Abolitionism: The Movement

Early Abolitionism

Beginning as early as 1688, a community of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, engaged in a dialogue about slavery. This early challenge to slavery was indeed significant, but it was not until the period of the American Revolution, when Quakers such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet wrote antislavery pamphlets that were distributed widely, that their goals reached fruition. In 1776, the Society of Friends organized the first Antislavery Society, and one year later it ordered its slaveholding members to emancipate their bondspersons or leave the church.

The high point of early abolitionism, the main goal of which was to end the slave trade, came in 1808 when the U.S. Congress declared that it was illegal to import slaves into the country. The impact of religious and intellectual trends, along with the marginality of slavery to the economies of the northeastern United States, led to the “first emancipation.” In the southeastern United States, where chattel slavery was of enormous economic interest and also a major social institution, the outcome was different. Manumissions, which had increased during the revolutionary era because of fluctuating tobacco prices in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, halted after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793. Many plantation owners migrated to the Southeast.

The New Abolitionism

After 1810, the emancipation tendencies of the revolutionary era gave way to a new orientation that resulted in a revision in U.S. beliefs regarding nature, human nature, and the supernatural, resulting in the widely circulated notion that the United States was a “White man's” country. As a consequence, the call for the “immediate emancipation” of slaves, which had been promulgated by free Black activists on the northeastern seaboard since the American Revolution, did not seem feasible, even to most abolitionists. Like most abolitionists, the Quaker Benjamin Lundy, whose weekly Genius of Universal Emancipation (1831–1835) was one of the most influential newspapers on abolitionism before William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator (1831–1865), believed that colonization was the most prudent method of engendering emancipation.

Thus, only after Garrison, prodded by the wealthy Black Philadelphia sail maker James Forten, demonstrated that most Blacks opposed colonization did the movement for “immediate emancipation” become a [Page 2]force to be reckoned with. During the early 1830s, Garrison's newspaper was financed, subscribed to, and provided other means of support by Forten and other Black male and female activists. Furthermore, Garrison drew on the support of large numbers of young Whites from comfortable families who were evangelical Protestants, Quakers, and Unitarians—people in whom the ideals of equality and the unity of humankind were embedded.

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