Black Abolitionists

By: Roy E. Finkenbine

Source:

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

Black Abolitionists

Historians acknowledge the existence of “two abolitionisms” in the antebellum United States—one black, one white. Although black and white abolitionists shared similar views about the moral evil of slavery, they held very different understandings of the relationship between slavery and race, which shaped their involvement in the antislavery struggle. Slavery and racism were distinct and separate evils for most whites. Few had firsthand experience with the “peculiar institution” and tended to regard it in abstract moral terms. Far too many white abolitionists paid little or no attention to the question of racial equality and, in fact, exhibited a great deal of prejudice and paternalism toward their darker-hued colleagues within the movement.

Most blacks, on the other hand, looked at slavery and racial discrimination through the lens of personal experience and saw them as two points on the same continuum. They believed that racism and bondage were merely different manifestations of the same problem. That understanding prompted black abolitionists to see the antislavery cause in more pragmatic terms. It also led them to conceive of abolitionism as an all-encompassing movement for racial equality—of equal importance was fighting for economic opportunity, social mobility, civil and political rights, equal education, and fair representation in the press and popular culture, on the one hand, and fighting against the institution of slavery, on the other. This stark conceptual division “separated black from white and generated a distinct black abolitionism.” Because of the tendency of antebellum African American activists to view emancipation and equality as closely related goals and to fight for both at the same time, some historians have thought of their struggle as America's first civil rights movement.

Varieties of Involvement

“Every colored man is an abolitionist,” bragged the Reverend Richard Robinson before a national gathering of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination in 1856, “and slaveholders know it.” Robinson's remark underscored the broad commitment of antebellum African Americans to the struggle for emancipation and equality. That commitment, however, took a variety of forms. Geography, class, occupation, family background, church affiliation, legal status, gender, generation, and economic and legal constraints helped determine how individual blacks responded to American slavery and racism. But respond they did, employing tactics as varied as the situations in which they found themselves.

Fighting slavery and racism was especially difficult below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern slaves usually fought against their slavery through covert means or by running away, although a few openly rebelled against the system. Legal constraints usually forced free blacks in the South to limit their resistance to covert means as well. Many quietly aided those escaping from bondage by hiding them in homes or churches, offering instructions and directions, forging passes or free papers, and providing transportation to assist slaves in their flight. Others raised monies to buy the freedom of family members and friends. Few could go beyond those measures. Prior to 1830, free blacks in some cities in the Upper South, particularly Baltimore, spoke out against colonization and slavery and cooperated with black abolitionists in the free states. But after Nat Turner's 1831 revolt, their right to assemble was increasingly restricted and their voices muffled.

Northern free blacks faced fewer formal constraints on their abolitionist involvement. But the degree to which individual blacks participated varied; blacks engaged in abolitionism ranged from community activists and professional abolitionists who lectured, wrote, and organized for the cause to those who instinctively opposed slavery and racism but could do little to further the cause directly. Between these two poles was the bulk of the African American community, mostly working-class folk, who offered irregular and less obvious assistance. A few working-class blacks attended occasional antislavery meetings, subscribed to abolitionist journals, signed petitions, donated what money they could afford, and even refrained—where possible—from buying slave-produced goods.

The role of the black masses increased dramatically, however, after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed. As the need for protecting runaway slaves grew more urgent and the presence of slave catchers increased, so did the efforts of working-class blacks. What the times demanded, claimed the Bostonian Robert Johnson, himself a fugitive slave, “were men of overalls—men of the wharf—those who could do the heavy work in the hour of difficulty.” Working-class men responded by hiding and transporting fugitives and participating in attempts to rescue those who had been recaptured. Working-class women often served as the eyes and ears of local vigilance committees, watching for slave catchers in northern communities and in the hotels and boardinghouses in which they worked. In addition to providing food, shelter, and medical attention to fugitives, they participated in a few slave rescues. During the decade leading up to the Civil War, black abolitionism became a community venture.

Only a few of the most active black abolitionists, however, came from the working class. The latter group simply lacked the time and resources for such extensive involvement. Most active abolitionists were drawn from the so-called black elite. These were the community leaders who chaired local gatherings, attended state and national black conventions, spoke and wrote on antislavery and civil rights questions, raised funds and enlisted workers, filled offices, circulated petitions, organized public protests, challenged inequalities through the courts, and joined with white abolitionists to sustain the broader movement. A core group of some three hundred African American leaders—some free blacks, some former slaves—became actively involved in black abolitionism on a day-to-day basis. A select few became professional abolitionists. These were the lecturers like William Wells Brown and Charles Lenox Remond, the editors like Frederick Douglass, and the antislavery office clerks like William C. Nell and William Still, who devoted all their time to the cause.

At first only men worked as professional abolitionists. By the 1850s, however, African American women had earned a more prominent place in the struggle. Mary Ann Shadd Cary edited the Provincial Freeman. Ellen Craft, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Parker Remond, and Barbara Steward became soughtafter antislavery speakers. Harriet Tubman gained lasting prominence for her work with the Underground Railroad. Freeborn blacks numerically dominated this core group, largely because of their preponderance within the black elite. Less than one-third of the most active black abolitionists had experienced bondage, but as the number of abolitionists who were former slaves increased in the 1840s, they gained an importance much greater than their numbers in the movement might suggest. They were especially effective as speakers and writers because their firsthand experience with slavery made them particularly attractive to readers and audiences. The number of former slaves within the ranks of the antislavery activists continued to grow in the decade before the Civil War, owing primarily to the growing importance of the work of the Underground Railroad and vigilance committees.

The most active black abolitionists performed essential roles in the antislavery movement. In the battle for public opinion over slavery, nothing moved audiences like a “true narrative fallen from the lips of a veritable fugitive.” Black speakers, especially former slaves, gave the movement credibility as they effectively refuted proslavery myths that slaves were contented, well treated, and fit only for bondage. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) hired Charles Lenox Remond, a freeborn black from Massachusetts, as its first African American lecturing agent in 1838. His eloquence and intelligence impressed white audiences and established a place at the podium for black abolitionists. Antislavery societies soon rushed other black speakers into the field, “preferring one who has felt in his own person the evils of slavery, and with the strong voice of experience can tell of its horrors.” By the mid-1840s, a number of former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Samuel Ringgold Ward, regularly lectured for the movement.

At first, white abolitionists usually organized and sponsored these lecture tours, often subjecting the lecturers to close supervision and paternalistic treatment. Eventually, many black abolitionists chose instead to organize their own independent lecture tours. Whatever the case, they took the antislavery message to a wide variety of audiences—from local gatherings to national reform conventions—speaking in churches, schoolhouses, and town halls across the North. More than one hundred black lecturers even carried the antislavery message abroad to Great Britain, seeking to enlist audiences there in an effort to draw a “moral cordon” around slavery in the American South. These lecturers educated the public about the realities of bondage and won many converts to the cause. They also spoke about a range of other topics, from racism to temperance to politics, and raised funds to purchase family and friends out of bondage, to support antislavery newspapers, to aid and protect fugitive slaves, and to build various institutions in black communities. Some adopted innovative means of enlivening their presentations, displaying artifacts from the plantation or accompanying their lectures with moving scenes of slave life. Others used their lectures to sell antislavery literature, including their own autobiographical narratives.

Black abolitionists also moved readers through the printed word. Many former slaves published slave narratives—autobiographical accounts of their life in bondage. These works took the black abolitionist message beyond the lecture halls and into the parlors of white Americans. Innovations in print technology in the 1830s allowed for the cheap reproduction of such works, making them inexpensive and effective witnesses against slavery. The narratives recounted the horrors of slavery: brutal whippings, separation of families, the sexual vulnerability of slave women, and exciting escapes. Nearly four dozen book-length narratives were published between 1836 and the beginning of the Civil War; some, like those of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, sold tens of thousands of copies in America and abroad. By the early 1840s, antislavery activists believed that these books were an “infallible means of abolitionizing the free states.” Black abolitionists also published other types of antislavery works, including such critiques of American racial prejudice as Hosea Easton's Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People (1838) and such early works of African American history as William C. Nell's Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). All sought to present blacks and the black experience in a more positive light.

After 1852, with the dramatic success of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, some black abolitionist authors sought to use fiction to advance the cause. They penned several novels and novellas about slavery in the South and racial prejudice in the North over the next decade, beginning with William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) and Frederick Douglass's “The Heroic Slave” (1853). Stowe's novel also prompted additional slave narratives, including Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the only full-length account of slavery by a female runaway.

Efforts to aid fugitives from southern slavery also depended on the leadership and skills of black abolitionists. Although Quakers and other white activists were important to the loose network of individuals and groups known as the Underground Railroad, abolitionists recognized, as James G. Birney reported in 1837, that “such matters are almost uniformly managed by the colored people.” William Still in Philadelphia, Lewis Hayden in Boston, David Ruggles in New York, Stephen Myers in Albany, Frederick Douglass in Rochester, and Jermain W. Loguen in Syracuse played key roles in urban vigilance committees, which dispensed food, clothing, money, and medicine to fugitives; provided them with legal services and temporary shelter; and transported them farther north, even to Canada.

Often, a black abolitionist's vocation proved to be a valuable resource to his vigilance committee work. In Boston, for example, the clothing dealers Hayden and Jonas W. Clarke could be counted on to outfit fugitives, the printer Benjamin F. Roberts published placards to warn against slave catchers and the Boston police, the attorney Robert Morris defended captured fugitives, and the physician John S. Rock attended to the ill and injured. Less well-known black activists performed similar roles in the small towns dotting the northern side of the Ohio River and Pennsylvania's border with slaveholding Maryland. A few individuals, like Harriet Tubman and John P. Parker of Ripley, Ohio, went into the slave states to safely lead individuals and groups away from the plantation. Even more subversive were such activists as Jacob R. Gibbs in Baltimore and Thomas Smallwood in Washington, D.C., who headed secret networks that helped slaves escape from southern cities. To a black abolitionist, “few things could be so satisfying as helping a runaway.”

Beginnings

The beginnings of black abolitionism date back to the emergence of urban communities of freeborn blacks in the North and Upper South after the American Revolution. Because African Americans were not allowed to join organizations established during that era by white reformers to work for the gradual end of slavery, black activists fought for emancipation and equality through black community institutions—churches, lodges, and benevolent societies. In fact, the earliest black abolitionists were such community activists as Prince Hall in Boston and Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in Philadelphia. Denied other forms of access to the political arena, these leaders depended upon moral appeals and the power of the printed word. In the late eighteenth century they sent dozens of petitions to state legislatures and even to Congress, calling for an end to slavery, abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, protection against kidnappers, access to public education, voting rights, and land of their own in the new territories of the Old Northwest.

In the early nineteenth century black activists began to publish a substantial number of protest pamphlets aimed at influencing legislatures, sympathetic whites, and literate free blacks. A leading example was Letters by a Man of Colour (1813), by James Forten of Philadelphia, an articulate attack on slavery and racism in the early Republic. The most widely circulated of these pamphlets was David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which went through three editions in 1829 and 1830. Walker, a black Bostonian with roots in slaveholding North Carolina, challenged literate blacks to stand up to racial injustice, while pointing out the hypocrisy of American slavery and prejudice. The Appeal attributed the ills of antebellum African Americans to bondage, enforced black ignorance, religious hypocrisy, and the movement for African colonization. Walker even hinted at the need to use violence. Smuggled into the South by free black sailors and white allies, his Appeal provoked considerable fear among slaveholders.

Black abolitionism developed a separate organizational presence by the late 1820s, in large part as a response to the rise of the African colonization movement. Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society called for repatriating African Americans to the African continent; by 1822 it was recruiting black settlers for its newly created colony of Liberia on the West African coast. Most white abolitionists and antislavery organizations of the decade supported colonization as well as a gradual approach to emancipation. Most black abolitionists, however, rejected colonization, seeing it as an unjust threat to the future of African Americans on the North American continent. They organized mass meetings, wrote letters to antislavery journals, and privately persuaded white allies in an effort to diminish public support for a mass return to Africa. They reminded whites that they had helped build the new nation and thought of it as their “only true and appropriate home.” An organized black abolitionist movement grew out of this struggle and showed what could be accomplished with greater coordination and persistent protest. Local groups dedicated to fighting for emancipation and equality emerged in Baltimore, Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, and other free black communities. The Massachusetts General Colored Association, established by Walker and others in about 1826, started a continuing correspondence among these groups. Similarly, the first African American newspaper, the New York–based Freedom's Journal, which was published from 1827 to 1829, linked black abolitionists across the North and Upper South through its columns and a network of unpaid subscription agents.

The context of black abolitionism changed dramatically about 1830. After working closely with William Watkins and other black abolitionists in Baltimore during 1829 and 1830, William Lloyd Garrison emerged as the most prominent antislavery voice in the United States while helping to publish the Genius of Universal Emancipation in that city. He had adopted many of the beliefs of the black abolitionists, particularly their opposition to colonization and gradual emancipation. Likewise, they quickly embraced Garrison and, believing that he would help carry the call for immediate emancipation to other whites, largely subsidized his Liberator, the most strident and widely circulated antislavery journal in the 1830s. The movement soon found converts across the North; hundreds of new antislavery organizations were formed, beginning with the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which was created in 1832 at Boston's African Meetinghouse. One year later, abolitionists from several states gathered in Philadelphia to organize the AASS, which dominated the movement through the end of the decade. By 1836 more than five hundred AASS auxiliaries had been established across the North. Unlike earlier antislavery organizations, the AASS was interracial in nature; such previously all-black groups as the Massachusetts General Colored Association soon became part of the new organization.

Grateful for their new allies, black abolitionists muted their earlier militancy and shifted their approach during the 1830s. Abandoning Walker's tone and message, they emphasized the tactic of moral suasion and the strategy of moral reform. Moral suasion sought to convince people of the sinfulness of slavery through printed or spoken appeals to their conscience. Even such independent racial efforts as the black national conventions of the decade consistently posited that improvements must come “by moral suasion alone.” The strategy of moral reform tried to persuade whites that African Americans were worthy of emancipation and equality through bringing about a change of behavior in the race. Because of the restraints imposed by inadequate schooling and lack of economic opportunity, went the argument, most African Americans fell short of white standards of education and conduct. Moral reformers believed that by demonstrating that blacks were capable of self-improvement, they could smash white stereotypes about blacks. Black abolitionists endorsed the social values of thrift, self-help, education, the work ethic, sobriety, and gentility as sure routes to racial advancement. William Whipper, a conservative activist in Philadelphia, spoke for many black abolitionists of the decade when he argued that “the prejudice which exists against [blacks] arises not from the color of their skin, but from their condition.” Such a change in condition, they claimed, must precede any meaningful changes in race relations in the United States. Independent and aggressive black abolitionism lay dormant for nearly a decade.

Greater Independence

By about 1840, however, black abolitionists had begun to question the value of such singular dependence upon moral suasion, moral reform, and interracial activism. Instead of visible improvement, conditions seemed to be getting worse. Slavery was spreading farther westward, stereotyping in the press and popular culture was becoming cruder, the voting rights of free blacks had been rescinded in three states, Irish and German immigrants were displacing black workers in northern cities, and racial violence was escalating. Several dozen mob attacks on northern black communities in the 1830s and 1840s “mocked moral reform and underscored its failure.” In these riots, white mobs had targeted the symbols of free black success—churches, businesses, the houses of the black elite, and the meeting places of moral reform organizations. Most black abolitionists were convinced that moral reform efforts had failed. Even Whipper had concluded that it was “not the lack of elevation, but complexion that deprived the man of color of equal treatment.” They also abandoned a reliance on moral suasion, coming to understand that more assertive methods were needed. Many shared the view of Peter Paul Simons of Brooklyn that “physical and political efforts are the only methods left for us to adopt.”

Black abolitionists were also disillusioned by the shortcomings of their white allies. They increasingly recognized that many white abolitionists were tainted by racism and lacked substantial commitment to racial equality. Theodore S. Wright of New York complained that his white colleagues “overlooked the giant sin of prejudice … at once the parent and the offspring of slavery.” They criticized white allies for their paternalism and prejudice, sensing that they “presumed to think for, dictate to, and know better what suited colored people, than they know for themselves.” They bristled at their secondary position in the movement—the AASS leadership was almost exclusively white, black agents were usually paid less than whites in similar positions, black lecturers were sometimes told what to say, and black clerks in antislavery offices remained mired in subservient positions.

Black abolitionists were also concerned about the factional feuding within the movement that diverted white abolitionists from the central task of freeing the slaves. The AASS splintered in 1840 over matters of tactics and goals. Garrisonians and more conservative abolitionists differed on questions of gender equality, criticism of the churches for supporting slavery, and the question of whether moral suasion should continue to be the sole means for ending bondage. By 1840 the two groups had moved beyond compromise. The dissidents walked out of the annual AASS convention and soon formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society as a rival to the AASS and the Liberty Party, in order to run antislavery candidates for office. Black abolitionists hoped to avoid these internecine squabbles and sought a return to more unified action. They saw all questions except slavery and racism as relatively unimportant, but their white allies pressured them to choose sides. Some sided with the Garrisonians or were attracted to the religious orthodoxy of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society or the political abolitionism of the Liberty Party. Others decided to work alone, remaining independent of the white organizations. They sought greater autonomy, working with white allies when it suited their purposes or independently when that best served the cause. Many remembered that they had worked without white collaboration before 1830.

More than the relationship between black and white abolitionists changed after 1840. A new generation of African American activists emerged, filling a void left by the death or declining involvement of such prominent figures as William Hamilton and Peter Williams of New York, Nathaniel Paul of Albany, James Forten of Philadelphia, Samuel Cornish of New Jersey, and William Watkins of Baltimore. Whereas most of the key black abolitionists before 1840 had been free blacks, a high percentage of these new activists were former slaves—such individuals as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Jermain W. Loguen, James W. C. Pennington, Henry Bibb, and Lewis and Milton Clarke came to dominate the movement. And the center of black abolitionism shifted westward. Black abolitionists from such western towns as Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit assumed prominent roles in the fight against slavery.

These new leaders frequently worked independently of their white allies through such community institutions as the black church, the black convention movement, and the black press. Black churches often doubled as meeting places and centers for organized abolitionist activity. They became sites for protest gatherings, antislavery lectures, and planning sessions, and often housed black presses. Many were regular stops on the Underground Railroad and provided sanctuary for fleeing fugitives. The black convention movement took on new life at both the national and state level during the 1840s, creating statewide networks for challenging a variety of black laws and other racial inequalities.

The black press was also rejuvenated during the decade. The Colored American, which had been founded in 1837 by Samuel Cornish, soon illustrated how an independent print voice could stimulate independent action by black abolitionists. It openly challenged slavery and racism and urged black leaders to “speak out in THUNDER TONES.” Establishing the pattern that black papers had followed prior to the Civil War, it functioned as an antislavery journal and a mouthpiece for the particular concerns of black communities. Abandoning their reliance on the Liberator and other white journals, black abolitionists established and supported a number and variety of black newspapers in the 1840s and 1850s, including the North Star, Frederick Douglass' Paper, the Impartial Freeman, the Voice of the Fugitive, the Provincial Freeman, the Aliened American, and several others. By the end of the 1850s, the Weekly Anglo-African sought to be an independent national voice for the entire African American population.

Black abolitionists also adopted new measures to combat slavery and racism in the 1840s and 1850s. These included petition campaigns, lawsuits, legislative appeals, and economic pressure. When these tactics failed, even more confrontational methods were used. A great deal of energy was invested in political action, in the belief that politics could be “a mighty Anti-Slavery engine.” The push for suffrage became a focus of state black conventions in the 1840s and 1850s, at which statewide campaigns for black suffrage were organized in Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York. To gain the ballot, they petitioned, lobbied legislators, distributed printed appeals, and rallied the black community through the press. Black abolitionists in New York developed an extensive statewide network of suffrage organizations at the local, county, and state levels. In 1860 there were sixty-six black suffrage clubs in New York City and Brooklyn alone. Where voting was possible, these leaders used political action to advance civil rights, challenge black laws, and fight slavery, working at different times and in different places through the Whig, Liberty, Free-Soil, and Republican parties. A few black abolitionists even ran for local or statewide office on the Liberty and Free-Soil tickets.

More militant tactics were also explored. When moral suasion and political action failed to overturn discriminatory laws and practices, black abolitionists increasingly turned to more forceful means after 1840. They deliberately challenged Jim Crow seating practices on railroads and in streetcars in nearly every northern state, sitting in cars reserved for whites and forcing whites to eject or arrest them. A massive 1843 campaign against Massachusetts's three railroads ended segregated seating practices on common carriers in that state. Segregated school systems were also targeted. Robert Purvis refused to pay his school tax until the schools of Byberry, Pennsylvania, were integrated. African Americans in New York and Massachusetts boycotted and petitioned against Jim Crow schools for the same purpose. Under the leadership of William C. Nell, blacks in Boston mounted a decade-long protest against segregated schools, employing mass meetings, editorials, picketing, boycotts, petition campaigns, and legal action (the unsuccessful Roberts v. City of Boston case in 1849). School segregation was finally ended in 1855 by action of the state legislature.

More and more, black abolitionists debated the value of violence. During the 1830s they had generally suppressed talk about force and the shedding of blood at the prompting of their white allies, but some black leaders moved toward open advocacy of violent means in the 1840s and 1850s. Garrison's calls for nonviolent resistance seemed increasingly irrelevant as federal efforts to enforce fugitive slave laws threatened black communities and left few alternatives to using violence in self-defense. Black abolitionists also endorsed slave violence, openly celebrating such rebels such Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Joseph Cinque of the Amistad, and Madison Washington of the Creole as cultural heroes, often comparing them favorably to America's Revolutionary fathers. Henry Highland Garnet openly called for slave violence at the 1843 black national convention; the delegates defeated a measure to endorse this recommendation by only a single vote. At first, many black abolitionists distanced themselves from Garnet's call. But by the 1850s most had become convinced that slavery was too deeply rooted in American soil to be eliminated by peaceful means.

Crisis of Union

Political events of the 1850s—the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reopened all of the western territories to slavery; the campaign to reopen the Atlantic slave trade; and the Dred Scott decision—disheartened many black abolitionists and led them to again question the progress of the antislavery cause. Southern slaveholders seemed to control the federal government, and antislavery progress seemed to be stalled, if not reversed. Particularly troubling was the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision. The former put the federal government in the business of catching and returning runaway slaves and threatened fugitives and free blacks alike. The latter, the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), affirmed the constitutionality of slavery in the western territories and denied black claims to American citizenship. Faced with these events during the decade of the 1850s, black abolitionists were forced to rethink their fundamental assumptions about slavery and race and to ponder their future as American citizens. Neither condition nor complexion seemed to adequately account for the depth and complexity of American racism. Neither moral suasion nor political action, or even violence, seemed to offer an adequate solution. Surveying twenty-five years of antislavery efforts, Charles Lenox Remond cynically labeled them “complete failures.”

By the end of the decade the crises of the 1850s had stirred black abolitionists' interest in leaving the United States for a more welcoming place. Many looked to Canada as a temporary haven. Thousands of runaway slaves threatened with the Fugitive Slave Law sought new lives there. Others, such as Martin Robison Delany and James T. Holly, looked abroad to Haiti or West Africa. The black republics in the Caribbean as well as such African locations as Liberia and the Niger Valley were relatively enticing. Delany and Holly saw these as prime locations in which to develop a black nationhood that might work against slavery from a distance. Most black abolitionists, however, agreed with William T. Still, who believed that “the duty to stay here and fight it out seems paramount.” Nevertheless, few African Americans were hopeful about their future in the United States. By 1860, even such confirmed opponents of emigration as Whipper and Douglass toyed with the idea of leaving the country.

The coming of the Civil War in 1861 restored African American hopes for Emancipation and equality. Black abolitionists saw in the conflict a real opportunity to end slavery and advance the fortunes of the race. They pressed the administration of Abraham Lincoln to enlist black troops in the Union army and to adopt Emancipation as a war goal. After these gains had both been achieved by 1863, blacks fulfilled many roles in the war effort. Some, like Martin Robison Delany and H. Ford Douglas, enlisted in black regiments. Others recruited for the Union cause, helping to fill the rosters of such regiments as the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiments and other all-black units. They traveled thousands of miles addressing rallies across the North and signing up individual enlistees. Many, particularly black women activists, raised funds for black soldiers and the freedmen. They were at the center of relief efforts for the contrabands, collecting food, supplies, clothing, money, and medicine. Dozens of black abolitionists streamed southward to open schools and establish churches in the areas of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces. Like John Oliver of Boston, the first black teacher sent south by the American Missionary Association, they believed that “the work of Anti-Slavery men is not yet compleat [sic]” until the former slaves were ready to assume their full role and rights as American citizens. They continued to push for an end to slavery until that became a reality a few months after the cannons were stilled.

Black abolitionists emerged from the war mindful of the need for continued activism. They recognized that the Thirteenth Amendment offered “nothing but freedom” to the race; racial equality still eluded African Americans throughout the nation. The failure of the federal government to grant blacks full civil and political rights and to parcel out confiscated Confederate land to the freedmen left them disillusioned. So, too, did the readiness of their white allies to abandon the fight. The guns had barely fallen silent at Appomattox before Garrison and other white abolitionists called for dismantling antislavery organizations and shutting down antislavery journals, arguing that the work of abolition was done. Black abolitionists harbored no such illusions. Garnet argued in 1865 that “the battle has just begun in which the fate of the black race in this country is to be decided.” Douglass contended that “the work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.” With such questions as racial equality, civil rights, the vote, and a fair Reconstruction unanswered, they understood that a great deal of work still lay ahead. In 1873 white abolitionists gathered in Chicago for a reunion to celebrate their roles in ending slavery and to consider their legacy. Black abolitionists, however, observing the piecemeal dismantling of Reconstruction in the South at that time, continued to battle for the equality that America had promised in its founding document.

See also Abolitionism; Africa, Idea of; African Americans and the West; African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Anti-Slavery Society; American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; American Colonization Society; American Missionary Association; American Revolution; Amistad; Antislavery Movement; Antislavery Press; Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery in; Bibb, Henry W.; Birney, James Gillespie; Black Church; Black Nationalism; Black Press; Black Uplift; Canada; Civil Rights; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Class; Colonization; Constitution, U.S.; Cornish, Samuel; Delany, Martin Robison; Detroit; Discrimination; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Education; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Emigration to Africa; Entrepreneurs; Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Forten, James; 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 1850; Garnet, Henry Highland; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian Abolitionists; Gender; Haiti; Immigrants; Integration; Jacobs, Harriet; Jim Crow Car Laws; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Laws and Legislation, Liberia; Liberty Party; Lincoln, Abraham; Literature; Loguen, Jermain Wesley; Lynching and Mob Violence; Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; Military; Moral Suasion; Myers, Stephen A.; National Conventions of Colored Men; Nell, William Cooper; North Star; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Pennington, James W. C.; Political Participation; Poverty; Progress; Purvis, Robert; Racism; Radical Abolitionist Party; Reconstruction; Reform; Religion; Religion and Slavery; Remond, Charles Lenox; Republican Party; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Roberts v. City of Boston; Ruggles, David; Segregation; Slave Narratives; Slave Resistance; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Society of Friends (Quakers); Stereotypes of African Americans; Still, William; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Supreme Court; Thirteenth Amendment; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet; Turner, Nat; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Underground Railroad; Union Army, African Americans in; Urbanization; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Walker, David; Ward, Samuel Ringgold; Whig Party; Whipper, William; Women; and Work.

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