Antislavery Movement

By: Richard Newman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Antislavery Movement

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the perfect embodiment of the American antislavery movement. As a young slave on a large Maryland plantation, he rebelled both physically and psychologically against bondage. When he escaped in 1838 Douglass used the Underground Railroad to make his way north. As a fugitive slave in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass formally joined the abolitionist movement, quickly becoming one of the best-known speakers at antislavery meetings. With his two antebellum autobiographies, Douglass helped pioneer the genre of the slave narrative. His final postwar autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, epitomized the successful reminiscences of abolitionists. He also edited three important abolitionist newspapers through antebellum society's most tumultuous years.

During the Civil War, which resulted in the emancipation of nearly four million slaves, Douglass advocated abolition as strenuously as ever and recruited black soldiers for the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the Union's first African American unit. Finally, long after the Civil War ended, an aging but still dedicated Douglass fought to preserve the memory of the antislavery struggle. “Whatsoever else I may forget,” he declared at a Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) event in Rochester, New York, in 1883, as related by the historian David Blight, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” Blight himself notes, “He viewed Emancipation as the central reference point of black history.” One might add that the antislavery struggle was the central reference point of Douglass's long career as an abolitionist, orator, writer, editor, and ultimately the conscience of the American nation. In short, one cannot find a better guide to the evolving meaning and impact of the American antislavery movement than the life of Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey Douglass.

Antislavery before Douglass

While Douglass shaped the formal antislavery struggle virtually from the moment he entered it, even he realized that abolitionism had a long and distinguished—if not entirely successful—history in early America. The antislavery movement encompassed a truly broad array of people, movements, and ideas in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Indeed, antislavery action dated to the beginning of bondage on the North American continent. About twelve million slaves were imported to the New World between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, but about one-half million came to North America. As recent scholarship has suggested, colonial slaves fought their bondage by resisting work, running away, and plotting rebellions.

A coherent body of antislavery thought matured only slowly and haltingly in both North American and transatlantic culture. Prior to the American Revolution, every British colony sanctioned bondage, and slavery was an integral part of the Anglo-American economy. Every major religious group contained slaveholders and sanctioned bondage. Several colonies prohibited even private manumission.

Quakers established the first formal antislavery movement in America during the 1750s. Defining slavery as a violation of religious principles, the Society of Friends in Pennsylvania insisted that slaveholders either relinquish their bondsmen or leave the denomination. Quakers thus became a vanguard of abolitionism during the Revolutionary era, staffing many of the leading antislavery groups and setting a precedent for other religious groups to follow. During the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s Methodists, Baptists, and Anglicans all began debating slavery. While no group instituted Quaker-style prohibitions on slaveholding, religiously inspired acts of manumission occurred with greater frequency than ever in the twenty years following the American Revolution.

Revolutionary rhetoric had also undermined slavery's normative status by the end of the eighteenth century. American statesmen began identifying slavery not only as a moral wrong but also as an anomaly in a democratic republic. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “I tremble for my country when I recall that God is just.” Enslaved people influenced emancipation efforts by using the disruptions of the Revolutionary War years either to run away—several thousand slaves fled with British troops in New York, Virginia, and elsewhere—or to bargain with masters for freedom. Thus for both religious and philosophical reasons, antislavery trends accelerated in the late 1700s. In Virginia, which had the new nation's largest slave population, guilty masters petitioned the legislature in such impressive numbers that the General Assembly of Virginia altered its emancipation policy in 1783: masters no longer needed to petition the assembly for permission to liberate enslaved people. Perhaps as many as six thousand slaves were liberated in the Old Dominion by the early 1800s.

To bolster abolition as a national movement—one not limited to religious groups or private emancipation acts—northern Quakers and their allies established the world's first abolition societies during the 1770s and 1780s. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), inaugurated in 1775 and then reorganized in 1784, and the New York Manumission Society, formed in 1784, were the two largest and most important early abolition groups, with membership in each organization reaching several hundred at their peak. These first-generation abolitionists hoped to gradually end slavery at the state level, stop the overseas slave trade at the federal level, and encourage political leaders to make full emancipation a national goal. They worked strategically, lobbying political and legal leaders using skillful argumentation and deferential discourse; early abolitionists conceded that the slavery debate, if too heated, could divide the Union. Still, through local and state organizations as well as the American Convention of Abolition Societies (which met first in 1794 and then biennially until 1836), these groups petitioned governments to adopt gradual abolition laws. Pennsylvania created the world's first gradual emancipation act in 1780, requiring all masters to register bondpeople born after the law's passage with a state official; these slaves would then be freed at the age of 28. Between 1780 and 1804 every northern state would adopt similar laws or abolish slavery in their constitutions. Massachusetts ended slavery by judicial decree in 1783 after an enslaved person, Quok Walker, sued for his freedom.

Although they never advocated immediate emancipation at the national level, early abolitionists engaged in many other antislavery activities. Abolitionists took great pride in pushing the federal government to end the slave trade after 1807, as the Constitution had outlined but not mandated. They worked to ban slavery and the domestic slave trade in the federally controlled District of Columbia during the 1820s. Perhaps most impressively, both the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society distinguished themselves by aiding kidnapped free blacks and, on occasion, fugitive slaves in courts of law. Early reformers' legal efforts helped liberate hundreds of slaves between the 1780s and 1830s.

As a formal movement, then, antislavery garnered early successes at the state level. However, it had stalled nationally by the early 1800s. The Continental Congress had adopted a few key antislavery provisions: in 1784 it considered, but did not adopt, an ordinance prohibiting slavery's expansion into future southwestern territories. In 1787 the Continental Congress did pass the Northwest Ordinance, prohibiting bondage from spreading into future midwestern states. But the new Constitution of 1787 solidified slavery's place in the Union with the three-fifths clause (which counted three-fifths of the enslaved population in the apportionment of congressional representatives and electoral votes), a promise of federal military aid to suppress slave insurrections, a guarantee of fugitive slave recovery (with the first Fugitive Slave Law in 1793), and a delay on the consideration of any slave trade ban until at least 1807. This last point is often overlooked. In the early 1800s South Carolina and Georgia alone imported nearly one hundred thousand slaves before the ban took effect.

In short, while slavery was slowly eradicated from northern states, it nevertheless grew demographically as well as geographically. At the time of the first federal census in 1790, about seven hundred thousand slaves and only sixty-three thousand free blacks lived in America. By 1830 the number of slaves had nearly tripled to 2 million, with free blacks then numbering 250,000.

Despite antislavery's gradualist beginnings and partial successes, Frederick Douglass acknowledged his debts to abolitionists of the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. In speeches and newspaper articles during the 1850s he praised Quakers for their early dedication to emancipation. Douglass also saluted first-generation abolitionists' concerns for the education and advancement of free blacks.

Douglass also paid homage to African American reformers who fought for racial justice in the nation's earliest years. Although denied formal membership in early abolition societies, an inaugural generation of black activists emerged from both free and enslaved backgrounds to establish a vibrant protest tradition based on public reform tactics like pamphleteering and public oration. Long before Douglass published his first narrative, black pamphleteers like Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, James Forten, Lemuel Haynes, Peter Williams, and Prince Hall took aim at slavery and racial injustice through printed essays, sermons, and speeches. Allen and Jones—both former slaves—published the first copyrighted black pamphlet in Philadelphia in January 1794 titled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia. The pamphlet took white Philadelphians to task for stereotyping black relief workers as harmful and shiftless—despite their heroic work during the city's famous yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Remove the stain of slavery, the pamphlet argued, and African Americans would become valuable citizens in their own right. Allen and Jones also attacked slavery as a religious sin.

Douglass duly recognized his debts to Allen, Jones, Forten, Williams, and other first-generation black leaders. These men not only had pushed for slavery's end but also had challenged racial discrimination in northern locales where bondage had been gradually eradicated. Their literary appeals—pamphlets and reprinted speeches—helped open new tactical avenues to abolitionism and pointed the way to moral suasion, as advocated by William Lloyd Garrison. From early black reformers Douglass also gleaned a broader philosophical outlook on black activism itself. His philosophy became grounded in a belief that the nation's racial problems were not intractable—that by following America's founding words and deeds, advocating liberty and justice for all, slavery could be eradicated and racial justice achieved.

While early antislavery activism formed one important part of Douglass's abolitionist heritage, enslaved people's protests formed another. In his speeches and autobiographies alike, Douglass alluded to the daily struggle of enslaved people as an inspiration for his activism. He often referred to slaves as “my brethren in bonds” and lauded their struggle to survive in the face of masters' incessant collective will to dominate their bond servants mentally as well as physically. Douglass understood most slaves' inability to physically stand up to slaveholders and knew that enslaved people longed for freedom. As he told a New York City audience on 6 May 1845, as he recorded in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, “To you I bring a thankful heart … in the name of three millions of slaves, [and] I offer you their gratitude for your faithful advocacy in behalf of the slave.”

Douglass also knew that the fight of enslaved people would not be recorded properly for many years to come. Thus he offered a steady stream of references and allusions to grassroots black protest in his speeches and publications. Several major rebellions occurred before Douglass entered the abolition movement: Gabriel's conspiracy (outside Richmond, Virginia, in 1800) and Denmark Vesey's revolt (in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822) were elaborately planned but foiled before they started; Nat Turner's rebellion (in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831) resulted in the deaths of more than fifty white citizens before being put down. Douglass paid particular attention to the slave revolutions in Haiti (1791–1804), which resulted in the creation of the Western Hemisphere's first black republic. The events in Haiti scared southern masters but inspired both black activists and southern slaves. In the 1850s Frederick Douglass' Paper included nearly two dozen references to the Haitian slave rebel Toussaint Louverture. On 2 March 1855 Douglass approvingly republished a lecture by C. W. Elliott praising the revolutionary leader as an icon who merely sought to bring liberty to black men everywhere. If Douglass did not believe that a massive slave rebellion was possible in America, he nevertheless believed that the words and ideas of rebels like Toussaint Louverture provided crucial insight into slaves' collective will to freedom.

Douglass and the Antislavery Renaissance

The antislavery movement changed drastically during the 1820s and 1830s—years when a young Douglass grew to hate bondage, escaped from Maryland slavery, and became a member of the American abolitionist community. Abolitionism changed still more as Douglass began to shape that community during the 1840s. Unlike first-generation activists who espoused gradualism, post-1830s reformers began to advocate immediate abolition. Organizationally, second-generation abolitionists initiated interracial antislavery societies (the Pennsylvania Abolition Society did not admit its first black member, Robert Purvis, until the 1830s). Second-wave activists also mobilized women as key reformers. Tactically, these so-called modern abolitionists attempted to rout bondage not by skillfully and deferentially lobbying elite political figures but by mobilizing public opinion through the press, oratory, and grassroots organization in both rural and urban areas. Older abolitionists still active in the 1830s worried that immediatists would ruin the Republic; post-1830s abolitionists engaged in tactics that early reformers had rejected, such as the forming of abolitionist political parties. In short, the American antislavery movement grew more militant and more diverse in the three decades leading up to the Civil War.

Like other abolitionists coming into the movement after 1830, Douglass found this modern brand of antislavery activism to be akin to a crusade—and he loved it. No sooner had Douglass read one of the leading organs of radical abolitionism—Garrison's newspaper the Liberator (first published on 1 January 1831)—on arriving in Massachusetts than he became a convert. In his 1845 Narrative Douglass noted, “I got a pretty correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of antislavery reform, [and] my soul was set on fire.” Antiabolitionists in the North and South, on the other hand, frowned on the movement as reckless and fanatical. Although it underwent a series of changes before the Civil War, the immediatist abolition movement would not disappear until its objective had been achieved.

While for years scholars focused on the 1831 publication of the Liberator as a signal event, later scholarship notes that Garrison's paper reflected but did not create the changes that occurred in the antislavery struggle. A new wave of religious revivalism had spread across American culture in the 1820s, demanding that Americans eradicate sin from society. Some reformers channeled revivalism into support for immediate abolitionism. Economic changes in northern culture led to slavery's becoming a southern institution—though one with important markets and financial backers in the North. Still, by the 1820s every northern state—as well as new northwestern states like Ohio and Illinois—forbade bondage. Black public protest became more aggressive and ramifying during the 1820s, influencing younger white reformers like Garrison, who had formerly been a moderate abolitionist.

Black public protest became particularly important during early debates over the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816. The ACS purportedly sought to send free blacks to African settlements as an inducement to slaveholders, who might then liberate their own bondpeople on the condition that they be exported overseas. Yet while some members of the ACS claimed to be antislavery advocates—indeed, some slaveholders feared the organization to be a Trojan Horse of antislavery itself—the group was dominated by slaveholders and northern antiabolitionists; the ACS assembled northerners and southerners alike who agreed that free blacks were nearly as problematic as slavery. Nevertheless, early abolition groups like the PAS refused to publicly condemn the ACS because it contained prominent members like Henry Clay and James Madison.

On the other hand, free black activists did not hesitate to attack the group; in fact, black reformers became the vanguard of the anticolonization movement before 1830 and therefore a key part of the transformation of American abolitionism. Anticolonization documents produced by free blacks would become a cornerstone not only of black protest but also of future antislavery activists; in 1832 Garrison published a collection of such documents, Thoughts on African Colonization. Black activists used Freedom's Journal, the first black-edited newspaper (published in New York City between 1827 and 1829) as a vehicle for anticolonizationist thought. The paper also established a national dialogue among black reformers over antislavery tactics in the colonization era. David Walker, a Freedom's Journal correspondent, emerged as a key spokesman during this period. His 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, published in Boston and sent as far as Virginia and Georgia, aggressively challenged the notion that America was a white republic—and that blacks had to defer to white fears regarding abolition. Walker incredulously asked white Americans if they needed to have the Declaration of Independence reread to them and challenged black readers to mobilize nationally and demand abolitionism. Walker died mysteriously in 1830, but his pamphlet illuminated a more fiery pathway toward abolition.

The New England Anti-Slavery Society, the first immediatist group in America, founded in Boston in 1832, and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), the first such national group, founded in Philadelphia in 1833, embraced a broad strategy of moral suasion. By convincing Americans of slavery's sinfulness, abolitionists hoped that the population at large would demand abolition from national leaders and that southern slaveholders would independently liberate slaves. Thus immediate abolitionists spent the majority of their funds on the publication and dissemination of antislavery petitions, pamphlets, newspapers, and eventually slave narratives; during the first quarter century of the antislavery movement, no organization had funded the publication of an explicit antislavery newspaper or had sought to capitalize on the literary output of former slaves.

The first abolitionist journals appeared in the late 1810s and early 1820s. Benjamin Lundy's Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821–1838) was one of the earliest such papers. After 1831 abolitionists supported not only the Liberator but a host of other antislavery papers as well, including the Emancipator (started by the AASS in New York City in 1836), the Philanthropist (published in Cincinnati at the same time), and the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840–1870). Abolitionists also sponsored grassroots lecturing campaigns in northeastern and midwestern states. As James Brewer Stewart writes in his book Holy Warriors, by the early 1830s abolitionists were already embracing mass communication as a key tactic in the fight against slavery. Early mass media provided gripping accounts of slavery's evil and allowed women to become key figures in the movement. Indeed, both black and white female abolitionists engaged in a variety of activities to bolster the movement. They served as editors of newspapers, held local antislavery fairs throughout the North, and secured hundreds of thousands of signatures on state and federal antislavery petitions.

While the moral suasion approach emphasized appeals to morality over practical politicking, during the 1830s some immediate abolitionists pushed for attempts to alter public policy, too. Amos Phelps, a Massachusetts minister turned immediate abolitionist, argued that numerical majorities produced by moral suasion tactics could push for a constitutional amendment banning slavery. Garrison was supportive of Phelps's ideas.

Douglass's twin roles as orator and editor wonderfully illuminate moral suasion strategies. As related by Blight, his first speech before an interracial audience came on 11 August 1841. “I spoke but a few moments,” he later recalled, “when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I'd desired with considerable ease. From that time … I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren.” Douglass's words on that day electrified even immediate abolitionists who had been publishing, speaking, and protesting for over a decade. “I shall never forget his first speech,” Garrison proclaimed. “I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear the never.” Douglass became one of the featured speakers on the abolitionist circuit over the next decade, traveling throughout America and to Canada and Britain. One of Douglass's early epic tours saw him and Charles Lenox Remond visiting more than thirty midwestern locales in just three months during the fall of 1843. When Douglass turned his lectures on his experiences into a personal narrative in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it quickly became a best-seller.

Of course, Douglass's role as editor and author is well known. He published three newspapers from his new home in Rochester between 1847 and 1864: the North Star (1847–1851), Frederick Douglass' Paper (1851–1859), and Douglass' Monthly (1859–1863). In this endeavor Douglass expanded on one of the most important abolitionist tactics of the 1820s and 1830s—the creation of newspapers dedicated solely to the antislavery cause. He also published three autobiographies during his long life, illuminating one of the most important tools African Americans used to influence abolitionism after 1830: slave narratives. Some two hundred narratives flowed from the abolitionist press in the antebellum period; Americans became familiar with the tales of former slaves such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northup, Henry “Box” Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Addressing an increasingly literate white middle-class northern audience, slave narratives uncovered the realities of bondage and underscored the emotional toll of slavery on black Americans. Often framed by white interlocutors, slave narratives helped make antislavery a broader concern in American culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold more than 1 million copies in the 1850s, helped ignite sectional debates over slavery in both political and cultural venues. After the novel's publication and success, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, listing the sources for her book, which included many slave narratives. Literary journals of the North proclaimed that slave narratives had become a whole new genre of American literature.

Although only a fraction of the northern white population ever joined the new interracial and immediatist antislavery societies after 1830 (perhaps 2 percent to 5 percent in some locales), abolitionist tactics and activities put disproportionate pressure on society in the thirty years leading up to the Civil War. Immediatists like Douglass believed that their moralizing strategies would halt slavery's growth and persuade masters to eradicate slavery in the South. There were indeed hopeful signs during the 1830s. Abolitionists' moral suasion tactics—massively bombarding the American public with discussions of the evil of slavery—produced a brief surge in antislavery growth. By the mid-1830s abolitionist organizations appeared in every northern state, signatures to abolitionist petitions numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and public debate over slavery occurred more regularly than ever before, from large eastern cities like Boston to new market towns like Buffalo in western New York. Yet slavery did not die even under such intense public scrutiny. Between 1830 and 1860 the institution almost doubled in size, with the number of enslaved persons increasing from 2 million to 3.9 million. Moreover, slavery had spread into a host of new southern states, from Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana in the early national period to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas in the 1820s and 1830s. Also, northern textile production—particularly of products either made from southern cotton or destined for southern plantations—depended heavily on the southern cotton industry.

“New Method of Assorting the Mail, as Practiced by Southern Slave-Holders; or Attack on the Post Office, Charleston. S.C.” Lithograph of 1835 showing a raid in July of that year by a mob that ransacked the mail and destroyed bundles of abolitionist periodicals, including The Liberator. The sign on the wall offers a bounty from New Orleans for the capture of Arthur Tappan, founder and president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Library of Congress.

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Radical abolitionism faced increasing hostility by the 1840s, from not only southern slaveholders but also many northerners as well. Even in immediate abolition's stronghold, the Massachusetts governor Edward Everett tried to prevent abolitionist lecturers from speaking in the state. At the federal level Congress passed a gag rule preventing discussion of abolitionist petitions between 1836 and 1844. The idealism and hope of immediate abolitionists had hit a wall, and many reformers were ready to employ new tactics to slay bondage.

Douglass and the Coming of the Civil War

With antiabolitionism strengthening and slavery growing stronger, the antislavery movement began fragmenting into quarrelsome and even competing factions by the 1840s. Divisive issues abounded, including the degree of prominence of female activists within abolitionism; the justifiability of violent tactics, even for free black northerners attempting to hold off kidnapping attempts; the use of the Constitution to battle slavery; and the possible formation of an abolitionist political party.

Douglass was a unique figure within the fragmenting antislavery movement as one of the few activists who could move among the various factions and still earn the respect of most of his abolitionist brethren. As such Douglass became one of the most thoughtful and introspective immediatists: he questioned the meaning of his activism at regular intervals and was not afraid of switching positions. His stand on the Constitution offers perhaps the best example. Although initially he aligned himself with the Garrisonian position of the 1840s and 1850s—that the Constitution sanctioned bondage and was therefore, in Garrison's words, “an agreement with Hell, a covenant with Death”—Douglass had changed his tune by the 1850s, arguing that the Constitution was in fact an antislavery document through and through. Starting his own newspaper in Rochester at this time, as Douglass confided in his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, “compelled me to rethink the whole subject.” The Constitution, he wrote, “could not well have been designed … to maintain and perpetuate” so evil an institution as slavery. Douglass's new views brought him into opposition with former friends; although “painful” to disagree with his cohorts, it was, he thought, the right position to take.

While antislavery debate touched on myriad issues in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, a few stand out because of their impact on both Douglass's antislavery activism and the movement as a whole. One issue concerned the movement's staffing and leadership. A year prior to Douglass's first public speech in 1841, the national antislavery movement had divided into organizations that disagreed over the question of women's roles. A faction that believed in the minimization of women's roles broke away from the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Another faction, of which Douglass was a part, believed that women's activism should be central to the abolitionist struggle. Douglass, for one, was not afraid to share the stage with female reformers such as Abby Kelley Foster, who became the first female lecturing agent hired by the AASS in 1839. As Waldo Martin writes in his book The Mind of Frederick Douglass, beyond “black liberation,” Douglass remained a lifelong advocate of women's equality. Though first and foremost committed to abolitionism, Douglass viewed “women's liberation” as a vital part of his reform vision. Indeed, for Douglass both abolitionism and women's rights reform stemmed from what Martin refers to as his “egalitarian humanism.” He attended the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, favored women's suffrage, and worked together with a variety of female activists on the abolition circuit. In this sense Douglass's support of the women's rights movement exemplifies antislavery's capacious growth in antebellum society.

Regarding abolitionism itself, female activists formed a critical foundation of the movement after 1830. Although Quaker women in particular had spoken out against slavery in colonial and early national society, no female reformer had been asked—or even allowed—to join the leading antislavery groups of the new Republic. Thus, during the 1820s and 1830s women in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and other locales began mobilizing their own antislavery groups; they soon became members of the national antislavery movement as well. Inspired by women's activism in Great Britain—in the 1820s England's Elizabeth Heyrick became one of the first transatlantic white reformers to publicly advocate immediatism—as well as a new wave of revivalism, abolitionist women served as fund-raisers, publicists, editors, petition canvassers, and organizers of local abolition groups. Abolitionist women were responsible for gathering perhaps as many as 2 million signatures to antislavery petitions after 1830.

A related and equally contentious issue also roiled the abolitionist movement: the roles and tactics of black activists. Tensions between black and white reformers stretched back to the movement's very beginnings. In the early 1830s, when the first interracial abolitionist organizations were founded, many African American activists were instilled with the hope that they would be able to share power with whites. By the mid-1830s, however, black activists were expressing concerns about their relationships to condescending whites; some began to wonder why so few African Americans occupied leadership positions in the American Anti-Slavery Society. As the former slave and black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet would proclaim of white reformers in the 1840s, “they are our allies—ours is the battle!” Douglass's ally James McCune Smith wrote in Frederick Douglass' Paper on 26 January 1855, “Blacks almost began the present movement. … They certainly ante-dated many of its principles.” Indeed, the black convention movement remained an important part of the broader antislavery struggle between 1830 and 1864, during which time black activists held twelve national conventions—every year between 1830 and 1835, then in 1843, 1847, 1848, 1853, 1855, and 1864. These meetings witnessed debates over violent tactics, political strategies, relationships to white reformers and a host of economic issues. Douglass attended several of these national conventions and hosted the one in Rochester in 1853.

Tensions between black and white reformers translated into often-fierce tactical debates, particularly over the matters of violent revolt among southern slaves and self-defense among free blacks. While Garrisonian reformers embraced nonresistance, or opposition to violent struggle, many black reformers advocated a more practical position. In 1835, for instance, the New Yorker David Ruggles formed a vigilance society to protect free blacks and fugitive slaves from devious slave catchers; the society proclaimed physical confrontation acceptable if need be. Ruggles's organization would aid several hundred fugitive slaves and kidnapped free blacks—including Douglass himself when he fled from bondage. Similar groups would form in Boston and Philadelphia over the next twenty-five years. By the 1850s, following the passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law, confrontational fugitive slave rescues in Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, and elsewhere became major news events and increased southern sensitivities over slavery's security in a union that comprised black as well as white abolitionists.

Douglass initially adhered to Garrison's moral suasion strategies, opposing Garnet's call for a slave uprising at the 1843 black convention in Buffalo, but shifted positions in the decade before the Civil War. Douglass joined the Radical Abolitionist Party in 1855, which sought to battle slavery in the southern states themselves. Douglass held secret discussions with John Brown before his raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859; although convinced that the raid itself was ill advised and would fail, he refused to condemn the man's violent tactics. “Let every man work for the abolition of slavery in his own way,” he wrote on 31 October 1859 in an attempt to clarify his role in the raid and his support of Brown. He added, “I would help all and hinder none”—including rebels like Brown.

Perhaps the most significant debate to occur within the antislavery movement was that over political tactics. Political party activity was initiated between the 1840s and the onset of the Civil War, causing vigorous debate. Garrisonian abolitionists came to view political parties as corrupt because they diluted reformers' moral imperative. Other activists saw political parties as a legitimate means to propagate antislavery principles. The Liberty Party, the inaugural abolitionist political organization, sought to end slavery in federally controlled areas such as the District of the Columbia and to limit slavery's expansion in western territories. The former-master-turned-abolitionist James Gillespie Birney received only seven thousand votes as the Liberty Party's first presidential candidate in 1840. In 1844 the Liberty Party still garnered only sixty thousand votes but may have helped determine the outcome of the election by winning roughly fifteen thousand votes in New York, where the slaveholding Whig and presidential hopeful Henry Clay lost to the Democrat James Polk by fewer than seven thousand votes. While it is impossible to know how many Liberty Party votes might have supported the moderately proslavery Clay over the more rabidly proslavery Polk, the close vote in New York certainly sent the message to politicians that the slavery vote mattered. For the first time antislavery politics had influenced the nation's governance.

The advent of the Free-Soil Party in 1848 intensified debate over antislavery politics. Free-Soilers embraced a policy of nonextension—but not of abolition in federally controlled areas. Their slogan of “free soil, free labor, free men” also spoke little of African American rights. The party's decision to nominate Andrew Jackson's former vice president Martin Van Buren, a Democrat who did not favor interference with southern slavery, created fierce opposition among many stalwart abolitionists. While Free-Soilers attracted more support than the Liberty Party, many abolitionists then renounced party politics altogether. Nevertheless, the Free-Soil Party made the strategy of nonextension of slavery in the West a viable one and provided a pivot point for the creation of the Republican Party. The Free-Soil Party also further underscored the power of antislavery political action, as significant numbers of votes were taken from the Democratic candidate, setting the stage for the election of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor.

The majority of black activists remained advocates of political tactics and strategies; by the 1850s, as John Stauffer notes in his book The Black Hearts of Men, African Americans overwhelmingly favored political action. Douglass supported a variety of political parties that not only opposed slavery in theory but also acted against the institution in deed. He supported the new Republican Party, the successor to the Free-Soil Party, as early as 1855 for its pledge to stop slavery's expansion in the western territories. Although he worried about Republicans' refusal to embrace racial equality and to make abolition in the South a goal, Douglass supported Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

While conceding property rights to southern masters, the Republican Party publicly condemned slavery as an evil institution and vowed to stop its expansion in the territories. The party included well-known statesmen, including the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, the Ohio governor Salmon Portland Chase, and the New York senator William Henry Seward, as well as new voices—most notably, Lincoln. If many die-hard abolitionists saw the Republican Party as little better than the Free-Soil Party—for its refusal to advocate immediate abolition—other reformers celebrated the Republicans' infusion of broad antislavery principles into mainstream politics. Indeed, the Republican Party's strong nonextension platform helped intensify sectional politics. Abraham Lincoln professed to hating slavery but admitted that the national government had no constitutional power to do anything about it in the South. Slavery's expansion, however, was another matter. Lincoln told Republicans to remain steadfast opponents of the spread of slavery into federally controlled territories. Republicans' antislavery—though not abolitionist—pledge, combined with southern secessionists' desire to cleave the Union, resulted in the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century. By 1865 secessionists' actions would also lead, ironically, to the emancipation of 3.9 million enslaved people in the South.

Douglass's Civil War

The Civil War (1861–1865) brought the antislavery movement its final victory over bondage. It represented for Douglass a period of turmoil and triumph—the turmoil of having to struggle to convince even northerners, from Lincolnite Republicans to average citizens, to declare war on slavery and the triumph of living to see slavery demolished by a Union Army that comprised black troops. While he became “the most famous black man in America,” as John Stauffer declares in The Black Hearts of Men, and even an “insider” in Republican politics, Douglass also came to realize that his own “vision of perfection and heaven on earth” was “a sentimental illusion.” Lincoln's initial refusal to embrace antislavery as a war aim was particularly frustrating to Douglass. But the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery nationally, was no small feat, and in witnessing its passage in 1865 Douglass recognized that he had lived to see a revolution in race relations.

Indeed, for all abolitionists the Civil War was both a challenging period and a celebratory one. Many Garrisonians refused to endorse Abraham Lincoln's presidency while nevertheless supporting his strong stand against slavery's expansion. Lincoln's refusal to embrace abolitionism prior to the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 frustrated abolitionists. Yet it was their vision of universal liberty that Lincoln eventually appealed to when he stated that the Civil War was engineering “a new birth freedom” for the Republic. In The Struggle for Equality, the historian James McPherson notes that abolitionists became more respected spokesmen for liberty in the 1860s, as men and women, black and white, envisioned a broad program of government-backed initiatives for black education and employment. Abolition's influence could also be seen in the passage of two other Civil War amendments: the Fourteenth Amendment, providing equality to American citizens regardless of race, which Congress sent to the states for ratification in 1866; and the Fifteenth Amendment, granting black men the right to vote, which passed in 1869 and was ratified in 1870.

Douglass's multifaceted role during the Civil War has been well documented: he not only continued to speak, publish, and mobilize public opinion in the North against slavery but also became a recruiter of black troops for the famous Fifth-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. “Nobody brought more authority to the antislavery lecture platform than Douglass,” Donald Yacovone observes in Freedom's Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War, and “when the War began … he sought to ensure that the North correctly understood the causes of the conflict that had engulfed the nation”: most pointedly, in Douglass's own words, “the foul slave system.” Douglass's activism was aimed at a truly national audience. As thousands of slaves fled southern plantations, he made clear the notion that slavery was doomed and that blacks would be a part of the regeneration of the Union Army. He fought to maintain antislavery organizations until racial justice had been secured. When Garrison told fellow reformers in December 1864 that the day of jubilee was near, Douglass argued that the American Anti-Slavery Society should not disband prematurely—in fact, it would remain operative until 1870. Douglass convinced abolitionists they had to remain vigilant until African Americans had full political equality.

Douglass dedicated his later years to memorializing the antislavery struggle as a redefining event not merely for African Americans but for the American nation as a whole. “During the last third of his life,” notes David Blight, “one of the most distinguishing features of [Douglass's] leadership was his quest to preserve the memory of the Civil War.” At the center of that memory, as Douglass told black and white audiences at rallies in Rochester, Washington, New York City, and Chicago, was the notion that the Civil War was not about battles, tactics, and generals but about ideals of “freedom, citizenship, suffrage and dignity.” Douglass's work to preserve those ideals coincided with a white backlash that would eventually overturn many of the gains of the Civil War. However, his vision of universal liberty as the birthright of every American—a vision that became synonymous with the antislavery struggle from the late 1830s until his death in 1895—made Douglass a hero of the nineteenth century and the antislavery movement a precursor to later civil rights struggles.

See also Abolitionism; American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; American Anti-Slavery Society; American Colonization Society; American Revolution; Antislavery Press; Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery in; Birney, James Gillespie; Black Abolitionists; Black Press; Brown, Henry “Box”; Brown, John; Chase, Salmon Portland; Civil Rights; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Clay, Henry; Colonization; Constitution, U.S.; Democratic Party; Demographics; Detroit; Douglass' Monthly; Douglass, Frederick; Education; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Emigration to Africa; Feminist Movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Forten, James; Foster, Abby Kelley; Fourteenth Amendment; Frederick Douglass' Paper; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Free-Soil Party; Freedmen; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Garnet, Henry Highland; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian Abolitionists; Haiti; Haitian Revolutions; Harpers Ferry Raid; Jacobs, Harriet; Jefferson, Thomas; Laws and Legislation; Liberty Party; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; Lincoln, Abraham; Lundy, Benjamin; Moral Suasion; My Bondage and My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; National Conventions of Colored Men; New York City; Nonresistance; North Star; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Polk, James; Proslavery Thought; Purvis, Robert; Radical Abolitionist Party; Reform; Religion and Slavery; Remond, Charles Lenox; Republican Party; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Ruggles, David; Seneca Falls Convention; Seward, William Henry; Slave Narratives; Slave Trade; Slave Trade, Domestic; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Smith, James McCune; Society of Friends (Quakers); Stereotypes of African Americans; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Suffrage, Women's; Sumner, Charles; Thirteenth Amendment; Toussaint Louverture; Truth, Sojourner; Turner, Nat; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Underground Railroad; Union Army, African Americans in; Voting Rights; Walker, David; Whig Party; and Women.

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