Abolitionism

Abolitionism was a social and political movement in Europe and the Americas that aimed to end the transatlantic slave trade and then slavery itself. Abolitionists argued that slavery violated natural rights, Christian teaching or both, and that enslaved people should be freed. The movement brought together religious groups, Enlightenment thinkers, formerly enslaved people and free Black communities, and political reformers. It used petitions, newspapers, lectures, boycotts and first-hand narratives of enslavement to change public opinion. Its main goals were achieved in the nineteenth century, though in the United States only after a civil war. Today the word is also used for movements against modern forms of slavery and human trafficking.

Early protests came from Quakers, including the Germantown petition of 1688 in Pennsylvania. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and others founded a society in London to abolish the slave trade, and William Wilberforce led the campaign in Parliament. Britain and the United States banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and 1808. The Haitian Revolution, beginning in 1791, ended slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. In the United States, William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator in 1831 and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, became one of its most influential speakers and writers. Harriet Tubman and others helped people escape through the Underground Railroad. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 ended slavery in the United States, and Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish it, in 1888.

Gradualists wanted slavery to end slowly, sometimes with compensation for slaveholders, while immediatists demanded immediate emancipation. Garrisonians relied on moral persuasion and rejected the US Constitution as proslavery, while political abolitionists formed the Liberty Party and later joined the Free Soil and Republican parties. Most abolitionists relied on peaceful means, but John Brown led an armed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Some antislavery reformers supported colonization, the resettlement of freed people in Africa, which many Black abolitionists strongly opposed.

In their own time, defenders of slavery called abolitionists dangerous fanatics who threatened property, order and the Union, and mobs attacked abolitionist meetings in northern cities. Some moderates argued that immediate emancipation was impractical. Later historians have pointed out that many white abolitionists still held racial prejudices, that British emancipation paid compensation to slaveholders but not to the enslaved, and that the movement often gave too little attention to land, wages and political rights after freedom.

Abolitionist campaigns led to the end of the legal slave trade across the Atlantic and to emancipation in the British Empire, the French colonies in 1848, the United States, Cuba and Brazil. The movement pioneered mass petitions, consumer boycotts of slave-grown sugar and organized lecture tours. Many leaders of the early women's rights movement, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, gained experience in abolitionism.