American Anti-Slavery Society

The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was the first national antislavery society in the United States of America. Immediatists, those who supported the immediate emancipation of enslaved people without compensation to slaveholders, established the society in Philadelphia in December 1833. For the remainder of the 1830s, it was the central organization of the abolitionist movement. It brought national attention to the movement to immediately abolish slavery.

Besides its significance as the organizational force of the early antebellum abolitionist movement, the AASS was also a pioneer in several other social movements. It was an interracial organization that sought to abolish slavery, and it declared that all people are equal, demanding full equality for African Americans, a revolutionary proposal at the time. The AASS also called for gender equality. Thus, the organization was at the forefront of three major social issues in American history, the related movements to abolish slavery and end racism, and the women's movement for equality.

Before the rise of immediatism, the American Colonization Society (ACS) attracted many anti-slavery advocates who considered its plan to colonize freed enslaved people in West Africa a worthy program of gradual emancipation that could eventually help end slavery in the United States. However, most free African Americans opposed the ACS, suspicious of slaveholder involvement in that organization and believing their future and rightful citizenship to be in their country of birth, the United States. African Americans’ opposition to the ACS influenced white antislavery proponents such as William Lloyd Garrison and others who would align with the AASS to also oppose the ACS and embrace immediatism.

Garrison subsequently launched an abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, in Boston in 1831. With the Liberator as his platform and support from African Americans, Garrison called for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and for racial equality. Garrison pushed for a meeting of abolitionists in Philadelphia, and at that meeting in December 1833 attendees formed the American Anti-Slavery Society.