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Antislavery Movements
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
The Schomburg Center |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
When Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin became a huge bestseller, it inspired many Americans to join the abolitionist's cause. Stowe's book also stood at the end of nearly two centuries of antislavery movements leading into the Civil War. From the Germantown Petition by the Quakers in the late-seventeenth century to the the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War, this excerpt from The New York Public Library's African American Desk Reference documents the long chain of antislavery movements within the United States. |
Quakers
In North America, the first whites to oppose slavery were members of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers. In 1688, a group of Pennsylvania Quakers issued the Germantown Petition, declaring that slavery was incompatible with Christian principles, and the 1696 Yearly Meeting urged Quakers to avoid the slave trade. During the 18th century, anti-slavery sentiments were expressed by such prominent Quakers as John Hepburn, Elihu Coleman, Ralph Sandiford and Benjamin Lay. |
The best known of the Quaker antislavery advocates, John Woolman (1720-1772) of New Jersey, traveled to the South in 1746 and 1757, urging Quaker brethren to free their slaves, either immediately or by a provision in their wills. In concert with Anthony Benezet, Woolman convinced the Society of Friends to take a definitive stance against slavery. In 1755, the society decreed that any member engaged in the importation of slaves would be expelled. In 1790, the Quakers petitioned Congress to end slavery. |
Underground Railroad
As early as the 1780s, an informal network sprang up to aid runaway slaves making their way to freedom in the North. The network was especially active in the western territories after the War of 1812, and by 1830, it had spread through 14 Northern states. The network derived its historic nickname from a Kentucky slave owner who pursued an escaped slave into Ohio then lost track of him, remarking that the man "must have gone off an underground road." |
Scholars have identified 3,200 active workers in the Underground Railroad, including legendary "conductors" such as Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson, who boldly ventured into the slave states to lead runaways north. The network consisted of numerous safe houses, including that of the Quaker Levi Coffin, who sheltered many fugitives in the attic of his Indiana home (now a national historic landmark). Another important stop on the Underground Railroad was Oberlin College in Ohio, the first US college to admit women and blacks and a bastion of the abolitionist movement. Between 1810 and 1860, perhaps as many as 100,000 enslaved African Americans--most were between 15 and 35 years of age--reached the free states and Canada by means of the Underground Railroad. Pursuit by slaveholders and their agents, sanctioned by the federal Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850, was a major cause of friction between North and South. |
Manumission movements
Between 1785 and 1792, opponents of slavery established manumission societies in New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts, urging the liberation of slaves by will or by deed. During this period, a number of states in the northeast passed laws madating a gradual abolition of slavery. Antislavery sentiment was reflected in Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution, which decreed that the slave trade would be illegal after 1808. By 1826, there were 143 manumission societies in the United States, 103 of them in the South. Leading Southern journals advocating manumission included the Manumission Intelligencer, the Emancipator, and the Patriot, all founded between 1819 and 1821. |
Colonization projects
The idea of repatriating freed slaves to settlements in Africa was first proposed in 1714 but never acted upon. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson drew up a colonization plan and presented it to the Virginia legislature. (At that time, Jefferson advocated manumission but doubted that free blacks would be able to live harmoniously with whites.) |
Paul Cuffe, ship owner and early advocate of black nationalism, put Jefferson's ideas into action in 1815, when he transported 38 free blacks to Sierra Leone, the West African colony created by British antislavery activists in 1787. Cuffe's action inspired the formation of the American Colonization Society, founded in Virginia in 1817 by Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson and other slaveholding whites. Four years later, the society founded the settlement of Monrovia, just south of Sierra Leone. In 1847, Monrovia became Liberia, the first republic in Africa with a government modeled on that of the United States. Other projects included the Mississippi Colonization Society, founded in 1831; and Nashoba, a utopian community near Memphis, Tennessee, founded in 1826 by Fanny Wright in order to prepare freed slaves for eventual resettlement abroad. In the years before the Civil War, approximately 15,000 free blacks resettled in West Africa. |
The issue of colonization caused considerable controversy among African American leaders. Leaders such as Cuffe and John Russwurm argued that African Americans would never be treated justly in the United States and should return to their ancestral homeland. Most antislavery leaders, however, agreed with Richard Allen, James Forten and Frederick Douglass, who maintained that African Americans should remain in the United States and fight for justice in the nation they had done so much to create. Black leaders recognized that many who urged the repatriation of free blacks to Africa were more interested in removing free blacks from the Americas than in improving the African Americans' lot or making some sort of restitution for their enslavement. |
Radical abolitionism
By the 1830s, many opponents of slavery turned from moderate appeals for manumission to demands for immediate and complete abolition. The spearhead of the movement was William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper the Liberator, which published its first issue on January 1, 1831. The following year, Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1833 he played a leading role in founding the American Anti-Slavery Society. During the years before the Civil War, about 200,000 Americans belonged to various abolition societies. In addition to Garrison, leading white abolitionists included Wendell Phillips, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, Theodore Weld, James G. Birney, and Angelina and Sarah Grimki. After suffering a crippling internal split during the 1840s over the inclusion of women's rights in its agenda, the abolitionist movement scored its greatest propaganda success with the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's book became a runaway best-seller and aroused antislavery sentiment among many readers who had previously not supported the abolitionist cause. |
This feature is derived from pages 60-63 of The New York Public Library's African American Desk Reference, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
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