Abolitionism in the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Abolitionism in the United States was not born in a single moment of moral clarity. On the 18th of February 1688, four men gathered in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and put their names to a two-page document that condemned slavery as a violation of universal human rights. Francis Daniel Pastorius and the brothers Derick and Abraham op den Graeff, along with Gerrit Hendricksz, were German Quakers, and what they drafted that day became the first written statement against slavery in colonial America. Their petition went to the governing bodies of their Quaker meeting, and it was ignored. But it planted something. Nearly two centuries would pass before the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, would finally make slavery unconstitutional across the entire nation. The story of what happened in between is the story of abolitionism: a movement that fractured repeatedly over strategy, split along lines of race, class, and gender, and remained for much of its life a minority voice in a society that tolerated or openly defended slavery. What drove ordinary people to risk violence, social ruin, and arrest in service of this cause? And why did the movement take so long to reach its goal?

• 2. Colonial Roots

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  Rhode Island made it illegal for any person, black or white, to be bound longer than ten years as early as 1652, yet the law was widely ignored, and Rhode Island became involved in the slave trade just decades later. That gap between declared principle and daily practice runs through the entire colonial era. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, which took place in Virginia, offered a different kind of lesson. European indentured servants and African people of indentured, enslaved, and free status banded together against Governor William Berkeley after he refused to remove Native American tribes who were raiding lower-class settlers. The unification of white and black lower classes was perceived as so dangerous that authorities responded with the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, designed to permanently divide the two groups. Samuel Sewall, a prominent Bostonian, wrote The Selling of Joseph in 1700, the earliest recorded anti-slavery tract published in what would become the United States. He was protesting the widening shift from indentured servitude to outright slavery in the colonies. In the colony of Georgia, founded in 1733, founder James Edward Oglethorpe fended off repeated attempts by South Carolina merchants to introduce slavery. His motivations mixed principle with military strategy: he worried about Spanish collusion with runaway slaves, and wrote to the Georgia Trustees in 1739 urging them to hold firm, arguing that allowing slavery would occasion the misery of thousands in Africa. He was overruled in 1750, after the Spanish defeat at the Battle of Bloody Marsh removed his defensive argument. The Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay made the moral stakes viscerally clear at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in Burlington, New Jersey, when he threw off a cloak to reveal a sword, then plunged it into a book concealing a hidden bladder filled with pokeberry juice, splattering those nearby with fake blood to dramatize the violence of slaveholding. Lay's friend Benjamin Franklin had printed his 1737 book All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. Within the Quaker community, the campaign had a measurable target: between 1681 and 1705-70 percent of Quakers owned slaves. Anthony Benezet became particularly influential in the following decades, inspiring a generation that included Granville Sharp, John Wesley, Thomas Clarkson, Olaudah Equiano, and Benjamin Rush, among others.

• 3. Revolution and Law

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  Thomas Paine published one of the first articles advocating emancipation of slaves on the 8th of March 1775, in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser. The piece appeared just weeks before the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired. On the 14th of April 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was formed in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers. It was the first American abolition society. It suspended operations during the war but reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president. Vermont, then an independent republic, became the first jurisdiction in North America to prohibit slavery in 1777, though it required masters to remove slaves rather than freeing them directly. Pennsylvania in 1780 became the first state to begin gradual abolition, though those enslaved before the law took effect were not freed until 1847. Massachusetts took a more radical path. Its 1780 constitution included a clause declaring all men equal. Three years later, in the case of Commonwealth v. Nathaniel Jennison, the Massachusetts Supreme Court reaffirmed that even slaves had a constitutional right to liberty, effectively ending slavery there. New York moved more slowly; the enslaved population was first converted into indentured servants before the state granted full emancipation in 1827. In New Jersey, slavery was not fully prohibited until the Thirteenth Amendment. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, forbidding slavery in the vast territory that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. South Carolina, which had abolished the slave trade in 1787, reversed that decision in 1803, and it remained the persistent exception to northern progress. In 1807, Congress made the importation of slaves a crime effective the 1st of January 1808, as soon as the Constitution permitted. President Jefferson, in his 1806 annual message to Congress, framed this as withdrawing citizens from further participation in violations of human rights. Even so, roughly a thousand slaves per year continued to be smuggled into the country.

• 4. Garrison and Immediatism

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  On the 1st of January 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of his newspaper The Liberator, and American abolitionism as an organized political movement is usually dated from that day. Garrison always signed himself "Wm. Lloyd Garrison", and The Liberator continued without interruption until slavery was abolished in 1865. In 1835 alone, abolitionists mailed over a million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the South. The backlash was swift: mail was stolen from the Charleston, South Carolina, post office, and the Postmaster General ruled that postmasters were not required to deliver abolitionist material. By the 1830s, a decisive shift in Northern thinking had occurred. Mainstream opinion moved away from gradual emancipation and toward immediatism, meaning freeing all enslaved people immediately and dealing with consequences afterward. Amos Adams Lawrence described his own conversion after witnessing the capture and return to slavery of Anthony Burns: "we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists." Garrison recruited the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass as a speaker, and Douglass eventually launched his own widely distributed abolitionist newspaper, North Star. In 1854, Garrison stated his position plainly: "I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, 'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Hence, I am an abolitionist." The movement fractured along several lines. In the early 1850s, a split opened over the Constitution. Garrison's camp publicly burned copies of it, calling it "an agreement with hell". A rival camp led by Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and eventually Douglass argued the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document. A separate fracture ran along class lines, with artisan republicans Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright opposing slavery on grounds of solidarity between wage workers and enslaved people, while the industrialist Tappan brothers rejected any comparison between Northern workers and chattel slaves.

• 5. Women in the Movement

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  Angelina and Sarah Grimké were the first female anti-slavery agents, and their power derived partly from an unlikely source: they were born in the South. Perhaps because of their origins, their critiques of slavery carried particular weight and specificity. Angelina spoke of her genuine thrill at seeing white men do manual labor. In 1836, the sisters moved to New York to work for the Anti-Slavery Society, and the following year they played leadership roles at the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. In February 1838, Angelina addressed a Committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts, an act that for a woman at the time was itself a form of protest. A decade before the more famous Seneca Falls Convention, the Grimké sisters were already travelling and lecturing about slavery. As historian Gerda Lerner wrote, in working for the liberation of the slave, Sarah and Angelina Grimké found the key to their own liberation. Abby Kelley Foster, from Massachusetts, became the leading fundraiser for the American Anti-Slavery Society and helped bring Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone into the movement. Her form of radical abolitionism, demanding full civil rights for all black people, became known as "Abby Kelleyism". She organized and spoke at the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, a gathering that is often overshadowed by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which was not actually a national event. At the 1852 American and Foreign Antislavery Society convention, approximately two-thirds of the 2,000 attendees were women. Women also worked through cent societies, where members of a church would each pledge to donate one cent a week to abolitionist causes. In the winter of 1831-32, women sent three petitions to the Virginia legislature advocating emancipation. The Liberator noted in 1847 that when the account of abolitionist effort was made up, the contributions of women would "hold a most honorable and conspicuous position." The Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848 grew out of the partnership between Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had first met at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Sojourner Truth delivered her first documented public speech at the 1850 National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester.

• 6. Black Voices and Agency

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  Manisha Sinha, in her book The Slave's Cause, argues that the Stono Rebellion of 1739 should be understood as an act of abolition from the perspective of the enslaved, recognizing their agency and humanity as grounds for self-liberation. The rebellion was led by a literate enslaved man named Jemmy on the 9th of September 1739, in South Carolina. The participants intended to reach Spanish-controlled Florida, but were stopped by white colonists in Charlestown. The result was 25 colonists and between 35 and 50 African people killed, and the passage of the 1740 Negro Act. Historian James M. McPherson, writing in 1964, noted that scholars had largely overlooked the work of black abolitionists and focused attention on only a few figures like Frederick Douglass. Lesser-known figures such as Martin Delany and James Monroe Whitfield also shaped the movement substantially. Black abolitionists faced a particular challenge, confronting a hostile public while simultaneously asserting their American identity. Many intentionally adopted aspects of British, New England, and Midwestern cultures to navigate this tension. Black female abolitionists operated with distinct motivations and strategies. They were often middle-class members of literary societies composed solely of Black women, and they held themselves to high moral standards to be taken seriously. Sarah Mapps Douglass, a free-born Quaker, wrote articles for The Liberator and served as secretary for a women's literary society in Philadelphia, emphasizing education and morality for Black women. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published by the London Emancipation Committee as The Deeper Wrong: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Lengthy British reviews of the book showed how it helped abolitionists build public support in Britain. Frederick Douglass completed 280 lectures across the United Kingdom and Ireland in 19 months from 1845 to 1847. On the 4th of October 1845, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society presented him with a Bible bound in gold. Brothers Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston, free Black men, helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society.

• 7. John Brown's Raid

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  In October 1859, John Brown led a band of 22 men to seize the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, knowing it contained tens of thousands of weapons. Brown had grown up in Hudson, Ohio, in a region historians have called probably the most intensely antislavery section of the country. He believed the South was on the verge of a massive slave uprising, and that a single spark would ignite it. Financial support came from a group called the Secret Six: George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Gerrit Smith, all abolitionists. The raid did not unfold as Brown had planned. He hoped to quickly assemble a small army of runaway slaves but had made no provision to actually inform them of his intentions. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army was dispatched to suppress the raid, and Brown was captured quickly. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting a slave revolt, and was found guilty on all charges. Under Virginia law, there was a month between sentencing and execution, and Brown used those weeks to speak with reporters and write many letters. When he was hanged, church bells rang across the North, a 100-gun salute was fired in Albany, New York, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among the writers who praised him publicly. The day of his execution, Brown said: "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done." Historian David S. Reynolds credited Brown as the man who "killed slavery, sparked the civil war, and seeded civil rights". The raid may have helped Lincoln win the 1860 election and contributed to Southern states' decision to secede, leading to the Civil War.

• 8. War and Amendment

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  The Civil War began with Lincoln publicly stating he opposed only the spread of slavery to Western territories, not slavery itself. That position shifted step by step over four years. On the 16th of April 1862, Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. Two months later, on June 19, Congress banned slavery in all federal territories. Congress also passed the Confiscation Acts, which declared that escaped slaves who crossed Union lines were confiscated war property and did not need to be returned to their Confederate owners. The Second Confiscation Act, enacted on the 17th of July 1862, stated that enslaved people belonging to anyone who supported the rebellion "shall be deemed captives of war, and shall be forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves." The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on the 1st of January 1863, declaring enslaved people in Confederate states to be free. The United States Colored Troops began operations that same year. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was repealed in June 1864. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery everywhere in the United States except as punishment for a crime. It freed more than 50,000 people still enslaved in Kentucky and Delaware, the only two states where slavery still existed at that point. The amendment also abolished slavery among Native American tribes. The Germantown petition of 1688 had arrived at a Quaker meeting and been set aside. The two-page document that Francis Daniel Pastorius and his colleagues drafted in Pennsylvania took 177 years to produce a constitutional result. The question of what legal status the formerly enslaved would hold in a post-slavery republic remained unresolved as the amendment was ratified, a question the movement had long argued about and never fully settled.