ANTISLAVERY

ANTISLAVERY sentiment and activity in the United States took several forms during its evolution from the quiet protest of the Germantown Quakers in 1688 through the tragic and violent American Civil War, which spawned the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Response to slavery varied from adamant defense to mild doubts to militant hostility. The antislavery movement was a crucible for the white conscience in matters of race, because nearly all slaves in the United States were black. As a consequence, different elements within the society perceived the problem of slavery in radically different ways and proposed sometimes contradictory solutions.

In the U.S. the antislavery movement was a multifarious one that featured diverse and often clashing objectives and organizational forms. Throughout the history of antislavery activism in the United States, there was a small number of people who may with justice be called abolitionists, those who sought to abolish slavery throughout the country and to incorporate the freed blacks into American society. In the eighteenth century abolitionists generally supported plans for gradual emancipation, but a new generation of abolitionists who appeared in the 1830s demanded an immediate end to slavery and advocated the integration of American society. A much larger group among the opponents of slavery were those who feared that blacks neither could nor should integrate into American society as equals. These critics of slavery instead proposed the colonization of free blacks outside the United States. Increasingly, colonizationists shifted away from their early opposition to slavery to focus upon the removal of free blacks. The northern sectionalists came to be the largest element in the antislavery crusade; they opposed slavery as the basis of the social and political power of an aristocratic class that unfairly dominated the political process to the disadvantage of northern whites. The racial attitudes of this group covered a broad spectrum, and its main efforts centered upon restricting the expansion of slave territory.

Gradualism

The early history of antislavery in America consisted primarily of the agitation of certain British and American Quakers, but even in this group antislavery sentiments grew slowly because many wealthy Quakers were slave-holders. Only by the mid-1700s, when the Society of Friends faced a severe internal crisis brought on by the effects of the Great Awakening and the Seven Years War, did opposition to slavery increase measurably among Quakers. It was not until the 1780s that the major Quaker meetings could announce that their membership was free of slaveholders.

By the late eighteenth century the opposition to slavery had spread beyond the Society of Friends to other people whose response to slavery grew out of the secular thought of the Enlightenment. Because of its underlying republican ideology, emphasizing liberty and individual rights, the American Revolution encouraged antislavery sentiments. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all the states abolished the African slave trade, and most moved toward the ultimate eradication of slavery. This movement proceeded most rapidly in the states north of the Mason-Dixon line, where slavery was of minor economic importance. Moreover, the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 had confined slavery to the area that increasingly became known as the South.

Gradual emancipation in the northern states did not take place without opposition, and the newly formed anti-slavery societies played a crucial role in these early achievements. Aside from supporting gradual emancipation, these early antislavery societies attacked the Fugitive Slave Law and the African slave trade, distributed antislavery literature, and encouraged education of blacks. Although the membership of these early organizations included such prominent political figures as Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Rush, Quakers usually dominated them. Because of this narrow sectarian base and the ideological limitations of early antislavery sentiment, the movement rapidly waned following its victories in the northern states.

Colonization

During the three decades following 1800, opposition to slavery entered a new phase. Efforts at gradual emancipation gave way to proposals for the colonization of free blacks, and the center of antislavery activity shifted to the upper South. Although the most vocal opponents of slavery during these years were active in southern states, true abolitionism never gained a foothold anywhere in the South. In the two decades following the American Revolution, all the southern states except Georgia and South Carolina moved toward emancipation by easing the process of private manumission, and between 1800 and 1815 societies devoted to gradual emancipation sprouted in all the states of the upper South. After 1800 the tide turned and flowed in the opposite direction. By 1830 nearly all vocal abolitionists were forced to leave the South. As the crucial debate in the Virginia legislature in 1832 revealed, the only antislavery advocates remaining in the South by then were the rapidly dwindling supporters of the American Colonization Society (ACS).

The ACS had originated in response to fears that free blacks could not successfully incorporate into American society. Its activities typified the conservative reform emanating from a period of fairly modest social and economic change, but its early membership included, along with some of the South's leading politicians, such abolitionists as Benjamin Lundy, the Tappan brothers, Gerrit Smith, and the young William Lloyd Garrison. Abolitionists formed only a minor element in the ACS, however. In the early years, most advocates of colonization usually related the proposal to schemes for manumission and gradual emancipation, but most colonizationists cared little about the plight of the slave and hoped to rid the country of the troublesome presence of a race generally deemed inferior and degraded. The doctrine of gradualism based on a faith in the perfectibility of all people gave way to the racist perspectives that typified the nineteenth century. As the ACS became increasingly dominated by those whose main purpose was the deportation of free blacks and shedding its antislavery character, the abolitionists turned against the organization.

Immediatism

The appearance of Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonization in 1832 and the debates at Lane Seminary in 1834 signaled a major shift in American antislavery and the emergence of the movement for immediate abolition. One can trace the roots of the doctrine of immediatism to the basic elements of eighteenth-century antislavery thought and relate its appearance in the United States in the 1830s to such causes as British influence, increasing black militancy, and the failure of gradual emancipation in the South. Nevertheless, the new intensity and enthusiasm that characterized the drive for immediate, uncompensated abolition came about primarily from evangelical perfectionism. Although abolitionists were often ambivalent about their precise programs, their new approach connoted a direct response to the recognition of the sinfulness of slavery and epitomized the abolitionist movement of this period. In rejecting the detached eighteenth-century perspective that had governed the psychology of gradual emancipation, the advocates of immediate abolition "made a personal commitment to make no compromise with sin."

In the 1830s antislavery sentiments spread throughout the northern states, and a new network of abolition societies appeared. The New England Antislavery Society formed in 1831. Two years later at a meeting in Philadelphia, delegates from Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania established a national organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). In rapid order, auxiliaries appeared in all the eastern states, and members made an energetic effort to revive western abolitionism. Following the Lane debates, Theodore Dwight Weld served as an agent for the AAS by lecturing and organizing local groups throughout Ohio and the western portions of New York and Pennsylvania. In 1835 he founded the Ohio State Antislavery Society, which shortly became second only to the New York Society among the state auxiliaries of the AAS. His success prompted the AAS to extend the agency system by sending out a new host of agents, the "Seventy," to further expand the number of

local societies and advance the idea of immediate abolition of slavery.

As a result of such activities, the number of state and local societies multiplied rapidly. Historians, however, know little about the makeup of these societies except that they proliferated in rural Yankee areas "burned over" by the Great Revival and that a majority of their members were women. Abolitionist leaders were highly educated and moderately prosperous men of some importance in their communities. Their most significant characteristics were an intense religious commitment and Yankee origins. Nearly two-thirds were pastors, deacons, and elders of evangelical churches, and an even larger proportion of white abolitionist leaders traced their family origins to New England.

A distinctive group within the movement consisted of the free blacks who were prominent in the activities of the underground railroad and who provided a crucial element of abolitionist leadership. Unfortunately, whites generally denied blacks positions of power in these organizations, and blacks resented the racism and paternalism of the whites. During the 1830s and 1840s, a series of all-black National Negro Conventions focused the efforts of black abolitionists.

The major activity of the abolitionists in the 1830s consisted of the dissemination of antislavery arguments in the hope that moral suasion would effect the end of slavery in the United States. They produced abolitionist newspapers, such as Garrison's Liberator and the Emancipator, which functioned as the major organ of the AAS. Aside from its newspaper, the AAS issued a quarterly, two monthlies, and a children's magazine. It also supported a yearly antislavery almanac and a series of pamphlets that included the classics of antislavery literature. While it was not until the 1840s and 1850s that slave narratives and sentimental antislavery novels appeared, the appeal to sentiment was central to the most powerful of the abolitionist attacks on slavery published in the 1830s, Weld's Slavery As It Is.

In 1835 the AAS launched its postal campaign under the direction of Lewis Tappan. The society hoped to inundate the South with publications and convince southerners to rid themselves of the evils of slavery. Although the intention of the literature was to sway the minds and sentiments of the slaveholders, critics immediately viewed it as incendiary. In July 1835, a mob attacked the Charleston, South Carolina, post office and burned a number of abolitionist newspapers. In the following year, a law excluding antislavery literature from the mails failed in Congress, but with the cooperation of the Jackson administration, local postmasters effectively eliminated the circulation of abolitionist material in the South.

When the postal campaign failed, the AAS shuffled its organizational structure and turned to a campaign to present Congress with petitions on a variety of subjects related to slavery. The petition was a traditional antislavery instrument, but in 1835, John C. Calhoun and his South Carolina colleague in the House, James Hammond, moved against hearing any antislavery pleas. In an effort to disassociate themselves from this attack on the civil rights of northern whites, northern Democrats accepted the more moderate gag rule that automatically tabled all antislavery petitions. Undaunted, the AAS flooded Congress with petitions. The largest number of these petitions opposed the annexation of Texas and called for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Yet by 1840 the gag rule had effectively stifled the petition campaign.

Political Antislavery

Although it had grown rapidly during the 1830s, at the end of the decade, the abolition movement remained un-popular and weak. The abolitionists had encountered mob violence in the North, no major politician dared associate himself with their cause, and the leading religious denominations rejected their teachings. Factional bickering and financial reverses further undermined the movement. The theoretical Seventy agents had never reached full strength, and after 1838 their numbers dwindled drastically. Because the panic of 1837 and the subsequent depression dried up their sources of funds, the local societies had to curtail numerous activities. Then, in 1840, after several years of bickering over the relation of abolitionism to the churches and to other reform movements, particularly women's rights, the AAS split into warring factions. In that year the radical followers of Garrison took over the AAS. The moderate element formed a new organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFAS). By this time, the Great Revival, which had fired the growth of abolitionism in the previous decade, had run its course, and neither of these organizations retained the vitality that had characterized the AAS in the first five years of its existence.

In 1839 the majority of American abolitionists, faced with the distinct possibility of failure and agreeing that their earlier tactics had not won support for abolition, decided to establish a political party devoted to their cause. After an unsuccessful attempt to get New York gubernatorial candidates to respond publicly to their inquiries, Alvan Stewart, Gerrit Smith, and Myron Holley moved to form the Liberty party (or Human Rights party). The Liberty party devoted itself to bringing the slavery question into politics and hoped to keep the doctrine of immediatism alive by offering individuals an opportunity to go on record against slavery. Through 1844 the new party retained its abolitionist character by attacking the immorality of slavery and demanding equal justice for free blacks. During these years its support grew among the moderate abolitionists associated with the AFAS. While the Liberty party had induced most abolitionists to join its ranks, it is doubtful that abolition sentiment grew in the North during these years. At the height of its popularity, the party's votes came mainly from men who had earlier converted to abolitionism but had voted for the Whig party in 1840. It was strongest in the small, moderately prosperous Yankee farming communities that evangelical revivalism had earlier touched and that had been centers of organized abolition activities. After 1844 the Liberty party split over the question of broadening the party's appeal, and the majority of its members drifted into the Free Soil party, which appeared in 1848.

The failure of both moral suasion and political activity led many blacks and a few whites to greater militancy. In 1843 the Buffalo National Convention nearly adopted Henry Highland Garnet's advocacy of self-defense and slave revolt. Within a decade, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, numerous local conventions of blacks echoed his sentiments. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, Boston, and Syracuse, attempts by both blacks and whites to aid fugitive slaves became the focus of sporadic violence. It was not until 1859, however, that anyone connected with the abolition movement attempted to encourage rebellion among the slaves. After several years of planning, John Brown launched his unsuccessful Harpers Ferry raid.

Although individual abolitionists continued to agitate throughout the 1850s, organized abolitionism passed from the scene. As it emerged in the 1840s and 1850s, political antislavery compromised abolitionist goals in order to present a program moderate and broad-gauged enough to attract voters in the North whose opposition to slavery arose from their desire to keep blacks out of the territories and slaveholders out of positions of power in the federal government. The final phase of antislavery activity in the United States primarily emerged from hostility toward slaveholders and the values of the society in which they lived. Antisouthernism provided a vehicle through which the Republican party could unite all forms of northern antislavery feeling by 1860.

The growth of popular antagonism toward the South in the northern states began with the controversy over the gag rule. While the abolitionists had constantly attacked the excessive political power wielded by slave-holders, known as "slave power," Whig politicians in the

early 1840s made the most use of the issue to define a moderate pro-northern position between the abolitionists and the Democrats. The events associated with the Mexican-American War and actions of James Polk's administration caused a split in the Democratic party and the enunciation of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have excluded slavery from the territory gained by the war. The followers of Martin Van Buren in New York, increasingly enraged by the power of slaveholders within their party, joined with the so-called Conscience Whigs of Massachusetts and the majority of the Liberty party to form the Free Soil party. While its members included many true abolitionists, its platform represented both a broadening of the appeal of antislavery and a turning away from the earlier goals of the abolitionists. The party focused almost entirely on limiting the expansion of slavery to keep the territories free for the migration of whites. Its platform avoided traditional abolitionist demands, and its followers spanned the wide spectrum of contemporary racist opinion.

During the years between 1850 and 1854, not only abolitionism but also antisouthernism seemed to fade. Yet, at that very moment, a surge of nativism and anti-Catholicism throughout the North shattered traditional party alignments. Then, in 1854 and 1855, the fights over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the chaos in Kansas Territory revived antisouthernism and channeled it through the new Republican party. Although it deserves credit for ending slavery in the United States, the Republican party was by no means an abolitionist party nor one devoted solely to antislavery. Its platform touched on a wide variety of economic and social questions and appealed to a diverse group of northerners.

Ex-Whigs, with smaller but crucial groups of free-soil and nativist ex-Democrats and the remnants of the Free Democratic party, made up the new party. Consequently, it included both vicious racists and firm believers in racial justice. Although most Republicans had moderately liberal racial views for the day, many supported colonization schemes, and nearly all expressed reservations about the total integration of the society. The main focus of their antislavery sentiments was the southern slave-holder, and the only antislavery plank in their platform demanded the exclusion of slavery from the territories. In this limited form, a majority of northerners could embrace antislavery. Still, the party shied away from any direct attack on slavery. When secession threatened, many Republicans were willing to guarantee the existence of slavery in the southern states through a constitutional amendment.

The needs of war, as much as the constant agitation of the small abolitionist element within the Republican party, propelled the country toward emancipation. President Abraham Lincoln, who had long doubted the feasibility of social integration, prosecuted the war primarily to maintain the Union. Caught between the radical and conservative wings of his own party, the president moved cautiously toward the enunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation, the issuance of which on 1 January 1863 freed the slaves in areas still in rebellion. Later, with a good deal more forthrightness, he lent his support to the Thirteenth Amendment, which declared slavery unconstitutional anywhere in the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ericson, David F. The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Pro-slavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

McPherson, James M. The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969.

William G.Shade/a. e.

See alsoCivil War ; Colonization Movement ; Emancipation Movement ; Emancipation Proclamation ; Fugitive Slave Acts ; Gag Rule, Antislavery ; Harpers Ferry Raid ; Immediatism ; Kansas-Nebraska Act ; New England Anti-slavery Society ; Slavery ; andvol. 9:Address to President Lincoln by the Working-Men of Manchester, England ; Earliest American Protest against Slavery ; A House Divided ; John Brown's Last Speech ; Notes Illustrative of the Wrong of Slavery ; The Crime Against Kansas ; The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It .

Antislavery. The American antislavery crusade was a multifaceted, long‐term social reform movement that persisted from the mid‐eighteenth century through Emancipation in 1864. Over the years, the movement evolved from religious protest and colonization efforts to political organization, abolitionism, violent protest, and, finally, emancipation.

Beginnings of Antislavery Agitation.

Antislavery originated as a moral and religious issue. Various Protestant denominations—Mennonites and Amish, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Society of Friends (Quakers)—all contributed, with Quakers the early leaders. Eighteenth‐century Quakers George Keith, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet each attacked slavery on the basis of moral principle: namely, the equality of all persons before God. Among Baptists, local associations resolved to oppose the extension of slavery; some writers even called for its abolition. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, religious activists had formed antislavery societies that held public meetings and distributed literature to raise consciousness about the moral issues involved.

An early effort to achieve the progressive elimination of slavery was the African colonization movement. As a “gradualist” compromise between the moral issue of human bondage and the racial prejudices of white society, national leaders like Bushrod Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Henry Clay advocated manumitting (freeing) slaves and returning them to Africa, with the costs—including compensation to the owners—to be paid from a combination of public and private funds. The American Colonization Society, established in 1817, founded Monrovia (later Liberia) on the West African coast in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves. By 1860, some twelve thousand African Americans had returned to Africa. The colonization movement stirred hostility, however, from southerners opposed to manumission; from those who disapproved of spending public monies on the project; and from persons truly interested in the slaves' well‐being, who saw repatriation to Africa as simply a further injustice to persons of color.

By the late 1820s, rising public indignation in the North, called by some “ultraism,” strengthened antislavery sentiments. Local societies began to appear, particularly in New England. Leaders like Lewis and Arthur Tappan in New York City, William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, and Theodore Dwight Weld in Ohio founded a national organization, the American Anti‐Slavery Society (AAS), in 1833. Garrison, regarded as a fanatic by some and, worse yet, an incendiary by others, brought to the cause a sense of urgency; a genuine threat to slaveholders; and an uncompromising periodical, The Liberator, founded in 1831. An organizational genius, Garrison created a system whereby paid AAS agents fanned out across the North to lecture, debate, distribute tracts, sell Liberator subscriptions, and assist free blacks and fugitive slaves wherever possible. Through the AAS, the antislavery leadership combined careful planning and organization with the zeal of an evangelical religious crusade. Among the most effective AAS lecturers were the Grimké sisters of South Carolina, Sarah and Angelina, who had embraced Quakerism and moved North. In 1839 the Grimkés and Weld (whom Angelina had married) published American Slavery as It Is, a powerful documentary record of brutal abuses.

The religious dimension of antislavery found expression as well in the ministry of the Charles G. Finney and at two Ohio schools founded in 1833: Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and Oberlin College. Lane, a Presbyterian school, was situated in close proximity to a large population of free blacks. Its faculty and students included many antislavery firebrands, and a series of public lyceum debates soon gave Lane such a reputation as a hotbed of activism that in 1834 the trustees forbade further discussion of the matter. Fifty‐one Lane students, called “the Rebels,” withdrew and enrolled at Oberlin, an antislavery center where Finney was professor of theology. Through various forms of ministry and activism, Oberlin students and faculty infused the antislavery cause with new energy and momentum, making the college one of the movement's major leadership resources.

The Turn to Politics.

In 1840, Theodore Dwight Weld, the Tappan brothers, and other antislavery leaders turned to political organization. They were encouraged by the British Parliament's abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. Forming the Liberty party (also known as the Human Rights party), they nominated James G. Birney, a slaveowner turned abolitionist, for President. In part a reaction against Garrison (who was displaying increasingly radical and anarchist tendencies), the Liberty party stressed natural rights and political action. In 1840, too, these same individuals founded the American and Foreign Anti‐Slavery Society, which challenged Garrison for leadership of the movement. (The issue of equality for women in the antislavery campaign, which Garrison supported and more conservative antislavery leaders opposed, figured in this split as well.) Although Birney received only about seven thousand votes, his candidacy brought national attention to the antislavery cause—and sharpened the proslavery defenses of southern whites. Running again in 1844, Birney received 62,300 votes.

Congress's defeat in 1846 of the Wilmot Proviso (a resolution barring slavery in any territories other than Texas acquired in the Mexican War), coupled with the failure of either national party to take an unequivocal stand against slavery, further energized the effort to oppose slavery at the ballot box. In 1848 the Free Soil party took up the antislavery banner, nominating former President Martin Van Buren on a platform opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territories, summed up in the slogan “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.” While Van Buren ran third behind the Whig party candidate Zachary Taylor (who won) and the Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan, he did garner nearly 300,000 votes. Within a few years, many Free Soil voters would join the new Republican party, a coalition of antislavery enthusiasts, religious leaders, and former Whigs.

Abolitionism.

Meanwhile, “abolition” had become the cry of the more ardent antislavery advocates and “action‐men.” Radical activity ensued. Abolitionists flooded the South with inflammatory pamplets. Free northern blacks and escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft played an important role in the movement. Douglass became a major abolitionist spokesman, particularly with the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Abolitionists organized and operated the so‐called Underground Railroad, a complex network of antislavery households that spirited runaway slaves to the North and West, the Caribbean, and Canada. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a victory for slaveholders, heightened abolitionist fervor and directly inspired the most famous of all antislavery works, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Kansas‐Nebraska Act (1854) and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott (Scott v. Sandford) decision (1857), representing further victories for the slave power, added fuel to the abolitionist cause. Most radical of all were the ultraists like John Brown, who were prepared to wage armed conflict to achieve their objectives. Brown's career of antislavery violence, first in Kansas and then at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, won the support of Douglass and other prominent abolitionist leaders. Within two years the Civil War, which would finally end slavery in America, was underway.

From its inception, the antislavery movement benefited greatly from the evangelical energies unleashed in the Second Great Awakening, and from the many voluntary associations generated within the Protestant community. Countless antislavery leaders and supporters had roots in the evangelical missionary and revivalist traditions, and many also participated in other reform arenas, from Anti‐Masonry and adventism to the temperance and women's rights movements. Such leading women's rights advocates as Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got their start in the antislavery movement. Antislavery was the first great human rights crusade in American history. A sustained campaign lasting more than a century, it not only helped bring about the emancipation of the slaves, but it also inspired a long tradition of social reform.
See also Antebellum Era; Anti‐Masonic Party; Protestantism; Revivalism.

Bibliography

P.J. Staudenraus , The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865, 1961.
Bertram Wyatt‐Brown , Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery, 1971.
James B. Stewart , Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, 1977.
Ronald G. Walters , The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830, 1978.
Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, 1979.
Robert Abzug , Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform, 1980.
Lawrence J. Friedman , Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1982.
Aileen S. Kradotir , Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850, 1989.
Jean Fagan Yellin , Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture, 1989.

William H. Brackney

American Anti‐Slavery Society. The American Anti‐Slavery Society (AASS) was founded in 1833 by a small group of radicals calling for the immediate abolition of slavery. The leading spirit was William Lloyd Garrison, whose interaction with black abolitionists inspired him to reject colonization as a means of eradicating slavery. The founders of the AASS did not condone a violent overthrow of the slave system, but believed that moral suasion would convince slaveholders of its evils.

Abolitionists soon came to disagree over the necessity of violence, the position of women in the movement, and the role of politics and organized religion in the antislavery cause. These divisions reached a critical point in 1839 when a majority in the AASS voted to allow women to serve as delegates to antislavery conventions. Led by Lewis Tappan, opponents of Garrison's approach to abolitionism, with its exclusive emphasis on moral suasion and its interest in other reforms as well as antislavery, formed a new organization, the American and Foreign Anti‐Slavery Society, in 1840.

The violence of the 1850s caused many AASS members to rethink their commitment to moral suasion. Frederick Douglass rejected Garrisonian abolitionism in favor of political abolitionism. By the eve of the Civil War, Garrison and others endorsed the Republican party and supported John Brown's raid. While some Garrisonians continued to oppose violence, most endorsed the war as a means to end slavery.

Garrison retired in 1865 after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, but Wendell Phillips, Sallie Holley, and others maintained the AASS. As the interests of abolitionists fragmented, the AASS could no longer sustain its activities or newspaper, the National Anti‐Slavery Standard, and it disbanded in 1870 after the Fifteenth Amendment extended the franchise to freedmen. The AASS had witnessed the abolition of slavery, but had not been directly instrumental in its demise. Nevertheless, its members recognized that racism and the exploitation of black labor remained problems, and their principal legacy was a strong commitment to racial equality.
See also Antebellum Era; Civil War: Causes; Colonization Movement, African; Peace Movements; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Benjamin Quarles , Black Abolitionists, 1991.
Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, 1994.

Carol Faulkner

26. Antislavery

1. Abolitionists activist group working to free slaves. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 1]
2. Emancipation Proclamation edict issued by Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves (1863). [Am. Hist.: EB, III: 869]
3. Free Soil Party Abolitionist political party before Civil War. [Am. Hist.: Flexner, 3]
4. Jayhawkers antislavery guerrillas fighting on Union side in Civil War. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 256]
5. Laus Deo! poem written to celebrate emancipation of slaves. [Am. Lit.: “Laus Deo!” in Hart, 460]
6. Liberator William Lloyd Garrison’s virulently Abolitionist newspaper. [Am. Hist.: Van Doren, 142]
7. Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865) sixteenth U.S. president; issued Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 286–287]
8. North Star newspaper supporting emancipation founded by Frederick Douglass. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 607]
9. Shelby, George vows to devote self to freeing slaves. [Am. Lit.: Uncle Tom’s Cabin ]
10. Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–1896) author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, influential Abolitionist novel. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 481]
11. Uncle Tom’s Cabin highly effective, sentimental Abolitionist novel. [Am. Lit.: Jameson, 513]
12. Underground Railroad system which helped slaves to escape to the North. [Am. Hist.: EB, X: 255]

antislavery adj. opposed to slavery and dedicated to working for its abolition.