The Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery occurred on the 18th of February 1688. Francis Daniel Pastorius and three other men signed this document in a house on Germantown Avenue to condemn slavery.
Vermont became the first polity in North America to prohibit slavery in 1777. Masters were required to remove enslaved people from the state rather than freeing them directly under this law.
William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of his weekly newspaper called The Liberator on the 1st of January 1831. He signed the paper as Wm. Lloyd Garrison and it ran without interruption until slavery was abolished in 1865.
Frederick Douglass completed 280 lectures across the United Kingdom and Ireland over a period of 19 months starting in October 1845. On the 4th of October 1845 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society gave him a Bible bound in gold.
John Brown led a band of 22 men to seize the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry Virginia in October 1859. Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army was dispatched to put down the raid and Brown was subsequently hanged after being found guilty of treason.
The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865 to abolish slavery everywhere in the United States. This amendment freed more than 50,000 people still enslaved in Kentucky and Delaware which were the only states where slavery still existed at that time.