Abolitionism

As we discussed in class after reading Julie Joy Jeffrey’s The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, there were early indications even before the end of the Revolutionary War that slavery would eventually turn into a heavily controversial and contentious issue among the new United States. Despite being a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson’s first…

The country was divided on the subject of slavery especially in Alton where Illinois was a free state, but St. Louis, Missouri across the river, was considered a slave state. The year is 1837 and the slavery movement is well underway. Many people condone slavery because it will make their life easier. It will cost the owner a lot less to by 2 slaves at $1,500 each, (CITE THIS) than to pay for someone to work their land every year or pay for a maid to clean their house that will cost them…

laws were morally null and void, slaves should be immediately liberated, and owners should receive no compensation (Document B). Certain southern politicians took this kind of doctrine and ran with it to further their own political desires, but abolitionism did have a fire burning in the free northern states. It was fanned by public outrage over the passage of a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850. Since 1820, compromise had been extolled as the greatest possible…

Some of the first anti-slavery societies in America were predominantly founded by Quakers in the 1770’s and 1780’s, insisting on the maxim of moral reciprocity found in the Bible: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” In New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, where the movement was most influential in the early republic, forms of emancipation were adopted. However, because of respect for private property rights, they argued for gradual emancipation and advocated…

written in The Declaration of Independence. Dal Logo stated, “More important still was how, in the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ Garrison related the struggle for slave emancipation to much more general, universal, principles, ideally joining American abolitionism and even more significantly, the struggle for black and white equality in terms of citizenship with all the progressive qualities of humankind” (301). Garrison compared the topic of slave emancipation to other topics to make it…

The Abolitionist and Women Rights Movement The Abolitionist and The Women’s Rights Movement were two of the most prominent progressive moments that took place during the pre-civil war era. The abolitionist movement’s main goal was to immediately emancipate all slaves and to bring about the end of racism and segregation. The Women’s Right Movements sought to establish equal consideration for women in terms of human rights and societal roles. The two movements were intertwined in several aspects…

The enslavement of Africans in the Americas had existed for over two hundred years by the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Coinciding with Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election in 1860, seven southern states, and later an additional four, seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, leading to the Civil War. Contrary to the beliefs of the majority of southerners at this time, Lerone Bennett Jr., a scholar, author, social historian, and writer for Ebony Magazine, in…

Through a shift in the United States Democracy in the 1800’s, the idea of slavery was transformed. Although the idea for freedom had always been a major focal point for all slaves, the actuality of making it legal was a new determination. For an African American woman like Sojourner Truth, a former slave, becoming an active participant in this fight for abolition was her life goal. As religious reform and anti-slavery feminism movements began in the 1840’s, so did Truth’s career as being one of…

Several reform movements regarding the advancement of democratic ideals gained traction from 1825 to 1850. Activists were concerned with social and institutional issues, principal among these being temperance, abolitionism, women's rights, religion, education, and the penal system. However, this period also saw the emergence of decidedly anti-democratic nativist policies designed to oppress recently naturalized citizens. The pressure for social reform began as a response to perceived…

America began to see true social reform in the nineteenth century, and much of the desire for an improve life came from religious movements. Early reform movements expanded from the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival mainly among Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. The Awakening itself began in Western New York and quickly spread throughout the US, igniting a period of evangelicalism in both the South and the West. A couple reform societies sprang up in the South and in…