British example, Quaker traditions, evangelical revivalism,
and northern emancipations (1776-1827) aroused interest in abolitionism
in the United States. The abolitionists differed from those of
moderate antislavery feelings in that they called for an immediate
end to slavery. The most extreme abolitionists denied the validity
of any laws that recognized slavery as an institution; thus,
they systematically violated the fugitive slave laws by organizing
and operating the Underground Railroad,
which concealed and transported runaway slaves to Canada. The
activities and propaganda of the abolitionists, although discredited
in conservative northern quarters and violently opposed in the
South, made slavery a national issue.
Most historians cite 1831 as the beginning of the
United States abolitionist movement, when William Lloyd Garrison
founded The Liberator in Boston. This newspaper soon became
the leading organ of American abolitionism. In 1833 the American
Anti-Slavery Society was organized in Philadelphia under Garrison's
leadership; this society was the most militant of all the antislavery
organizations. Viewed as fanatics by the general public, the
abolitionists were relatively few in number-only about 160,000
in the period 1833 to 1840. Most were educated church people
of middle-class New England or Quaker heritage. Support among
the working and upper classes was minimal.
Northern mobs attacked abolitionists as threats
to the social order. This engraving depicts blacks and abolitionists
being expelled from Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts,
on December 3, 1860.
Prints and Photographs Division
Library of Congress. |
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Split Over Policy
In 1839 the society split into two main groups, the
radicals and the gradualists. The division was caused by disagreement
concerning policy and tactics. The radical leaders, who besides
Garrison included Wendell Phillips, Lucretia Mott, and John
Brown, refused to join a party necessarily committed to gradual
and legal emancipation of the slaves; these leaders retained
control of The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery
Society. The gradualists, who included James Birney, Arthur Tappan
and his brother Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Weld, believed that
emancipation could be achieved legally by means of religious
and political pressure.
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Although abolitionists prevailed in Illinois, in part
due to the influence of Abraham Lincoln, slavery was a contentious
issue. Clashes between groups divided on the subject sometimes
led to violence. This lithograph shows a mob attack in Alton,
during which the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was killed. |
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In 1840 the Tappans founded the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society, which, along with numerous state organizations,
carried on most of the United States antislavery agitation. One
year earlier, a group led by Birney had founded the first antislavery
political party, the Liberty party, in the United States. Birney
was the unsuccessful presidential candidate (1840 and 1844) of
the party, the adherents of which later helped found the Free-Soil
party (1848) and the Republican party (1854).
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Nineteenth-century American author and abolitionist
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852),
a groundbreaking novel that stimulated tremendous antislavery
sentiment in the United States. In the book, Stowe provided dramatic
examples of the evils of slavery and showed how the institution
of slavery corrupts otherwise kind slave holders. |
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By the 1850s advocacy of violence against slave owners had replaced
the earlier "moral suasion." This was especially true
during the bitter controversy over extending slavery into Kansas.
Only with the victory of Union forces in the American Civil War,
however, could abolitionists claim a triumph. Blood and iron,
not pure idealism, won the day. Most of the American antislavery
societies were dissolved following the adoption in 1870 of the
15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. |
