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What was the abolitionist movement?
The abolitionist movement was a long battle to try and end slavery, racial discrimination, and segregation. It was a political and social fight for independence of slaves. -
The start of the abolitionist movement
The abolitionist movement didn't merge into a radical fight until the 1830's. Although feelings of abolition were spreading around the time of the American Revolution and in the upper South during the 1820's. -
Immediate Emancipation
In the early 1830's abolitionists such as Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually moved by religious work, had began supporting the cause of "immediate emancipation." -
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William Lloyd Garison
Garrison was born in Massachusetts and was mentored by abolitionist publisher Benjamin Lundy. He supported and fought for the immediate abolishment of slavery without violence. He even launched his own antislavery publication named "Liberator" in 1831. In 1832 he established the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison also lead the American Anti-Slavery Society, which started publishing the "National Anti-Slavery Standard" in 1840. -
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Frederick Douglass
Frederick is one of America's most well known abolitionists. He was born into slavery in Maryland. Douglass wrote about his personal experiences with slavery in his classic text titled, "Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass' in 1845. He feared that the text could possibly cause his re-enslavement, Frederick traveled to Europe, where he lectured in England, Scotland, and Ireland. -
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Interesting Facts
In 1833 the United Kingdom abolished slavery with the Slavery Abolition Act. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were women's suffrage leader's who also were passionate abolitionists. Most abolitionists were peaceful and nonviolent except a man named John Brown who took an aggressive and dangerous path to try and end slavery. -
The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a group of African Americans as well as Whites who offered shelter and help to escaped or runaway slaves from the South. -
American Anti-Slavery Society
William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, and sixty other delegates of different race and gender met in the year of 1833 in Philadelphia to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. This society claimed slavery to be a sin that must be abolished, praised nonviolence, and disapproved of racial prejudice. -
Murder of an abolitionist
Elijah Lovejoy was an abolitionist editor who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois. This event became a rallying cry for many other abolitionists. -
Garrison and his followers
Garrison and his followers were starting to question slavery’s influence on society. They started to believe that the influence of slavery had corrupted society. a radical change in America’s spiritual values was needed to achieve emancipation. Garrison added a demand on equal rights for women within the movement. They also avoided corrupt political parties and churches. -
Literature
The poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell quickly spread, along with the autobiographies of fugitive slaves including Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and Solomon Northrup. -
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
The original act was a pair of federal laws that allowed for runaway slaves to be captured and returned within the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 added more provisions that regarded runaway slaves. This act basically pressured citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves. It even denied slaves the right to a jury trial and increased the penalty for intervening with the process to $1,000 and even six months in jail. -
Abolitionists and the Fugitive Slave Act
Even though blacks mainly managed the Underground Railroad white abolitionists began protecting African-Americans that were threatened with capture as escapees from bondage. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
This act was an 1854 bill that ordered "popular sovereignty" which allowed settlers of a territory to choose if slavery would be allowed within a new state's borders. Conflicts began to rise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the result of the act's passage led to a time of violence which is known as Bleeding Kansas. This helped influence the American Civil War. -
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed in the violent removal of the slavery system. In 1859, Brown and his 21 followers attacked the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry which is a town in West Virginia. Their mission was to acquire supplies and use them to arm a slave rebellion. Brown was later captured during the raid and hanged. He became an anti-slavery icon. -
American Civil War
When the American Civil War took place there was more than four million slaves that worked in the United States. 95% of those slaves were located in the Southern states. A big political issue that led up to the start of the Civil War was the expansion of slavery to the West. Northern abolitionists believed if they could stop the spread of slavery they could end slavery as a whole once in for all. -
Abraham Lincoln and the start of war.
The South felt threatened by the election to presidency of Abraham Lincoln since he was opposed to the spread of slavery into Western territories. The result of the separation of the Southern states led to the American Civil War. -
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The American Civil War
The war began as a power struggle to preserve the union. This led Lincoln who has never been an abolitionist to emancipate or set free the slaves in areas of the rebellion by the emancipation proclamation. This then led to the emancipation of all slaves in the United States by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. -
Emancipation Proclamation
Issued by Abraham Lincoln the president of the United States. Issued on January 1st, 1863, that freed or emancipated the slaves of the confederate states in uprising against the Union. -
Thirteenth Amendment
An amendment created in 1865 to the Constitution of the United States that properly ended slavery. -
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Slavery is completely abolished
Slavery was completely abolished in its final remaining Latin America Countries, Cuba and Brazil with the help of the pressure of public opinion. The system of slavery as a Western phenomenon came to an end.
