Abolition of Slavery

During the late 1820s and the early 1830s the abolitionist movement in the United States gained a new vigor. To be sure, opposition to the institution of slavery had a long history. Enslaved Africans and their descendants fought the institution through periodic revolts and, more commonly, through less dramatic actions like breaking tools, slowing the pace of work, and other everyday forms of resistance. They were the first abolitionists. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, a few white Christians, particularly Quakers such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, condemned the institution. During the era of the American Revolution, many were struck by the contradiction of paeans to liberty in a land of slavery. Some among them formed organizations like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which used lawsuits and legislative petitions in an effort to gradually undermine the institution of slavery. Yet starting around 1831 a new cadre of abolitionists in the northern United States began to loudly, passionately, and very publicly demand the immediate end of slavery. They declared slavery an abominable national sin that could not be tolerated a moment longer, one that required immediate repentance through abolition.

Slavery was not abolished immediately. Its end would not be come until decades later in the 1860s with the Civil War, and it would not come through one but thorough a confluence of many factors. When it came emancipation was in large part a war measure aimed at weakening the Confederacy by sapping a portion of its labor force. It was also a political measure designed to finally resolve the conflicts between the free North and slave South that had for decade periodically troubled, and with Lincoln's election in 1860 finally broken, the national political process. African Americans contributed substantially to emancipation, in the North by enlisting in the Union army, in the South by running from plantations to Union lines. The abolitionists played some role too by lobbying vigorously throughout the early years of the conflict to make it a war against slavery.

While never more than a small minority in the United States, the abolitionists were undeniably a very vocal minority. In the inaugural issue of the abolitionists newspaper the Liberator in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison insisted that "I WILL BE HEARD." The abolitionists were unquestionably heard if not heeded, and through their many condemnations of and arguments against slavery they helped to push and keep the issue of slavery before the public and in the national political debate. They raised other issues too. Though ultimately the abolitionists' role in effecting the end of slavery may have been both indirect and modest, what they did accomplish during their decades of activism was to raise and earnestly debate a number of profoundly important questions regarding both the ethics and efficacy of different strategies for accomplishing progressive social change, particularly in regard to racial equality.

For instance, the abolitionists asked fundamental questions about the nature of race and racism. While most white abolitionists continued to harbor some racial prejudice, abolitionism was nevertheless the first large, sustained interracial political movement in the United States. Second only to ending slavery among the abolitionists' goals was the ending of racial inequalities in the law and in social custom. Yet the abolitionists, both black and white, differed among themselves about what race was and how institutional and social racism could be overcome. Some fought for a colorblind society where race not only didn't matter but wasn't acknowledged. White abolitionist Nathaniel P. Rogers, for instance, called upon African Americans to disregard and ignore race, asking them to "forget ... that you are colored men and women." Others abolitionists instead believed that race and racial difference mattered and that they needed to be acknowledged. Some African American abolitionists who believed this organized black-only political organizations and became champions of black nationalism.

Abolitionists also asked fundamental questions about the relationship between existing social inequalities. For instance, were racial and sexual inequalities related to one another? Could they be successfully undermined separately? In fighting against slavery and racial inequality, many female abolitionists increasingly resented their own second class status vis-a-vis men. As abolitionist Abby Kelley said,"We have good cause to be grateful to the slave for the benefit we have received ourselves in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves, not by one chain, but by many. In every struggle we have made for him, we find we have been also struggling for ourselves." Abolitionism proved to be a training ground for early women's rights advocates. All of the organizers of the convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 that launched the women's suffrage movement had been active abolitionists. While many male abolitionists supported woman's rights, some didn't, and among those that did some considered woman's rights secondary to and a distraction from what they considered the more important work of ending slavery. John Greenleaf Whittier, for instance, challenged Angelina Grimke's woman's rights advocacy, asking "Is it not forgetting the great and dreadful wrongs of the slave in a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of your own?"

Abolitionists asked other difficult and important questions too, including under what circumstances violence was acceptable as a tactic for achieving progressive social and political change. Many abolitionists were principled, devoted Christian pacifists. They considered violence a sin akin to slavery. However, during their decades long struggle against slavery some became more accepting of violence. This was particularly the case in the decade preceding the Civil War. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which strengthened the laws for recapturing fugitive slaves that had escaped from the South, led some abolitionists to compromise their pacifism in principle and sometimes in practice. Some forcefully liberated recaptured slaves and others defended African Americans who used violence to defend themselves. Angelina Grimke expressed the feelings of many abolitionists when she wrote that "Although the shedding of human blood is utterly abhorrent to my mind... yet the tame surrender of a helpless victim up the the fate of the slave is far more abhorrent." By the end of the decade abolitionist John Brown had descended upon Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to incite slave rebellions throughout the South. After his raid was quickly suppressed, some in the North condemned Brown while others lauded him as a martyr. The abolitionists, for the most part, were among the latter, celebrating Brown for his abolitionist convictions.

Though not without their faults and inconsistencies, the abolitionists honestly and earnestly asked these and other profound questions. Theirs is an important legacy, one of extraordinary political and moral engagement in which they denounced inequality and demanded justice for the disempowered.

About Robert K. Nelson:

Robert K. Nelson is an interdisciplinary scholar who researches nineteenth-century American history and the digital humanities. His work on nineteenth-century reform and literary politics has appeared in the Journal of Social History and American Literature. He is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and holds a PhD in American Studies from the College of William and Mary.

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(compiled by Robert K. Nelson)