Abolitionism

For other uses, see Abolitionism (disambiguation).

"Anti-slavery" redirects here. For the British NGO working for the eradication of slavery, see Anti-Slavery International.

"Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" 1787 medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood for the British anti-slavery campaign

Collection box for Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Circa 1850.

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Abolitionism Indentured servant Unfree labour

Abolitionism was a movement to end slavery, whether formal or informal. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historical movement to end the African slave trade and set slaves free. The Spanish government enacted the first European law abolishing colonial slavery in 1542, although this law was not widely enforced. Later, in the 17th century, English Quakers and evangelical religious groups condemned slavery (by then applied mostly to Africans) as un-Christian; in the 18th century, abolition was part of the message of the First Great Awakening in the Thirteen Colonies; and in the same period, rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment criticized it for violating the rights of man. The Somersett's case in 1772, which emancipated a slave in England, helped launch the British movement to abolish slavery. Though anti-slavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century, the colonies and emerging nations that used slave labor continued to do so: French and English territories in the West Indies, South America, and the South of the United States.

After the American Revolutionary War established the United States, northern states, beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation during the next two decades abolishing slavery, sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified a constitution that declared all men equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on this principle brought an end to slavery in the state. In other states, such as Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts not applicable to Africans. During the following decades, the abolitionist movement grew in northern states, and Congress limited the expansion of slavery in new states admitted to the union.

Revolutionary France abolished slavery in 1794, but it was restored by Napoleon in the French colonies more than a decade later after his subversion of the French Revolution. Haiti achieved independence from France in 1804 and brought an end to slavery in its territory, establishing the second republic in the western hemisphere. Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. Britain abolished slavery throughout the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the French colonies abolished it 15 years later, and slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865, after the American Civil War, with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In Eastern Europe, groups organized to abolish the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia; and to emancipate the serfs in Russia (Emancipation reform of 1861). It was declared illegal in 1948 under the Universal Rights of Man of the United Nations. The last country to abolish legal slavery was Mauritania, where it was officially abolished by presidential decree in 1981. Today, child and adult slavery and forced labour are illegal in most countries, as well as being against international law, but a high rate of human trafficking for labor and for sexual bondage continues, believed to affect millions of adults and children.

Great Britain

Main article: Slavery in Britain and Ireland

Lord Mansfield (1705–1793), whose opinion in Somerset's Case (1772) was widely taken to have held that slavery was illegal in England.

The last known form of enforced servitude of adults (villeinage) had disappeared in England by the beginning of the 17th century. In a 1569 court case involving Cartwright, who had bought a slave from Russia, the court ruled that English law could not recognise slavery, as it was never established officially. This ruling was overshadowed by later developments. It was upheld in 1700 by the Lord Chief Justice John Holt when he ruled that a slave became free as soon as he arrived in England.

In addition to English colonists importing slaves to the North American colonies, by the 18th century, traders began to import slaves from Africa, India and East Asia (where they were trading) to London and Edinburgh to work as personal servants. Men who migrated to the North American colonies often took their East Indian slaves or servants with them, as East Indians have been documented in colonial records.

Some of the first freedom suits, court cases in the British Isles to challenge the legality of slavery, took place in Scotland from 1755 to 1778. The cases were Montgomery v. Sheddan (1755), Spens v. Dalrymple (1769), and Knight v. Wedderburn (1778). Each of the slaves had been baptized in Scotland and challenged the legality of slavery. They set the precedent of legal procedure in British courts that would later lead to successful outcomes for the plaintiffs. In the first two cases, deaths of the plaintiff and defendant, respectively, brought an end before court decisions. The Knight case was decided in favor of the plaintiff, the former slave.

African slaves were not bought or sold in London but were brought by masters from other areas. Together with people from other nations, especially non-Christian, Africans were considered foreigners, not able to be English subjects. At the time, England had no naturalization procedure. The African slaves' legal status was unclear until 1772 and Somersett's Case, when the fugitive slave James Somersett forced a legal decision. Somersett had escaped, and his master, Charles Steuart, had him captured and imprisoned on board a ship, intending to ship him to Jamaica to be resold into slavery. While in London, Somersett had been baptised; three godparents issued a writ of habeas corpus. As a result, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench, had to judge whether Somersett's abduction was legal or not under English Common Law. No legislation had ever been passed to establish slavery in England. The case received national attention, and five advocates defended Somersett.

In his judgment of 22 June 1772, Mansfield declared:

"The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."

Although the exact legal implications of the judgement are unclear when analysed by lawyers, it was generally taken at the time to have determined that slavery did not exist under English common law and was thus prohibited in England. The decision did not apply to other British territories; by then, for example, the American colonies had established slavery by positive laws. The Somersett's case became a significant part of the common law of slavery in the English-speaking world, and it helped launch the movement to abolish slavery.

After reading about the Somersett's Case, Joseph Knight, an enslaved African who had been purchased by his master John Wedderburn in Jamaica and brought to Scotland, left him. Married and with a child, he filed a freedom suit, on the grounds that he could not be held as a slave in Great Britain. In the case of Knight v. Wedderburn (1778), Wedderburn said that Knight owed him "perpetual servitude". The Court of Sessions of Scotland ruled against him, saying that chattel slavery was not recognised under the law of Scotland, and slaves could seek court protection to leave a master or avoid being forcibly removed from Scotland to be returned to slavery in the colonies.

But at the same time, legally mandated, hereditary slavery of Scots persons in Scotland had existed from 1606 until 1799, when colliers and salters were legally emancipated by an act of the Parliament of Great Britain (39 Geo.III. c56). Skilled workers, they were restricted to a place and could be sold with the works. A prior law enacted in 1775 (15 Geo.III. c. 28) was intended to end what the act referred to as "a state of slavery and bondage," but it was ineffectual, necessitating the 1799 act.

Ignatius Sancho (c1729–1780) gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro". To 18th-century British abolitionists, he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade.

First steps

Despite the ending of slavery in Great Britain, the United States continued to rely on it as an institution in the South, and the West Indian colonies of the British Empire also kept slavery. In 1785, the English poet William Cowper wrote:

"We have no slaves at home – Then why abroad? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free, They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud. And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein."

In 1783, an anti-slavery movement began among the British public. That year a group of Quakers founded the first British abolitionist organization. The Quakers continued to be influential throughout the lifetime of the movement, in many ways leading the campaign. On 17 June 1783, Sir Cecil Wray (Member of Parliament for Westminster) presented the Quaker petition to parliament. Also in 1783, Dr Beilby Porteus issued a call to the Church of England to cease its involvement in the slave trade and to formulate a policy to improve the conditions of Afro-Caribbean slaves. The exploration of the African continent, by such British groups as the African Association (1788), promoted the abolitionists' cause. Such expeditions highlighted the legitimate, complex cultures of Africans; before the Europeans had considered them "other" and uncivilized. The African Association had close ties with William Wilberforce, who became known as a prominent figure in the battle for abolition in the British Empire.

Africans played an important part in the abolition movement. In Britain, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography was published in nine editions in his lifetime, campaigned tirelessly against the slave trade.

One aspect of the history of abolitionism during this period was the effective use of images such as the famous Wedgewood medallion of 1787 and the engraving showing the horrific layout of the infamous slave ship, "The Brooks".

Growth of the movement

William Wilberforce (1759–1833), politician and philanthropist who was a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade.

After the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, William Wilberforce led the cause of abolition through the parliamentary campaign. It finally abolished the slave trade in the British Empire with the Slave Trade Act 1807. He continued to campaign for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which he lived to see in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

The Atlantic slave trade, also called Triangle trade, encompassed the trafficking in slaves by British merchants who exported manufactured goods from ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, sold or exchanged these for slaves in West Africa (where the African chieftain hierarchy was tied to slavery), and shipped the slaves to British colonies and other Caribbean countries or the American colonies. There traders sold or exchanged the slaves for rum and sugar (in the Caribbean) and tobacco and rice (in the American South), which they took back to British ports. The merchants traded in three places with each round-trip. Political influence against the inhumanity of the slave trade grew strongly in the late 18th century.

People of both European and African ethnicity worked for abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Well-known abolitionists in Britain included James Ramsay, who had seen the cruelty of the trade at first hand; the Unitarian William Roscoe who courageously campaigned for parliament in the port city of Liverpool for which he was briefly M.P., Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood, who produced the "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" medallion for the Committee; and other members of the Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers, as well as Quakers.

The latter made up most of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and were the first to present a petition against the slave trade to the British Parliament. As Dissenters, Quakers were not eligible to become British MPs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Anglican evangelist William Wilberforce led the parliamentary campaign. Clarkson became the group's most prominent researcher, gathering vast amounts of data, and gaining first hand accounts by interviewing sailors and former slaves at British ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and London.

Olaudah Equiano (c1745–1797) was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British debate for the abolition of the slave trade.

Mainly because of Clarkson's efforts, a network of local abolition groups was established across England. They campaigned through public meetings and the publication of pamphlets and petitions. One of the earliest books promoted by Clarkson and the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was the autobiography of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano. The movement had support from such freed slaves, from many denominational groups such as Swedenborgians, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and others. They reached out for support from the new industrial workers of the cities in the midlands and north of England. Even women and children, previously un-politicised groups, became involved in the campaign. At this time, women often had to hold separate meetings as there were social rules against their appearing in public meetings. They could not vote, nor could the majority of the men in Britain at the time.

The abolitionists negotiated with chieftains in West Africa to purchase land to establish 'Freetown' – a settlement for former slaves of the British Empire (the Poor Blacks of London) and the United States. Great Britain had promised freedom to American slaves who left rebel owners to join its cause during the American Revolutionary War. It evacuated thousands of slaves together with its troops and transported 3,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia for resettlement. About a decade later, they were offered a chance to resettle in Freetown, and several hundred made the move. Freetown was the first settlement of the colony of Sierra Leone, which was protected under a British Act of Parliament in 1807–8. British influence in West Africa grew through a series of negotiations with local chieftains to end trading in slaves. These included agreements to permit British navy ships to intercept chieftains' ships to ensure their merchants were not carrying slaves.

Blake's "A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows", an illustration to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

In 1796, John Gabriel Stedman published the memoirs of his five-year voyage to the Dutch-controlled Surinam in South America as part of a military force sent out to subdue bosnegers, former slaves living in the inlands. The book is critical of the treatment of slaves and contains many images by William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi depicting the cruel treatment of runaway slaves. It was an example of what became a large body of abolitionist literature.

Slave Trade Act 1807

Plate to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

The Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. The Act imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. At a time when Napoleon decided to revive slavery, which had been abolished during the French Revolution, and to send his troops to re-enslave the people of Haiti, Guadeloupe and the other French Caribbean possessions, the British took the moral high ground with their prohibition of the slave trade.

The act's intention was to entirely outlaw the slave trade within the British Empire, but the lucrative trade continued through smuggling. Sometimes captains at risk of being caught by the Royal Navy would throw slaves into the sea to reduce their fines. In 1827, Britain defined participation in the slave trade as piracy and punishable by death. Between 1808 and 1860, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Britain took action against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example, in 1851 it deposed "the usurping King of Lagos". Britain signed anti-slavery treaties with more than 50 African rulers.

Slavery Abolition Act 1833

Main article: Slavery Abolition Act 1833

"To the Friends of Negro Emancipation", an engraving in the West Indies, celebrating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.

After the 1807 act, slaves were still held, though not sold, within the British Empire. In the 1820s, the abolitionist movement revived to campaign against the institution of slavery. In 1823 the first Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Britain. Many members had previously campaigned against the slave trade. In 1831 the slave Sam Sharpe led a Christmas rebellion in Jamaica, an event that catalyzed anti-slavery sentiment.

On August 28, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was given Royal Assent, which paved the way for the abolition of slavery within the British Empire and its colonies. On 1 August 1834, all slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, but they were indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system that meant gradual abolition: the first set of apprenticeships came to an end on 1 August 1838, while the final apprenticeships were scheduled to cease on August 1, 1840, two years later.

On August 1, 1834, as the Governor in Port of Spain, Trinidad addressed an audience about the new laws, the mostly elderly, unarmed slaves began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out his voice. Peaceful protests continued until the government passed a resolution to abolish apprenticeship and the slaves gained de facto freedom. Full emancipation for all slaves was legally granted on August 1, 1838, ahead of schedule, making Trinidad the first British slave society to fully end slavery. The government set aside £20 million for compensation of slave owners for their "property" across the Empire, but it did not offer the former slaves compensation or reparations.

"The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840" by Benjamin Haydon (1841).

Campaigning after the act

In 1839, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society attempted to outlaw slavery in other countries and also to pressure the government to help enforce the suppression of the slave trade by declaring slave traders pirates and pursuing them. The world's oldest international human rights organization, it continues today as Anti-Slavery International.

France

In 1315, Louis X, king of France, published a decree proclaiming that "France signifies freedom" and that any slave setting foot on the French ground should be freed. This prompted subsequent governments to circumscribe slavery in the overseas colonies.

As in other "New World" colonies, the French relied on the Atlantic slave trade for labor for their sugar cane plantations in their Caribbean colonies. The French West Indies included Anguilla (briefly), Antigua and Barbuda (briefly), Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haïti, Montserrat (briefly), Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sint Eustatius (briefly), St Kitts and Nevis (St Kitts, but not Nevis), Trinidad and Tobago (Tobago only), Saint Croix (briefly), Saint-Barthélemy (until 1784 when became Swedish for nearly a century), the northern half of Saint Martin, and the current French overseas départements of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean sea. In addition, French colonists in La Louisiane in North America held slaves, particularly in the South around New Orleans, where they established sugar cane plantations. Over time in all these areas, a class of free people of color developed, many of whom became educated and property owners.

Louis XIV's Code Noir regulated the slave trade and institution in the colonies. Any slave brought to Metropolitan France would be immediately considered free. Although the Code Noir authorized and codified corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbid slave owners to torture them and encouraged them to instruct them. It was instrumental in asserting that Africans were human beings, endowed with a soul.

During the Age of Enlightenment, many philosophers wrote pamphlets against slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) or in the Encyclopédie In 1788, Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for abolition of slavery.

After the Revolution, on 4 April 1792, France granted free people of color full citizenship.

The revolt of slaves in the largest French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791 was the beginning of what became the Haïtian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. Rebellion swept through the north of the island, and many whites and free people of color were killed, as well as slaves. Slavery was first abolished in 1793 in St. Domingue by Sonthonax, a French Commissioner sent by the Convention in order to safeguard the allegiance of the population to revolutionary France.

First abolition of slavery (1794)

Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754–1793), who organised the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in 1788 in the midst of the French Revolution.

The Convention, the first elected Assembly of the First Republic (1792–1804), on 4 February 1794, under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, abolished slavery in law in France and its colonies. Abbé Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks were part of the abolitionist movement, which had laid important groundwork in building anti-slavery sentiment in the metropole. The first article of the law stated that "Slavery was abolished" in the French colonies, while the second article stated that "slave-owners would be indemnified" with financial compensation for the value of their slaves. The French constitution passed in 1795 included in the declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery was abolished.

Re-establishment of slavery (1802)

Napoleon did not include any declaration of the Rights of Man in the Constitution promulgated in 1799. Lobbied by planters and concerned about revenues from the Caribbean islands, after becoming First Consul, he decided to re-establish slavery. He promulgated the law of 20 May 1802 and sent military governors and troops to the colonies to impose it. On 10 May 1802, Colonel Delgrès launched a rebellion in Guadeloupe against Napoleon's representative, General Richepanse. The rebellion was repressed, and slavery was re-established. The news of this event sparked another wave of rebellion in Saint-Domingue. Although from 1802, Napoleon sent more than 20,000 troops to the island, two-thirds died due to warfare and yellow fever. He withdrew the remaining 7,000 troops and slaves achieved an independent republic they called Haïti in 1804. Seeing that he had lost Saint-Domingue, in 1803 Napoleon decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States and end his attempt at empire in North America. The French governments initially refused to recognise Haiti. It forced the nation to pay a substantial amount of reparations (which it could ill afford) for losses during the revolution and did not recognise its government until the 1830s.

Second abolition (1848)

"Abolition of Slavery in French Colonies, 1848" by Auguste François Biard (1849).

On 27 April 1848, under the Second Republic (1848–52), the decree-law of Schœlcher abolished slavery in the remaining colonies. The state bought the slaves from the colons (white colonists; Békés in Creole), and then freed them.

At about the same time, France started colonising Africa. Its activities included transferring the Native populations in several countries to mines, forestry, and rubber plantations under isolated, harsh working conditions often compared to slavery.

Debates about the dimensions of colonialism continue. Passed on 10 May 2001, the Taubira law officially acknowledges slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. 10 May was chosen as the day dedicated to recognition of the crime of slavery. Anti-colonial activists also want the French Republic to recognise African Liberation Day.

Although France formally recognised slavery as a crime, four years later, the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) voted on 23 February 2005 for a French law to require teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa." This resolution was met with public uproar and accusations of historic revisionism, both inside France and abroad.

Because of this law, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, refused to sign the envisioned "friendly treaty" with France. The writer and politician Aimé Césaire, leader of the Négritude movement from Martinique, refused to meet UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who cancelled his planned visit to the island. President Jacques Chirac (UMP) repealed the controversial law at the beginning of 2006.

Moldavia and Wallachia

Main article: Slavery in Romania

In the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (both now part of Romania), the government held slavery of the Roma (often referred to as Gypsies) as legal at the beginning of the 19th century. The progressive pro-European and anti-Ottoman movement, which gradually gained power in the two principalities, also worked to abolish that slavery. Between 1843 and 1855, the principalities emancipated all of the 250,000 enslaved Roma people. Many migrated to Western Europe and North America.^{[citation needed]}

In the Americas

Hugh Elliot was a noted abolitionist. Whilst Governor in the British West Indies, he was reported to be the driving force behind the arrest, trial and execution of a wealthy white planter Arthur Hodge for the murder of a slave.

Bartolomé de las Casas was a 16th-century Spanish Dominican priest, the first resident Bishop of Chiapas. As a settler in the New World he witnessed and opposed the poor treatment of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. He advocated before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor on behalf of rights for the natives. Originally supporting the importation of African slaves as laborers, he eventually changed and became an advocate for the Africans in the colonies. His book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, contributed to Spanish passage of colonial legislation known as the New Laws of 1542, which abolished native slavery for the first time in European colonial history. It ultimately led to the Valladolid debate.

Latin America

Punishing slaves at Calabouco, in Rio de Janeiro, c. 1822. Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.

During the Independence Wars (1810–1822), slavery was abolished in most of Latin America. It continued in the region until 1873 in Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil by the Lei Áurea or "Golden Law." Chile declared freedom of wombs in 1811, followed by the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in 1813, but without abolishing slavery completely. While Chile abolished slavery in 1823, Argentina did so with the signing of the Argentine Constitution of 1853. Colombia abolished slavery in 1852. Slavery was abolished in Uruguay during the Guerra Grande, by both the government of Fructuoso Rivera and the government in exile of Manuel Oribe.

Canada

Main article: Slavery in Canada

With slaves escaping to New York and New England, legislation for gradual emancipation was passed in Upper Canada (1793) and Lower Canada (1803). In Upper Canada the Assembly ruled that no slaves could be imported; slaves already in the province would remain enslaved until death, no new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, and children born to female slaves would be slaves but must be freed at age 25. In practice, some slavery continued until abolished in the entire British Empire in the 1830s.

United States

The historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of slavery in the United States." He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery.

The first attempts to end slavery in the British/American colonies came from Thomas Jefferson and some of his contemporaries. Jefferson included strong anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but other delegates took it out. Benjamin Franklin was a leading member of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first recognized organization for abolitionists in the United States. Following the Revolutionary War, Northern states abolished slavery, beginning with Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation act in 1780. Other states with more of an economic interest in slaves, such as New York and New Jersey, also passed gradual emancipation laws, but by 1804, all the northern states had abolished it. Some slaves continued in servitude for two more decades but most were freed.

Also in the postwar years, individual slaveholders, particularly in the Upper South, manumitted slaves, sometimes in their wills. Many noted they had been moved by the revolutionary ideals of the equality of men. The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population increased from less than one percent to nearly ten percent from 1790 to 1810 in the Upper South as a result of these actions.

As President, on March 2, 1807, Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and it took effect in 1808, which was the earliest allowed under the Constitution. In 1820 he privately supported the Missouri Compromise, believing it would help to end slavery. He left the anti-slavery struggle to younger men after that.

In the 1850s in the fifteen states constituting the American South, slavery was established legally. While it was fading away in the cities and border states, it remained strong in plantation areas that grew cotton for export, or sugar, tobacco or hemp. By the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million. American abolitionism was based in the North, and white Southerners alleged it fostered slave rebellion.

The white abolitionist movement in the North was led by social reformers, especially William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society; writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Black activists included former slaves such as Frederick Douglass; and free blacks such as the brothers Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston, who helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Some abolitionists said that slavery was criminal and a sin; they also criticized slave owners of using black women as concubines and taking sexual advantage of them.

The Republican Party wanted to achieve the gradual extinction of slavery by market forces, for its members believed that free labor was superior to slave labor. Southern leaders said the Republican policy of blocking the expansion of slavery into the West made them second-class citizens, and challenged their autonomy. With the 1860 presidential victory of Abraham Lincoln, seven Deep South states whose economy was based on cotton and slavery decided to secede and form a new nation. The American Civil War broke out in April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. As a result, four more slave states seceded.^{[citation needed]} In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the Confederate States; most border states began their own emancipation programs. Thousands of slaves escaped to freedom behind Union Army lines, and in 1863 many men started serving as the United States Colored Troops. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect in December 1865 and finally ended slavery throughout the United States.

Calls for abolition

The first American call to abolish slavery came in April 1688 when Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends. The Quaker establishment never took action. The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was an unusually early, clear and forceful argument against slavery and initiated the spirit that finally led to the end of slavery in the Society of Friends (1776) and in the state of Pennsylvania (1780).

Thomas Paine (1737–1805), whose 1775 article "African Slavery in America" was one of the first article the United States which advocated abolishing slavery and freeing the slaves.

The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14 April 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers. The society suspended operations during the Revolutionary war and was reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president. Rhode Island Quakers, associated with Moses Brown, were among the first in America to free slaves. Benjamin Rush was another leader, as were many Quakers. John Woolman gave up most of his business in 1756 to devote himself to campaigning against slavery along with other Quakers. One of the first articles advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery was written by Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, more popularly known as The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Museum.

Abolition in the North

Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780, most states north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line abolished slavery. While Massachusetts did not abolish slavery, its new constitution of 1780 declared the equal rights of men and became the standard against which slavery ceased. Emancipation in some of the free states was so gradual that both New York and Pennsylvania, for example, still listed a few slaves in their 1840 census returns, and a small number of black slaves (18) were held in New Jersey in 1860 as "perpetual apprentices".

At the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegates debated over slavery, finally agreeing to protect the international slave trade for 20 years by not regulating it before 1808. By that time, all the states had passed individual laws abolishing or severely limiting the international buying or selling of slaves. Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Congress of the Confederation prohibited slavery in the territories northwest of the Ohio River. The importation of slaves into the United States was officially banned on 1 January 1808. No action was taken on the nation's internal domestic slave trade.

John Jay (1745–1829), who founded the New York Manumission Society in 1785.

The principal organized bodies to advocate this reform were the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society. The latter was headed by powerful politicians: John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, later Federalists, and Aaron Burr, later the Democratic-Republican Vice-President of the United States. New York did enact a bill in 1799 that ended slavery over time, but made no provision for the rights of freedmen. Free blacks were subject to racial segregation and discrimination in the North.

Manumission by Southern owners

After 1776, Quaker and Moravian advocates helped persuade numerous slaveholders in the Upper South to free their slaves. Manumissions increased for nearly two decades. Many individual acts of manumission freed thousands of slaves. Slaveholders freed slaves in such number that the percentage of free Negroes in the Upper South increased sharply from one to ten percent, with most of that increase in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By 1810 three-quarters of blacks in Delaware were free. The most notable of men offering manumission was Robert Carter III of Virginia, who freed more than 450 people by "Deed of Gift", filed in 1791. This number was more slaves than any single American had freed or would ever free. Often slaveholders came to their decisions by their own struggles in the Revolution; their wills and deeds frequently cited language about the equality of men supporting their manumissions. Slaveholders were also encouraged to do so because the economics of the area was changing. They were shifting from labor-intensive tobacco culture to mixed-crop cultivation and did not need as many slaves.

The free black families began to thrive, together with African Americans free before the Revolution. By 1860, in Delaware 91.7 percent of the blacks were free, and 49.7 percent of those in Maryland. Such early free families often formed the core of artisans, professionals, preachers and teachers in future generations.

Western territories

During the Congressional debate on the 1820 Tallmadge Amendment, which sought to limit slavery in Missouri as it became a state, Rufus King declared that "laws or compacts imposing any such condition [slavery] upon any human being are absolutely void, because contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God, by which he makes his ways known to man, and is paramount to all human control." The amendment failed and Missouri became a slave state. According to the historian David Brion Davis, this may have been the first time in the world that a political leader openly attacked slavery's perceived legality in such a radical manner.

Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. Postmaster General refused to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South. Northern teachers suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists. They pointed to John Brown's attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising as proof that multiple Northern conspiracies were afoot to ignite slave rebellions. Although some abolitionists did call for slave revolts, no evidence of any other Brown-like conspiracy has been discovered. The North felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests". The famous, "fiery" Abolitionist, Abby Kelley Foster, from Massachusetts, was considered an "ultra" abolitionist who believed in full civil rights for all black people. She held to the views that the freed slaves would colonize Liberia. Parts of the anti-slavery movement became known as "Abby Kellyism". She recruited Susan B Anthony and Lucy Stone to the movement. Effingham Capron, a cotton and textile scion, who attended the Quaker meeting where Abby Kelley Foster and her family were members, became a prominent abolitionist at the local, state, and national levels. The local anti-slavery society at Uxbridge had over one quarter of the town's population as members.

Colonization and the founding of Liberia

Henry Clay (1777–1852), one of the three founders of the American Colonization Society.

In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations were established that advocated relocation of black people from the United States to places where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization, while others advocated emigration. During the 1820s and 1830s the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for proposals to "return" black Americans to freedom in Africa, regardless of whether they were native-born in the United States. It had broad support nationwide among white people, including prominent leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay and James Monroe, who considered this preferable to emancipation. Clay said that due to

"unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they [the blacks] never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off".

Many African Americans opposed colonization, and simply wanted to be given the rights of free citizens in the United States. One notable opponent of such plans was the wealthy free black abolitionist James Forten of Philadelphia.

After attempts to plant small settlements on the coast of West Africa, the A.C.S. established the colony of Liberia in 1821–22. Over the next four decades, it assisted thousands of former slaves and free black people to move there from the United States. The disease environment they encountered was extreme, and most of the migrants died fairly quickly. Enough survived to declare independence in 1847. American support for colonization waned gradually through the 1840s and 1850s, largely because of the efforts of abolitionists to promote emancipation of slaves and granting of United States citizenship. The Americo-Liberians established an elite who ruled Liberia continuously until the military coup of 1980.

Emigration

The emigrationist tradition dated to the Revolutionary War era. Initially, the thought was that free African Americans would want to emigrate to Africa, but over time other ideas became popular. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade relations with the United States. The Haitian Union was the name of a group formed to promote relations between the countries.

After riots against blacks in Cincinnati, its Black community sponsored founding the Wilberforce Colony, an initially successful settlement of African-American immigrants to Canada. The colony was one of the first such independent political entities. It lasted for a number of decades and provided a destination for about 200 black families emigrating from a number of locations in the United States.

Religion and morality

The Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s in religion inspired groups that undertook many types of social reform. For some that included the immediate abolition of slavery as they considered it sinful to hold slaves as well as to tolerate slavery. "Abolitionist" had several meanings at the time. The followers of William Lloyd Garrison, including Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, demanded the "immediate abolition of slavery", hence the name. A more pragmatic group of abolitionists, such as Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan, wanted immediate action, but were willing to support a program of gradual emancipation, with a long intermediate stage.

"Antislavery men", such as John Quincy Adams, did not call slavery a sin. They called it an evil feature of society as a whole. They did what they could to limit slavery and end it where possible, but were not part of any abolitionist group. For example, in 1841 Adams represented the Amistad African slaves in the Supreme Court of the United States and argued that they should be set free. In the last years before the war, "antislavery" could refer to the Northern majority, such as Abraham Lincoln, who opposed expansion of slavery or its influence, as by the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Southerners called all these abolitionists, without distinguishing them from the Garrisonians.

Historian James Stewart (1976) explains the abolitionists' deep beliefs: "All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution."

Slave owners were angry over the attacks on what some Southerners (including the politician John C. Calhoun) referred to as their peculiar institution of slavery. Starting in the 1830s, Southerners developed a vehement and growing ideological defense of slavery. Slave owners claimed that slavery was a positive good for masters and slaves alike, and that it was explicitly sanctioned by God. Biblical arguments were made in defense of slavery by religious leaders such as the Rev. Fred A. Ross and political leaders such as Jefferson Davis. Southern biblical interpretations contradicted those of the abolitionists; a popular one was that the curse on Noah's son Ham and his descendants in Africa was a justification for enslavement of blacks.

Garrison and immediate emancipation

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

A radical shift came in the 1830s, led by William Lloyd Garrison, who demanded "immediate emancipation, gradually achieved". That is, he demanded that slave-owners repent immediately, and set up a system of emancipation. Theodore Weld, an evangelical minister, and Robert Purvis, a free African American, joined Garrison in 1833 to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (Faragher 381). The following year Weld encouraged a group of students at Lane Theological Seminary to form an anti-slavery society. After the president, Lyman Beecher, tried to suppress the group, the students moved to Oberlin College.

Due to the students' anti-slavery position, Oberlin soon became one of the most liberal colleges and accepted African-American students. Along with Garrison, Northcutt and Collins were proponents of immediate abolition. Abby Kelley Foster became an "ultra abolitionist" and a follower of William Lloyd Garrison. She led Susan B. Anthony as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton into the anti-slavery cause.

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), a former slave whose memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), became bestsellers which aided the cause of abolition.

After 1840 "abolition" usually referred to positions similar to Garrison's; it was largely an ideological movement led by about 3000 people, including free blacks and free people of color, many of whom, such as Frederick Douglass in New England, and Robert Purvis and James Forten in Philadelphia, played prominent leadership roles. Douglass became legally free during a two-year stay in England, as British supporters raised funds to purchase his freedom from his American owner Thomas Auld, and also helped fund his abolitionist newspapers in the US. Abolitionism had a strong religious base including Quakers, and people converted by the revivalist fervor of the Second Great Awakening, led by Charles Finney in the North in the 1830s. Belief in abolition contributed to the breaking away of some small denominations, such as the Free Methodist Church.

Evangelical abolitionists founded some colleges, most notably Bates College in Maine and Oberlin College in Ohio. The well-established colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, generally opposed abolition,^{[citation needed]} although the movement did attract such figures as Yale president Noah Porter and Harvard president Thomas Hill.

In the North, most opponents of slavery supported other modernizing reform movements such as the temperance movement, public schooling, and prison- and asylum-building. They were split on the issue of women's activism and their political role, and this contributed to a major rift in the Society. In 1839, brothers Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan left the Society and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which did not admit women. Other members of the Society, including Charles Turner Torrey, Amos Phelps, Henry Stanton, and Alanson St. Clair, in addition to disagreeing with Garrison on the women's issue, urged taking a much more activist approach to abolitionism and consequently challenged Garrison's leadership at the Society's annual meeting in January 1839. When the challenge was beaten back, they left and founded the New Organization, which adopted a more activist approach to freeing slaves. Soon after, in 1840, they formed the Liberty Party, which had as its sole platform the abolition of slavery. By the end of 1840, Garrison himself announced the formation of a third new organization, the Friends of Universal Reform, with sponsors and founding members including prominent reformers Maria Chapman, Abby Kelley Foster, Oliver Johnson, and Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott).

Charles Turner Torrey, c. 1840, from Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Joseph P. Lovejoy, ed. (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co.), 1847

Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison repeatedly condemned slavery for contradicting the principles of freedom and equality on which the country was founded. In 1854, Garrison wrote:

I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form – and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing – with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul. I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or to promote any object. Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence. Convince me that liberty is not the inalienable birthright of every human being, of whatever complexion or clime, and I will give that instrument to the consuming fire. I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together.

Uncle Tom's Cabin inflamed public opinion in the North and in Britain against the personified evils of slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

The most influential abolitionist tract was Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the best-selling novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (which made the escape narrative part of everyday news), Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery. Her depiction of the evil slave owner Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee who kills the Christ-like Uncle Tom, outraged the North, helped sway British public opinion against the South, and inflamed Southern slave owners who tried to refute it by showing some slave owners were humanitarian. It inspired numerous anti-Tom novels, several written and published by women.

Irish Catholics

Irish Catholics in America seldom challenged the role of slavery in society as it was protected at that time by the U.S. Constitution. They viewed the abolitionists as anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. Some have argued that Irish Catholics were well received in the South. However, the voting patterns of the southern states in the 1856 presidential election tell a different story. The results of the 1856 election indicate that the South was the most anti-Catholic and anti-Irish region in the United States.^{[citation needed]} Millard Fillmore ran as the presidential candidate on the anti-Catholic platform of the American Party and won the State of Maryland and also carried 23% of the rest of the southern votes. Addressing the rise of the Know Nothing's anti-Catholic platform in the South, the former governor of Tennessee William B. Campbell wrote in 1855, "I have been astonished at the widespread feeling in favor of their principles—to wit, Native Americanism and anti-Catholicism—it takes everywhere."

Results by county explicitly indicating the percentage for Fillmore in each county.

However, Daniel O'Connell, the Catholic leader of the Irish in Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in the United States. O'Connell had played a leading role in securing Catholic Emancipation (the removal of the civil and political disabilities of Roman Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland) and he was one of William Lloyd Garrison's models. Garrison recruited him to the cause of American abolitionism. O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobald Mathew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United States for abolition.

1829 editorial cartoon mocking the Scottish-born abolitionist Frances Wright.

The Repeal Associations in the United States mostly took a pro-slavery position.^{[citation needed]} Several reasons have been suggested for this: Irish immigrants were fiercely competing with free blacks for low-end jobs, and did not want more free blacks to deal with. They disliked having the same arguments used for Irish and for black freedom; they were Democrats who destructed moralistic reformers; they were loyal to the United States Constitution, which defended their liberties while upholding slavery, and disliked the fundamentally extra-constitutional position of the Abolitionists. They perceived abolitionism as Protestant, and were suspicious of them.^{[citation needed]} In addition, slaveholders had no hesitation in voicing their support for the freedom of Ireland, a white nation outside the United States.^{[citation needed]} The Draft Riots in New York in 1863, led by ethnic Irish against blacks, demonstrated their position.

Radical Irish nationalists – those who broke with O'Connell over his refusal to contemplate the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland – had a diversity of views about slavery. In the minority was outspoken Presbyterian John Mitchel, who spent the years 1853 to 1875 in America, was a passionate propagandist in favor of slavery and the editor of a leading Confederate newspaper. However, the vast majority of Irish American Nationalist leaders like Thomas Francis Meagher, and the great majority of Fenians supported the Union. John Boyle O'Reilly, the famous Fenian poet, political prisoner, and editor of the Boston Pilot, the most influential Catholic newspaper in the United States, spoke out forcefully and consistently on the plight of Blacks, immigrants, American Indians and other downtrodden people seeking a foothold in American life. Meagher and the Fenians proved to be very successful advocates of the North, and men like Brig. Gen. Michael Corcoran, Gen. Thomas William Sweeny, and Col. John O'Mahony and others helped to enlist tens of thousands of Irish-Americans into the Union all-Irish Regiments and Brigades including:

There were 18 Irish American regiments plus the Irish Brigade (U.S.) that volunteered to fight the Civil War for the Union.

Officers and men of the Irish-Catholic 69th New York Volunteer Regiment attend church services in 1861.

The Catholic Church in America had long ties in slaveholding Maryland and Louisiana. Despite a firm stand for the spiritual equality of black people, and the resounding condemnation of slavery by Pope Gregory XVI in his bull In Supremo Apostolatus issued in 1839, the American church continued in deeds, if not in public discourse, to avoid confrontation with slaveholding interests. In 1842, the Archbishop of New York, while denouncing slavery, objected to O'Connell's petition if authentic as unwarranted foreign interference. The Bishop of Charleston declared that, while Catholic tradition opposed slave trading, it had nothing against slavery.^{[citation needed]}

In 1861, the Archbishop of New York wrote to Secretary of War Cameron: "That the Church is opposed to slavery ... Her doctrine on that subject is, that it is a crime to reduce men naturally free to a condition of servitude and bondage, as slaves." No American bishop supported extra-political abolition or interference with state's rights before the Civil War. During the Civil War, however, the Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who was an ally of Lincoln and Seward, would denounce Southern bishops, writing, "In their periodicals in New Orleans and Charleston, they have justified the attitude taken by the South on principles of Catholic theology, which I think was an unnecessary, inexpedient, and, for that matter, a doubtful if not dangerous position, at the commencement of so unnatural and lamentable a struggle."

McKivigan noted that ritualist churches such as the Catholic Church separated themselves from heretics rather than sinners; he observed that Episcopalians and Lutherans also accommodated themselves to slavery. The Anglican Church had been the established church in the South during the colonial period. It was linked to the landed gentry and the wealthier and educated planter classes, longer than any other church. In addition, while the Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening initially opposed slavery in the South, by the early decades of the 19th century, Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had come to an accommodation with it in order to evangelize with farmers and artisans. By the Civil War, the Baptist and Methodist churches split into regional associations over the issue of slavery - the Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists supported it.

After O'Connell's failure, the American Repeal Associations broke up. The Garrison supporters rarely relapsed into the "bitter hostility" of American Protestants toward the Roman Church. Some antislavery men joined the Know Nothings in the collapse of the parties; but Edmund Quincy ridiculed it as a mushroom growth, a distraction from the real issues. Although the Know-Nothing legislature of Massachusetts honored Garrison, he continued to oppose them as violators of fundamental rights to freedom of worship.

Abolitionist women

Like many Quakers, Lucretia Mott considered slavery an evil to be opposed.

William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newsletter the Liberator noted in 1847, "... the Anti-Slavery cause cannot stop to estimate where the greatest indebtedness lies, but whenever the account is made up there can be no doubt that the efforts and sacrifices of the WOMEN, who helped it, will hold a most honorable and conspicuous position." As the Liberator states, women played a crucial role as leaders in the anti-slavery movement.

Angelina and Sarah Grimké were the first female antislavery agents, and played a variety of roles in the abolitionist movement. Though born in the South, the Grimké sisters became disillusioned with slavery and moved North to get away from it. Perhaps because of their birthplace, the Grimké sisters' critiques carried particular weight and specificity. Angelina Grimké spoke of her thrill at seeing white men do manual labor of any kind. Their perspectives as native southerners as well as women, brought a new important point of view to the abolitionist movement. In 1836, they moved to New York and began work for the Anti-Slavery Society, where they met and were impressed by William Lloyd Garrison. The sisters wrote many pamphlets (Angelina's "Appeal to the Christian Women of the South" was the only appeal directly to southern women to defy slavery laws) and played leadership roles at the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837. The Grimkés later made a notable speaking tour around the north, which culminated in Angelina's February 1838 address to a Committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts.

Lucretia Mott was active in the abolitionist movement. Though well known for her women's rights advocacy, Mott also played an important role in the abolitionist movement. Over forty years, she delivered sermons about abolitionism, women's rights, and a host of other issues. Mott acknowledged her Quaker beliefs' determinative role in affecting her abolitionist sentiment. She spoke of the "duty (that) was impressed upon me at the time I consecrated myself to that Gospel which anoints 'to preach deliverance to the captive, to set at liberty them that are bruised ..." Mott's advocacy took a variety of forms: she worked with the Free Produce Society to boycott slave-made goods, volunteered with the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and helped slaves escape to free territory.

Abby Kelley Foster, with a strong Quaker heritage, helped lead Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone into the abolition movement. Kelley influenced future suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone by encouraging them to take on a role in political activism. She helped organize and was a key speaker at the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. (The Seneca Falls Convention, held in 1848, was not national). She was an "ultra" abolitionist who believed in immediate and complete civil rights for all slaves. SInce 1841, however, she resigned from the Quakers over disputes about not allowing anti-slavery speakers in meeting houses (including the Uxbridge monthly meeting where she had attended with her family), and the group disowned her. Abby Kelley became a leading speaker and the leading fundraiser for the American Anti-slavery Society. Radical abolitionism became known as "Abby Kelleyism."

Other luminaries such as Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth all played important roles in abolitionism. But even beyond these well-known women, abolitionism maintained impressive support from white middle-class and some black women. It was these women who performed many of the logistical, day-to-day tasks that made the movement successful. They raised money, wrote and distributed propaganda pieces, drafted and signed petitions, and lobbied the legislatures. Though abolitionism sowed the seeds of the women's rights movement, most women became involved in abolitionism because of a gendered religious worldview, and the idea that they had feminine, moral responsibilities. For example, in the winter of 1831–1832, three women's petitions were written to the Virginia legislature, advocating emancipation of the state's slave population. The only precedent for such action was Catharine Beecher's organization of a petition protesting the Cherokee removal. The Virginia petitions, while the first of their kind, were by no means the last. Similar backing increased leading up to the Civil War.

Even as women played crucial roles in abolitionism, the movement simultaneously helped stimulate women's rights efforts. A full ten years before the Seneca Falls Convention, the Grimkés were travelling, lecturing about their experiences with slavery. As Gerda Lerner says, the Grimkés understood their actions' great impact. "In working for the liberation of the slave," Lerner writes, "Sarah and Angelina Grimké found the key to their own liberation. And the consciousness of the significance of their actions was clearly before them. 'We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down.'"

Women gained important experiences in public speaking and organizing that stood them in good stead going forward. The Grimké sisters' public speaking played a critical part in legitimizing women's place in the public sphere.

The July 1848 Seneca Falls Convention grew out of a partnership between Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that blossomed while the two worked, at first, on abolitionist issues. Indeed, the two met at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in the summer of 1840. Mott brought oratorical skills and an impressive reputation as an abolitionist to the nascent women's rights movement.

Abolitionism brought together active women and enabled them to make political and personal connections while honing communication and organizational skills. Even Sojourner Truth, commonly associated with abolitionism, delivered her first documented public speech at the 1850 National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester. There, she argued for women's reform activism.

Progress of abolition in the United States

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War and Slavery in the United States

See also: Timeline of the African-American Civil Rights Movement

To 1804

Although there were several groups that opposed slavery (such as the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage), at the time of the founding of the Republic, there were few states which prohibited slavery outright. The Constitution had several provisions which accommodated slavery, although none used the word. Passed unanimously by the Congress of the Confederation in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, a vast area which had previously belonged to individual states in which slavery was legal.

Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), judge who wrote The Selling of Joseph (1700) which denounced the spread of slavery in the American colonies.

American abolitionism began very early, well before the United States was founded as a nation. An early law abolishing slavery (but not temporary indentured servitude) in Rhode Island in 1652 floundered within 50 years. Samuel Sewall, a prominent Bostonian and one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials, wrote The Selling of Joseph in protest of the widening practice of outright slavery as opposed to indentured servitude in the colonies. This is the earliest-recorded anti-slavery tract published in the future United States.

In 1777, Vermont, not yet a state, became the first jurisdiction in North America to prohibit slavery: slaves were not directly freed, but masters were required to remove slaves from Vermont. The first state to begin a gradual abolition of slavery was Pennsylvania, in 1780. All importation of slaves was prohibited, but none freed at first; only the slaves of masters who failed to register them with the state, along with the "future children" of enslaved mothers. Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went into effect were not freed until 1847.

Massachusetts took a much more radical position. Its Supreme Court ruled in 1783, that a black man was, indeed, a man; and therefore free under the state's constitution.

An animation showing when states and territories forbade or admitted slavery 1789–1861

Wood engraving of proslavery riot in Alton, Illinois on 7 November 1837, which resulted in the murder of abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802–1837).

All of the other states north of Maryland began gradual abolition of slavery between 1781 and 1804, based on the Pennsylvania model.

South

The institution remained solid in the South, however and that region's customs and social beliefs evolved into a strident defense of slavery in response to the rise of a stronger anti-slavery stance in the North. In 1835 alone abolitionists mailed over a million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the south. In response southern legislators banned abolitionist literature and encouraged harassment of anyone distributing it.

Immediate abolition

Abolitionists included those who joined the American Anti-Slavery Society or its auxiliary groups in the 1830s and 1840s as the movement fragmented. The fragmented anti-slavery movement included groups such as the Liberty Party; the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; the American Missionary Association; and the Church Anti-Slavery Society. Historians traditionally distinguish between moderate antislavery reformers or gradualists, who concentrated on stopping the spread of slavery, and radical abolitionists or immediatists, whose demands for unconditional emancipation often merged with a concern for black civil rights. However, James Stewart advocates a more nuanced understanding of the relationship of abolition and antislavery prior to the Civil War:

While instructive, the distinction [between antislavery and abolition] can also be misleading, especially in assessing abolitionism's political impact. For one thing, slaveholders never bothered with such fine points. Many immediate abolitionists showed no less concern than did other white Northerners about the fate of the nation's "precious legacies of freedom." Immediatism became most difficult to distinguish from broader anti-Southern opinions once ordinary citizens began articulating these intertwining beliefs.

Anti-slavery advocates were outraged by the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a white man and editor of an abolitionist newspaper on 7 November 1837, by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois. Nearly all Northern politicians rejected the extreme positions of the abolitionists; Abraham Lincoln, for example. Indeed many northern leaders including Lincoln, Stephen Douglas (the Democratic nominee in 1860), John C. Fremont (the Republican nominee in 1856), and Ulysses S. Grant married into slave owning southern families without any moral qualms.

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887), an individualist anarchist who wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845).

Antislavery as a principle was far more than just the wish to limit the extent of slavery. Most Northerners recognized that slavery existed in the South and the Constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene there. Most Northerners favored a policy of gradual and compensated emancipation. After 1849 abolitionists rejected this and demanded it end immediately and everywhere. John Brown was the only abolitionist known to have actually planned a violent insurrection, though David Walker promoted the idea. The abolitionist movement was strengthened by the activities of free African-Americans, especially in the black church, who argued that the old Biblical justifications for slavery contradicted the New Testament.

African-American activists and their writings were rarely heard outside the black community; however, they were tremendously influential to some sympathetic white people, most prominently the first white activist to reach prominence, William Lloyd Garrison, who was its most effective propagandist. Garrison's efforts to recruit eloquent spokesmen led to the discovery of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who eventually became a prominent activist in his own right. Eventually, Douglass would publish his own, widely distributed abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.

In the early 1850s, the American abolitionist movement split into two camps over the issue of the United States Constitution. This issue arose in the late 1840s after the publication of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery by Lysander Spooner. The Garrisonians, led by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, publicly burned copies of the Constitution, called it a pact with slavery, and demanded its abolition and replacement. Another camp, led by Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and eventually Douglass, considered the Constitution to be an antislavery document. Using an argument based upon Natural Law and a form of social contract theory, they said that slavery existed outside of the Constitution's scope of legitimate authority and therefore should be abolished.

Another split in the abolitionist movement was along class lines. The artisan republicanism of Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright stood in stark contrast to the politics of prominent elite abolitionists such as industrialist Arthur Tappan and his evangelist brother Lewis. While the former pair opposed slavery on a basis of solidarity of "wage slaves" with "chattel slaves", the Whiggish Tappans strongly rejected this view, opposing the characterization of Northern workers as "slaves" in any sense. (Lott, 129–130)

Idealized portrait of John Brown being adored by an enslaved mother and child as he walks to his execution.

Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the Underground Railroad. This was made illegal by the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Nevertheless, participants like Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Amos Noë Freeman and others continued with their work. Abolitionists were particularly active in Ohio, where some worked directly in the Underground Railroad. Since the state shared a border with slave states, it was a popular place for slaves' escaping across the Ohio River and up its tributaries, where they sought shelter among supporters who would help them move north to freedom. Two significant events in the struggle to destroy slavery were the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. In the South, members of the abolitionist movement or other people opposing slavery were often targets of lynch mob violence before the American Civil War.

Numerous known abolitionists lived, worked, and worshipped in Downtown Brooklyn, from Henry Ward Beecher, who auctioned slaves into freedom from the pulpit of Plymouth Church, to Nathan Egelston, a leader of the African and Foreign Antislavery Society, who also preached at Bridge Street AME and lived on Duffield Street. His fellow Duffield Street residents, Thomas and Harriet Truesdell were leading members of the Abolitionist movement. Mr. Truesdell was a founding member of the Providence Anti-slavery Society before moving to Brooklyn in 1851. Harriet Truesdell was also very active in the movement, organizing an antislavery convention in Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. The Tuesdell's lived at 227 Duffield Street. Another prominent Brooklyn-based abolitionist was Rev. Joshua Leavitt, trained as a lawyer at Yale who stopped practicing law in order to attend Yale Divinity School, and subsequently edited the abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator and campaigned against slavery, as well as advocating other social reforms. In 1841 Leavitt published his The Financial Power of Slavery, which argued that the South was draining the national economy due to its reliance on slavery.

John Brown

John Brown (1800–1859), abolitionist who advocated armed rebellion by slaves. He slaughtered pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and in 1859 was hanged by the state of Virginia for leading an unsuccessful slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry.

Historian Frederick Blue called John Brown "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans." When Brown was hanged after his attempt to start a slave rebellion in 1859, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, large memorial meetings took place throughout the North, and famous writers such as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown. Whereas Garrison was a pacifist, Brown resorted to violence. Historians agree he played a major role in starting the war. Some historians regard Brown as a crazed lunatic while David S. Reynolds hails him as the man who "killed slavery, sparked the civil war, and seeded civil rights." For Ken Chowder he is "the father of American terrorism."

His famous raid in October 1859, involved a band of 22 men who seized the federal Harpers Ferry Armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, knowing it contained tens of thousands of weapons. Brown believed that the South was on the verge of a gigantic slave uprising and that one spark would set it off. Brown's supporters George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe and Gerrit Smith were all abolitionist members of the Secret Six who provided financial backing for Brown's raid. Brown's raid, says historian David Potter, "was meant to be of vast magnitude and to produce a revolutionary slave uprising throughout the South." The raid was a fiasco. Not a single slave revolted. Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army was dispatched to put down the raid, and Brown was quickly captured. Brown was tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. At his trial, Brown exuded a remarkable zeal and single-mindedness that played directly to Southerners' worst fears. Few individuals did more to cause secession than John Brown, because Southerners believed he was right about an impending slave revolt. Shortly before his execution, Brown prophesied, "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood."

American Civil War

From the beginning of the American Civil War, Union leaders identified slavery as the social and economic foundation of the Confederacy, and from 1862 were determined to end that support system. Meanwhile pro-Union forces gained control of the Border States and began the process of emancipation in Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, and in the next 24 months it effectively ended formal slavery throughout the Confederacy. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in December 1865) abolished slavery in the United States, officially freeing more than 50,000 people still enslaved in Kentucky and Delaware.

Notable opponents of slavery

Main article: List of opponents of slavery

National abolition dates

Main article: Abolition of slavery timeline

José Gregorio Monagas abolished slavery in Venezuela in 1854.

Commemoration

The abolitionist movements and the abolition of slavery have been commemorated in different ways around the world in modern times. The United Nations General Assembly declared 2004 the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition. This proclamation marked the bicentenary of the birth of the first black state, Haiti. Numerous exhibitions, events and research programmes were connected to the initiative.

2007 witnessed major exhibitions in British museums and galleries to mark the anniversary of the 1807 abolition act – 1807 Commemorated 2008 marks the 201st anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. It also marks the 175th anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire.

The Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa held a major international conference entitled, "Routes to Freedom: Reflections on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade", from 14 to 16 March 2008. Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover delivered the keynote speech announcing the creation of two major scholarships intended for University of Ottawa law students specializing in international law and social justice at the conference's gala dinner.

Brooklyn, New York has begun work on commemorating the abolitionist movement in New York.

Contemporary abolitionism

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 states:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Although outlawed in most countries, slavery is nonetheless practiced secretly in many parts of the world. Enslavement still takes place in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. There are an estimated 27 million victims of slavery worldwide. In Mauritania alone, estimates are that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved. Many of them are used as bonded labour.

Modern-day abolitionists have emerged over the last several years, as awareness of slavery around the world has grown, with groups such as Anti-Slavery International, the American Anti-Slavery Group, International Justice Mission, and Free the Slaves working to rid the world of slavery. Zach Hunter, for example, began a movement called Loose Change to Loosen Chains when he was in seventh grade. Also featured on CNN and other national news organizations, Hunter has gone on to help inspire other teens and young adults to take action against injustice with his books, Be the Change and Generation Change.

In the United States, The Action Group to End Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery is a coalition of NGOs, foundations and corporations working to develop a policy agenda for abolishing slavery and human trafficking. Since 1997, the United States Department of Justice has, through work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, prosecuted six individuals in Florida on charges of slavery in the agricultural industry. These prosecutions have led to freedom for over 1000 enslaved workers in the tomato and orange fields of South Florida. This is only one example of the contemporary fight against slavery worldwide. Slavery exists most widely in agricultural labor, apparel and sex industries, and service jobs in some regions.

In 2000, the United States passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) "to combat trafficking in persons, especially into the sex trade, slavery, and involuntary servitude." The TVPA also "created new law enforcement tools to strengthen the prosecution and punishment of traffickers, making human trafficking a Federal crime with severe penalties."

The United States Department of State publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, identifying countries as either Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List or Tier 3, depending upon three factors: "(1) The extent to which the country is a country of origin, transit, or destination for severe forms of trafficking; (2) The extent to which the government of the country does not comply with the TVPA's minimum standards including, in particular, the extent of the government's trafficking-related corruption; and (3) The resources and capabilities of the government to address and eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons."

See also

• Abolition of slavery timeline
• Abolition Park
• Abolitionism and Queen Charlotte's paintings
• American Anti-Slavery Society
• American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a spin-off of the American Anti-Slavery Society
• Anti-Slavery International
• Anti-Slavery Society
• Come-outer
• Compensated emancipation
• List of opponents of slavery
• Monument to the abolition of slavery
• James Redpath
• Slavery in the British and French Caribbean
• Slavery in the British Virgin Islands
• The Slave in European Art
• The Slave Power

Further reading

Great Britain and World

• Bader-Zaar, Birgitta: Abolitionism in the Atlantic World: The Organization and Interaction of Anti-Slavery Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2010, retrieved: June 14, 2012.
• Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006)
• Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1999); The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1988)
• Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)
• Finkelman, Paul, ed. Encyclopedia of Slavery (1999)
• Gordon, M. Slavery in the Arab World (1989)
• Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the 18th-century Atlantic World (2003)
• Hellie, Richard. Slavery in Russia: 1450–1725 (1982)
• Hinks, Peter, and John McKivigan, eds. Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition (2 vol. 2006) ISBN 0-313-33142-1; 846pp; 300 articles by experts
• Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005)
• Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor; American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987)
• Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (2008)
• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. "Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World" (2007)
• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997)
• Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (2006)

United States and Canada

• Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. Oxford, 1994. ISBN 0-19-503752-9.
• Bacon, Jacqueline. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2002. ISBN 1-57003-434-6.
• Barnes, Gilbert H. The Anti-Slavery Impulse 1830–1844. Reprint, 1964. ISBN 0-7812-5307-1.
• Berlin, Ira and Leslie Harris. Slavery in New York. New Press, 2005. ISBN 1-56584-997-3.
• Blue, Frederick J. No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. Louisiana State Univ Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8071-2976-3.
• Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-06-052430-8.
• Cogliano, Francis D (2006). Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-2499-7. 
• Crawford, Alan Pell (2008). Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6079-5. 
• Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World Oxford, 2006. ISBN 0-19-514073-7.
• Delbanco, Andrew. The Abolitionist Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery 1830–1860. 1960. ISBN 0-917256-29-8.
• Frost, Karolyn Smardz; Osei, Kwasi (Cover design); South, Sunny (Cover art) (2007). I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-16481-2.  ISBN 978-0-374-53125-6. Winner, 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction; Nominee (Nonfiction), National Book Critics Circle Award 2007. See, Governor General's Award for English language non-fiction.
• David Nathaniel Gellman. Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery And Freedom, 1777–1827 Louisiana State Univ Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8071-3174-1.
• Griffin, Clifford S. Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States 1800–1865. Rutgers Univ Press, 1967. ISBN 0-313-24059-0.
• Hammond, John Craig and Matthew Mason (eds.) Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
• Harrold, Stanley. The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861. Univ Press of Kentucky, 1995. ISBN 0-8131-0968-X.
• Harrold, Stanley. The American Abolitionists. Longman, 2000. ISBN 0-582-35738-1.
• Harrold, Stanley. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves. Univ Press of Kentucky, 2004. ISBN 0-8131-2290-2.
• Hassard, John. The Life of John Hughes: First Archbishop of New York. Arno Press, 1969
• Horton, James Oliver. "Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation" New-York Journal of American History 2004 65(3): 16–24. ISSN 1551–5486
• Huston, James L. "The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse." Journal of Southern History 56:4 (November 1990): 609–640.
• Mayer, Henry All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 0-312-18740-8.
• McKivigan, John R. The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 Cornell Univ Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8014-1589-6.
• McPherson, James M. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP Princeton Univ Press, 1975. ISBN 0-691-04637-9.
• Osofsky, Gilbert. "Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism" American Historical Review 1975 80(4): 889–912. ISSN 0002-8762 in JSTOR
• Perry, Lewis and Michael Fellman, eds. Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists. Louisiana State Univ Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8071-0889-8.
• Peterson, Merrill D. John Brown: The Legend Revisited. Univ Press of Virginia, 2002. ISBN 0-8139-2132-5.
• Peterson, Merrill D. (1960). The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. University of Virginia Press. p. 548. ISBN 0-8139-1851-0. 
• Pierson, Michael D. Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8078-2782-7.
• Schafer, Judith Kelleher. Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862. Louisiana State Univ Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8071-2862-7.
• Salerno, Beth A. Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. Northern Illinois Univ Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87580-338-5.
• Speicher, Anna M. The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers. Syracuse Univ Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8156-2850-1.
• Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Harvard Univ Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-00645-3.
• "Thomas Jefferson and Slavery". Monticello.org. 2010-12-02. Retrieved 2012-05-04. </ref>
• Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge Univ Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-65267-7.
• Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. University of Chicago Press, 1967. ISBN 0-226-98332-3.

External links

• Mémoire St Barth | History of St Barthélemy (archives & history of slavery, slave trade and their abolition), Comité de Liaison et d'Application des Sources Historiques.
• Largest Surviving Anti Slave Trade Petition from Manchester, UK 1806
• Original Document Proposing Abolition of Slavery 13th Amendment
• "John Brown's body and blood" by Ari Kelman: a review in the TLS, 14 February 2007.
• Scotland and the Abolition of the Slave Trade – schools resource
• Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
• Twentieth Century Solutions of the Abolition of Slavery
• Elijah Parish Lovejoy: A Martyr on the Altar of American Liberty
• Brycchan Carey's pages listing British abolitionists
• Teaching resources about Slavery and Abolition on blackhistory4schools.com
• The National Archives (UK): The Abolition of the Slave Trade
• Towards Liberty: Slavery, the Slave Trade, Abolition and Emancipation Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives (UK)]
• The slavery debate
• John Brown Museum
• American Abolitionism
• History of the British abolitionist movement by Right Honourable Lord Archer of Sandwell
• "Slavery – The emancipation movement in Britain", lecture by James Walvin at Gresham College, 5 March 2007 (available for video and audio download)
• Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery | Scholatic.com
• "Black Canada and the Journey to Freedom"
• 1807 Commemorated
• The Action Group
• US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2008
• National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio
• The Liberator Files, Horace Seldon's collection and summary of research of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator original copies at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
• University of Detroit Mercy Black Abolitionist Archive, a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period.
• Abolitionist movement