Antislavery

By: William H. Brackney

Source:

 The Oxford Companion to United States History

Antislavery

The American antislavery crusade was a multifaceted, long-term social reform movement that persisted from the mid-eighteenth century through Emancipation in 1864. Over the years, the movement evolved from religious protest and colonization efforts to political organization, abolitionism, violent protest, and, finally, emancipation.

Beginnings of Antislavery Agitation.

Antislavery originated as a moral and religious issue. Various Protestant denominations—Mennonites and Amish, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Society of Friends (Quakers)—all contributed, with Quakers the early leaders. Eighteenth-century Quakers George Keith, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet each attacked slavery on the basis of moral principle: namely, the equality of all persons before God. Among Baptists, local associations resolved to oppose the extension of slavery; some writers even called for its abolition. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, religious activists had formed antislavery societies that held public meetings and distributed literature to raise consciousness about the moral issues involved.

An early effort to achieve the progressive elimination of slavery was the African colonization movement. As a “gradualist” compromise between the moral issue of human bondage and the racial prejudices of white society, national leaders like Bushrod Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Henry Clay advocated manumitting (freeing) slaves and returning them to Africa, with the costs—including compensation to the owners—to be paid from a combination of public and private funds. The American Colonization Society, established in 1817, founded Monrovia (later Liberia) on the West African coast in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves. By 1860, some twelve thousand African Americans had returned to Africa. The colonization movement stirred hostility, however, from southerners opposed to manumission; from those who disapproved of spending public monies on the project; and from persons truly interested in the slaves' well-being, who saw repatriation to Africa as simply a further injustice to persons of color.

By the late 1820s, rising public indignation in the North, called by some “ultraism,” strengthened antislavery sentiments. Local societies began to appear, particularly in New England. Leaders like Lewis and Arthur Tappan in New York City, William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, and Theodore Dwight Weld in Ohio founded a national organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS), in 1833. Garrison, regarded as a fanatic by some and, worse yet, an incendiary by others, brought to the cause a sense of urgency; a genuine threat to slaveholders; and an uncompromising periodical, The Liberator, founded in 1831. An organizational genius, Garrison created a system whereby paid AAS agents fanned out across the North to lecture, debate, distribute tracts, sell Liberator subscriptions, and assist free blacks and fugitive slaves wherever possible. Through the AAS, the antislavery leadership combined careful planning and organization with the zeal of an evangelical religious crusade. Among the most effective AAS lecturers were the Grimké sisters of South Carolina, Sarah and Angelina, who had embraced Quakerism and moved North. In 1839 the Grimkés and Weld (whom Angelina had married) published American Slavery as It Is, a powerful documentary record of brutal abuses.

The religious dimension of antislavery found expression as well in the ministry of the Charles G. Finney and at two Ohio schools founded in 1833: Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and Oberlin College. Lane, a Presbyterian school, was situated in close proximity to a large population of free blacks. Its faculty and students included many antislavery firebrands, and a series of public lyceum debates soon gave Lane such a reputation as a hotbed of activism that in 1834 the trustees forbade further discussion of the matter. Fifty-one Lane students, called “the Rebels,” withdrew and enrolled at Oberlin, an antislavery center where Finney was professor of theology. Through various forms of ministry and activism, Oberlin students and faculty infused the antislavery cause with new energy and momentum, making the college one of the movement's major leadership resources.

The Turn to Politics.

In 1840, Theodore Dwight Weld, the Tappan brothers, and other antislavery leaders turned to political organization. They were encouraged by the British Parliament's abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. Forming the Liberty party (also known as the Human Rights party), they nominated James G. Birney, a slaveowner turned abolitionist, for President. In part a reaction against Garrison (who was displaying increasingly radical and anarchist tendencies), the Liberty party stressed natural rights and political action. In 1840, too, these same individuals founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which challenged Garrison for leadership of the movement. (The issue of equality for women in the antislavery campaign, which Garrison supported and more conservative antislavery leaders opposed, figured in this split as well.) Although Birney received only about seven thousand votes, his candidacy brought national attention to the antislavery cause—and sharpened the proslavery defenses of southern whites. Running again in 1844, Birney received 62,300 votes.

Congress's defeat in 1846 of the Wilmot Proviso (a resolution barring slavery in any territories other than Texas acquired in the Mexican War), coupled with the failure of either national party to take an unequivocal stand against slavery, further energized the effort to oppose slavery at the ballot box. In 1848 the Free Soil party took up the antislavery banner, nominating former President Martin Van Buren on a platform opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories, summed up in the slogan “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.” While Van Buren ran third behind the Whig party candidate Zachary Taylor (who won) and the Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan, he did garner nearly 300,000 votes. Within a few years, many Free Soil voters would join the new Republican party, a coalition of antislavery enthusiasts, religious leaders, and former Whigs.

Abolitionism.

Meanwhile, “abolition” had become the cry of the more ardent antislavery advocates and “action-men.” Radical activity ensued. Abolitionists flooded the South with inflammatory pamplets. Free northern blacks and escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft played an important role in the movement. Douglass became a major abolitionist spokesman, particularly with the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Abolitionists organized and operated the so-called Underground Railroad, a complex network of antislavery households that spirited runaway slaves to the North and West, the Caribbean, and Canada. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a victory for slaveholders, heightened abolitionist fervor and directly inspired the most famous of all antislavery works, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott (Scott v. Sandford) decision (1857), representing further victories for the slave power, added fuel to the abolitionist cause. Most radical of all were the ultraists like John Brown, who were prepared to wage armed conflict to achieve their objectives. Brown's career of antislavery violence, first in Kansas and then at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, won the support of Douglass and other prominent abolitionist leaders. Within two years the Civil War, which would finally end slavery in America, was underway.

From its inception, the antislavery movement benefited greatly from the evangelical energies unleashed in the Second Great Awakening, and from the many voluntary associations generated within the Protestant community. Countless antislavery leaders and supporters had roots in the evangelical missionary and revivalist traditions, and many also participated in other reform arenas, from Anti-Masonry and adventism to the temperance and women's rights movements. Such leading women's rights advocates as Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got their start in the antislavery movement. Antislavery was the first great human rights crusade in American history. A sustained campaign lasting more than a century, it not only helped bring about the emancipation of the slaves, but it also inspired a long tradition of social reform.See also Antebellum Era; Anti-Masonic Party; Protestantism; Revivalism.

processed xml | source xml