antislavery sentiment influenced the wording of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned carrying slaves into the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. By 1800, Pennsylvania and all states north of it had begun to abolish slavery, though largely by gradual rather than immediate emancipation.
From Maryland south, slavery was far more important to existing economic interests than in the North. The abolition argument did not find a large audience in the tobaccogrowing states on Chesapeake Bay (Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) and in the Carolinas and Georgia, where rice and indigo cultivation flourished.
A few Southern planters did in fact seek to end slavery in the South. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, argued that slave ownership bred habits of arrogance and arbitrary power ill-suited to the needs of a republic based on shared power and popular consent. Jefferson also believed that African-American slaves posed serious threats to all white people: a threat of revolt if kept in servitude, particularly worrisome in wartime, and a threat of resentful hostility of a landless underclass if set free. Slavery was wrong, Jefferson wrote, but slavery could not end without expelling former slaves from North America. “We have the wolf by the ears,” Jefferson wrote, “we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”
Jefferson, Madison, and others, both North and South, hoped that slavery would end gradually. While the Constitution granted Congress no power to abolish slavery, it did permit Congress to prohibit the importation of slaves beginning in 1808. Without slaves from Africa and the West Indies, prices for slaves would increase. Two important consequences would occur: the ending of the Southern plantation system and the return to Africa of masses of former slaves. Jefferson’s conviction that expulsion from North America would be best for white and black people alike was shared by Henry Clay and other prominent sponsors of the American Colonization Society.
Colonization faced serious opposition, however. As early as the 1790s, there were voices raised against both gradual emancipation and colonization schemes. Philadelphia African Americans such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones joined Benjamin Franklin and others in the Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1790 the organization petitioned Congress under Franklin’s name to abolish slavery throughout the country. Ominously, the petition earned a stern rebuke from Southerners, whose views on slavery were less compromising than Jefferson’s. Thomas Tucker, a South Carolina representative, declared that such a petition would “never be submitted to by the Southern States without a civil war.”
Despite Tucker’s warning, calls for immediate abolition became more urgent during the 1820s. A number of factors contributed to the growing unwillingness of some antislavery activists to compromise. The first was the obvious failure of gradual emancipation in the South. With the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, slavery profitably expanded well beyond the plantations of the Atlantic coast and into what would soon come to be called the Southern “cotton belt.”
As slavery expanded further, fewer Southern planters shared Jefferson’s doubts about slavery and more embraced
A group of abolitionists known as the Oberlin Rescuers outside the Cuyahoga County Jail, Ohio, from which they had rescued a fugitive slave named John Price (Hulton/Archive)
A strong defense of the South’s “peculiar institution.” The debates over slave-state Missouri’s admittance to the Union in 1819-20, though they ended in compromise, demonstrated Southern resolve on the issue while revealing deep divisions within the North. Southern views hardened further in the aftermath of a Virginia slave revolt led by Nat Turner in 1832.
Abolition activists were also deeply influenced by the “Second Great Awakening,” a period of evangelical revivalism that peaked between 1810 and 1840. Those who opposed slavery on religious grounds condemned the practice as nothing less than an abomination. These more militant attitudes crystallized in the late 1820s and early 1830s, informing the work of such abolitionists as David Walker (1785-1830), Lydia Maria Child (1802-80), and William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79). Unlike Benjamin Franklin, these activists would not plea or petition for emancipation; rather, they would demand it.
Walker, an African American, was born free in North Carolina. Loathing the South’s poisonous atmosphere of slavery and oppression, he left for Massachusetts, establishing a small business there while taking an active role in the city’s free black community. In 1829, Walker published a pamphlet entitled “An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” Targeting Thomas Jefferson’s remarks in Notes on the State of Virginia, Walker declared that white Americans had proven themselves “unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious, and bloodthirsty. . . always seeking after power and authority.” Only abolition of slavery would free white Americans from their own degradation; “what a happy country this will be if whites will listen.”
Lydia Maria Child, a self-educated New Englander, came to public attention with An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Like Walker, Child’s rhetoric burned. The races, she declared, were equal to one another in every way. White people had enslaved black people only because the white people had acted with “treachery, fraud, and violence.” Child’s commitment to racial equality and her willingness to enter a public arena generally closed to women outraged many Americans, including some who were committed to the antislavery movement.
William Lloyd Garrison was as uncompromising as Walker or Child. Introducing The Liberator, his influential abolitionist newspaper, Garrison famously declared, “I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, AND I WILL BE HEARD.” For Garrison, not even the Constitution was sacred. Because the Constitution implicitly protected slavery, Garrison thundered, the document was immoral. On July 4, 1852, in a well-publicized demonstration, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, while shouting “so perish all compromises with tyranny!”
Abolitionists like Walker, Child, and Garrison asserted that the Constitution and majority opinion both ranked well below a “higher law,” God’s law. Though the Constitution itself prohibited any state from harboring an escaped slave, abolitionists successfully urged several Northern states to enact “personal liberty” laws that forbade state officials from assisting in the recapture of escapees. Personal liberty laws enraged Southerners, but they were based on the same states’ rights argument Southerners themselves embraced in other circumstances.
By the 1830s, Southern planters and their Northern sympathizers came to see abolitionism as a grave threat to their lives and property. Proslave apologists condemned abolitionists as treasonous and violent extremists who sought nothing less than a slave revolt, the murder of white people, and the destruction of the white race. Such fears convinced President Andrew Jackson to forbid the distribution of abolitionist literature through the mails. Congress was persuaded to forbid the reading and debate of all antislavery petitions brought to its attention. This happened despite a First Amendment guarantee of the right to petition for redress of grievances. In the North, mobs often pelted abolitionist speakers with everything from rotten food to rocks, burned abolitionist presses, and vandalized meeting halls. While Garrison was rescued from a violent Boston mob, abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was not so lucky, and he was murdered by another mob in Alton, Illinois, on November 7, 1837. African-American abolitionist David Walker inspired particular hatred: $1,000 was offered for his dead body.
Though abolitionists did not always face such violence, they remained a distinct minority within the North well into the Civil War. Most white Northerners simply accepted as a matter of course that black people were an inferior race; many concurred with Southerners that slavery was essential both to protect African Americans from their own passions and to protect white people from black people. Many Northerners also feared that if slavery were ended, free African Americans would compete for jobs, forcing white workers to accept lower wages and worse conditions. For these workers, African-American freedom would mean white slavery.
Abolitionists were also divided among themselves. While black and white abolitionists worked side by side in Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, differences of emphasis and organization ensured that African Americans supported their own distinct institutions. Though Garrison’s Liberator remained the preeminent abolitionist journal among white Americans, Frederick Douglass’s North Star was widely read among free African Americans. Black church and community groups independently organized support for escaped slaves; under activists such as Harriet Tubman, these groups became the foundation for the network of escape routes, “conductors,” and safe-houses called the Underground Railroad.
Abolitionists also differed over strategy. In 1840 abolitionist Lewis Tappan split with Garrison’s American Antislavery Society and established a rival organization, the American and Foreign Antislavery Society. Tappan and others in the new group were dismayed at Garrison’s alleged opposition to religion, support for women’s equality, and reliance on “moral suasion” rather than direct political action to end slavery.
Gender also divided abolitionists. Like Lydia Child, abolitionists such as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton found a cool and sometimes hostile reception from the men who led abolitionist organizations. To fight against slavery, they concluded, they had to emancipate women as well. Though some male abolitionists voiced contempt for feminism, others, such as Frederick Douglass, provided active support.
Despite these divisions, abolitionism grew stronger, particularly after the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. The conquest of Mexican territory reopened an angry debate over the expansion of slavery last heard during the debates leading to the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In the wake of U. S. victories, Congressman David Wilmot introduced his Wilmot Proviso to prohibit slavery in any lands seized as a result of the war. Though ultimately defeated, Wilmot’s bill spread antislavery sentiment.
Most Americans who opposed slavery in the territories were not abolitionists but Free Soilers. Free Soilers did not oppose slavery in the South but believed that if slavery were permitted in the West, wealthy Southern planters would buy up the best farmland. Northern farmers of more modest means would have nothing. Free Soilers shared with abolitionists a deep disdain for what they both characterized as the South’s “slaveocracy.”
Abolitionists were divided on the wisdom of working with Free-Soil Democrats and Whigs. William Lloyd Garrison refused to work with anyone who sought less than full and immediate emancipation. Tappan and other abolitionists disagreed. Abolitionists had already experimented with electoral politics in the form of the Liberty Party, whose support had grown from 7,000 presidential votes in 1840 to 60,000 in 1844. In 1848, many abolitionists joined the Free-Soil Party, which garnered more than a quarter million votes for presidential candidate Martin Van Buren. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered the Whig Party in 1854, most Northern Whigs joined Free Soilers and abolitionists to establish the Republican Party. Though the Republican Party officially embraced only Free-Soil ideas, abolitionists now had a strong voice in a mainstream political movement.
Even so, Garrisonian “moral suasion” remained vital to the abolitionist cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin condemned the abuses of slavery in vivid prose. As many as one-third of literate Northerners read Stowe’s book. African Americans who had escaped slavery now found large and enthusiastic audiences for their speeches and books.
However, moral suasion was clearly not going to end slavery by itself. During the 1850s, the debate over slavery provoked increasing violence. From Preston Brooks’s assault on Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers to Bleeding Kansas, and from John Brown’s attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry to Southern calls for secession, slavery had become the most divisive national issue. In 1860, hoping to allay the fears of white Northerners, the Republican Party passed over William H. Seward, an abolitionist sympathizer, and instead nominated Abraham Lincoln, a Free Soiler who had condemned John Brown’s raid and promised to protect slavery where it already existed.
At the beginning of the Civil War, most white Northerners—and certainly most Union soldiers—still opposed abolition of slavery. Lincoln himself entertained the idea that the United States might gradually end slavery and that former slaves might be returned to Africa. Yet Garrison, Douglass, and other abolitionists urged Lincoln to reject gradualism, reject colonization, and reject anything short of full citizenship. Throughout the Civil War, abolitionists struggled to ensure that African Americans could serve as combat soldiers in the Union army and that those soldiers would earn the same pay as white soldiers. Abolitionists also lobbied for other causes: that Union commanders end slavery in Southern territories they occupied, that the U. S. government grant captured plantation lands to former slaves, and that Congress declare and protect the civil rights of African Americans.
The Thirteenth Amendment brought the end of slavery in 1865, and abolition’s mission had been fulfilled. Some former abolitionists, their life’s work accomplished, retreated from politics. Others remained active within the Republican Party. Still others joined moral crusades modeled after abolitionism and seeking reform of other elements of American life. However, veteran abolitionists found themselves divided in their approaches to Reconstruction and an industrializing economy. As a political movement, abolition was finished. Even so, fundamental issues arising out of race were never fully resolved by the Civil War. In many ways, they remain as vital to American society today as they did when abolitionists first raised them.
Further reading: Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionist Constituency (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986); James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (New York: Norton, 1984).
—Tom Laichas
World History
