Abolitionist

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Abolitionist, name applied to one who aimed at or advocated the abolition of slavery. The term may be found at least as early as 1790, during the period when Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and the younger Pitt attacked the slave trade. In 1807 the British Parliament abolished slave traffic between England and her possessions, and in 1808 the traffic was abolished in the U.S. Despite universal outlawry, the slave trade continued illegally. During the 1830s, the territorial expansion of the U.S. made slavery and its abolition a vital issue, but though the North had freed its slaves it was still economically dependent on the cotton industry of the South, to which slavery was indispensable. Out of this conflict emerged three schools of Abolitionist thought: radical Abolitionism under W.L. Garrison; the philosophical attacks of Channing and Wayland; and Free‐Soilism under Lincoln. Two events in 1831 accelerated the Abolitionist movement and the hostility to it: the South was alarmed by the defeat, by only one vote, of a bill in the Virginia Senate providing for the colonization of free blacks and encouraging private emancipation; and the first issue of The Liberator. The New England Anti‐Slavery Society was organized by Garrison and others in 1831, and in 1833 the American Anti‐Slavery Society was established at Philadelphia by this and other local societies. The American Anti‐Slavery Society, including such members as Wendell Phillips, Whittier, Edmund Quincy, Arthur Tappan, James G. Birney, and Amos Phelps, was not dissolved until 1870, although a schism occurred in 1840 and most of the membership resigned to join other groups. In 1859 John Brown and his followers captured the armory at Harpers Ferry, intending to establish a base from which to free slaves by armed intervention. From then until the firing upon Fort Sumter, the Abolitionist drive and the opposition to it became increasingly powerful, being among the principal causes of the Civil War and influencing the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. The earliest antislavery prose is to be found in such works as Sewall's The Selling of Joseph, Franklin's On the Slave Trade, and the ninth of Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. Hildreth's The Slave (1836) is credited with being the first antislavery novel, but of the reams of literature—sermons, tracts, treatises, periodicals, poems, plays, and novels—for this cause, the most popular and influential were Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and H.R. Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). Other prominent antislavery authors were Lowell, Whittier, Benjamin Lundy, John Rankin, Samuel Crothers, T.D. Weld, Horace Mann, and Frederick Douglass.

ab·o·li·tion·ist / ˌabəˈlishənist/ • n. a person who favors the abolition of a practice or institution, esp. capital punishment or (formerly) slavery. DERIVATIVES: ab·o·li·tion·ism n.

abolitionist n. a person who favors the abolition of a practice or institution, especially capital punishment or (formerly) slavery.
abolitionism n.

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