Abolitionism
Abolitionism was a social and political movement aimed at ending the institution of slavery. It gained momentum in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the United States and Britain. Abolitionists advocated for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved individuals and worked through various means, including petitions, literature, and direct action, to achieve this goal.
8 Key excerpts on "Abolitionism"
eBook - ePubThe Slave's Cause
A History of Abolition
- Manisha Sinha(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
...Some abolitionists became disenchanted with their country and government, while others sought to harness the power of the state against slavery. The history of abolition is an ideal test case of how radical social movements generate engines of political change. As they do in all social movements, questions of principle versus expediency permeated abolition, giving rise to divisions over tactics. Abolitionists debated the culpability of the church, state, and society as well as their amenability to change: whether society could be transformed through political action and whether the state was an arena of conflict or a tool of the Slave Power. It is a mistake, however, to equate slaveholders’ political power with modern state formation. For good reason the conservative political tradition of American slaveholders, who dominated the federal and their state governments from inception and used all the repressive powers of the state to further the interests of slavery, was strongly antistatist. 8 During the Civil War and Reconstruction the enslaved and their radical allies pushed the nation to realize their ideal of an interracial democracy. And for a brief period, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, the slave stood in the sun before being shoved back into the shadows. The overthrow of Reconstruction had little to do with the alleged poverty of the abolitionist vision and a lot to do with the endur ing power of abolition’s opponents. When the horror of racial injustice settled in again, not just the formerly enslaved but democracy as a whole suffered. The fate of American democracy lay not in the hands of the powerful, with their dreams of wealth and empire, but in the postwar movements for racial, gender, and economic autonomy. 9 The abolitionist project of perfecting American, indeed global, democracy remains to be fulfilled. In that sense, its legacy is an enduring one. A new historical narrative of abolition, this book challenges long-standing interpretive binaries...
eBook - ePubNew York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee
Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory
- Alan J. Singer(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...3 ABOLITION ON THE MARGINS So far as I am personally concerned, I feel no interest in any history of it that may be written. It is enough for me that every yoke is broken and every bondman set free. Yet there are lessons to be drawn from it that cannot fail to be serviceable to posterity. … There are innumerable battles yet to be fought for the right, many wrongs to be redressed, many evil customs abolished, many usurpations overthrown, many deliverances wrought; and those who shall hereafter go forth to defend the righteous cause, no matter at what cost or with what disparity of numbers, cannot fail to gain strength and inspiration from an intelligent acquaintance with the means and methods used in the Anti-Slavery movement. —William Lloyd Garrison, in a letter written March 17, 1873 IN HER GROUNDBREAKING BOOK THE SLAVE ’ S CAUSE: A HISTORY OF ABOLITION (2016), Manisha Sinha documents the radical nature of the American movement to end slavery as well as the crucial role played by both free blacks and enslaved Africans, especially black abolitionists based in New York. Sinha argues persuasively that “[s]lave resistance,” especially slave rebellions, “not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement” (Sinha 2016, 1). During the Civil War, black and white abolitionists continually pushed to expand the struggle to encompass not just an end to slavery, but emancipation combined with respect for the freedman’s humanity and recognition of full citizenship rights...
eBook - ePubThe American Civil War and Reconstruction
People, Politics, and Power
- Britannica Educational Publishing, Jeff Wallenfeldt(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 3 A BOLITIONISM AND A BOLITIONISTS Abolitionism P assionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity, Abolitionism, the antislavery movement, appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in American politics. Yet by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of “race,” over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When race became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released. If the reform impulse was a common one uniting the American people in the mid-19th century, its manifestation in Abolitionism finally split them apart for four bloody years. Despite its brutality and inhumanity, the slave system had aroused little protest throughout the world until the 18th century, when rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment began to criticize it for its violation of the rights of man, and Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century, moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, since slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all of the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 (Vermont) and 1827 (New York). But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the great plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America. Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of African slaves into the British colonies and the United States...
eBook - ePubLincoln Reconsidered
Essays on the Civil War Era
- David Herbert Donald(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Open Road Media(Publisher)
...In this instance, he must ask what produced in these abolitionists their attitude of frozen hostility toward the President. These abolitionist leaders who so excessively berated Lincoln belonged to a distinct phase of American antislavery agitation. Their demand for an unconditional and immediate end of slavery, which first became articulate around 1830, was different from earlier anti-slavery sentiment, which had focused on gradual emancipation with colonization of the freed Negroes. And the abolitionist movement, with its Garrisonian deprecation of political action, was also distinct from political antislavery, which became dominant in the 1840’s. The abolitionist, then, was a special type of antislavery agitator, and his crusade was part of that remarkable American social phenomenon that erupted in the 1830’s, “freedom’s ferment,” the effervescence of kindred humanitarian reform movements—prohibition; prison reform; education for the blind, deaf, dumb; world peace; penny postage; women’s rights; and a score of lesser and more eccentric drives. Historians have been so absorbed in chronicling what these movements did, in allocating praise or blame among squabbling factions in each, and in making moral judgments on the desirability of various reforms that they have paid surprisingly little attention to the movement as a whole. Few serious attempts have been made to explain why humanitarian reform appeared in America when it did, and more specifically why immediate Abolitionism, so different in tone, method, and membership from its predecessors and its successor, emerged in the 1830’s. The participants in such movements naturally give no adequate explanation for such a causal problem. According to their voluminous memoirs and autobiographies, they were simply convinced by religion, by reading, by reflection, that slavery was evil, and they pledged their lives and their sacred honor to destroy it...
eBook - ePub- A. James Fuller(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...Abolition emerged as a by-product of the upsurge of religious revivalism popularly known as the Second Great Awakening. The original abolitionist principles and objectives revealed the deep influence of evangelical tenets. Revivalist assumptions led may churchmen to regard slavery as a product of personal sin and to demand emancipation as the cost of repentance. Early abolitionists therefore focused on a campaign of “moral suasion” to use religious institutions to reach and convert the consciences of slaveholders rather than pursuing political or governmental means to achieve emancipation. 1 The rejection of this emancipation program by nearly every major American religious body in the 1830s forced abolitionists to reconsider their church-oriented strategy. Many followed the lead of the Boston abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison and abandoned the churches as hopelessly corrupted by slavery. Many of these Garrisonians also adopted pacifistic or “nonresistant” political practices and counseled Northerners to withhold their sanction from the proslavery Constitution by refusing to vote. The Garrisonians hired Douglass as a traveling lecturer only two years after he escaped from slavery in Maryland, resettled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and espoused their basic political ideology. 2 After the 1840 schism in the antislavery ranks, some non-Garrisonian abolitionists focused on reforming the churches. Many of these abolitionists joined the newly formed American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the most prominent leader of which was the New York City merchant Lewis Tappan. Throughout the 1840s, this abolitionist faction concentrated on lobbying denominations and other religious institutions to adopt stronger sanctions against slaveholders. Tappan and many who worked with him shared the view that the business of politics was morally corrupt and maintained a wary distance from that sphere. 3 Not all the abolitionists who broke with Garrison opposed political activism...
eBook - ePub- Jeremy Black(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 Abolitionism DOI: 10.4324/9781315732299-5 The nineteenth century witnessed the end of legal slave trading in the Atlantic world. This was not a process free from considerable opposition nor from serious difficulties. However, the Abolitionist cause succeeded, first against the slave trade and then against slavery, and this marked a major change in the Atlantic world. The debate over Abolitionism, and therefore the arguments for and against, can be traced back into the eighteenth century. Among the key Abolitionist currents were religious pressure and secular idealism. The first was particularly important in the Protestant world, although there had always also been a significant current of Catholic uneasiness about, and sometimes hostility to, slavery. Abolitionism should be located in both religious and secular contexts. The two were generally closely linked for, with the exception of revolutionary France in the 1790s, there was only limited expression of atheistical views. Indeed, with the breach with Christianity, there was in part an effort to offer not atheism but, instead, an alternative form of religion. More commonly, religious and secular progress were thought of as part of the same process, and notably so in Britain, the leader, first, in the slave trade and, then, in its abolition. Denmark In Protestant Europe, the slave trade was abolished first by Denmark in 1792. This was achieved by government decree (without an Abolitionist campaign), although the law did not come into force until 1803. In the meanwhile, the slave trade to the Danish West Indies (now the American Virgin Islands) was opened to all foreign nations, and their population was built up from about 25,000 slaves to about 35,000. In part, it was believed in Denmark that Britain and France would soon abolish the trade and would then seek to prevent other powers from participating, which proved to be an erroneous expectation in the short term but not in the long term...
eBook - ePubJames W.C. Pennington
African American Churchman and Abolitionist
- Herman E. Thomas(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...To contend that some African-Americans in the abolition movement were more concerned about immediate emancipation than the sin of slavery represents another. However, neither interpretation applies to the entire abolition movement; for categories are approximate and may overlap. Cognizant of these factors of limitation, the writer found the four categories of abolition delineated by Eileen Kraditor helpful in explaining abolition in terms of motives and methods and in locating Pennington on a continuum of abolition. 2 3 According to Kraditor, an “abolitionist” was “any man or woman who belonged to an antislavery society [between 1834–1850] … and who believed that slavery was a sin, that slaves should be freed immediately, and unconditionally, and without expatriation or compensation to the owners, and who subscribed at least in theory to the doctrine of race equality.” 4 The first category she called “Garrisonian.” A “Garrisonian” abolitionists was someone who, while not necessarily“agreeing with Garrison’s teachings on religion, politics, or the woman question, supported Garrison’s belief that an antislavery society should be ‘broad’ in the sense that it should include members with all religious, social, and political views,” united only by their devotion to abolitionist principles outlined in the above definition. In the second class were the “anti-Garrisonian[s]”; these abolitionists desired to “narrow” antislavery activity to acts which did not otherwise alienate “the general Northern public,” and who, after 1839, believed that “the societies should officially endorse political action.” 5 The“conservatives” who believed that Northern society was essentially good and the alleviation of slavery would" preserve its basically moral arrangements,” comprised the third category. Slavery was an evil which ought be abolished preferably by moral persuasion...
eBook - ePubFor Abolition
Essays on Prisons and Socialist Ethics
- Scott, David, Sim, Joe(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Waterside Press(Publisher)
...Underscored by libertarian socialist principles of freedom, empathy, dignity and the right to a fulfilling human life, penal Abolitionism aspires towards an emancipated and truly liberated humanity grounded in non-hierarchical, anti-oppressive and non-exploitative human relationships. Emancipation is to come through a free and thoroughly democratic society organised around human wellbeing and the meeting of our necessary needs. The ideas of penal abolitionists should not be restricted to bookshelves in university libraries or student seminars, but rather should be infused into popular culture and be drawn upon to influence the way that people think about crime and punishment. In this sense, penal abolitionists should work from ‘ inside ’ the system, they should perform an active role in society and contribute towards everyday cultural and ideological battles for hearts and minds through a pedagogy of freedom. Such an understanding of the role penal abolitionists should perform in public debates means having a very broad understanding of what abolitionist activism and interventions entail. Abolitionist and socialist activism, as understood by this author, ranges from delivering public speeches, seminars, research, briefing papers, journalistic writings and other media engagement as well as community organising and providing a platform for subjugated and subaltern voices. Further, many prominent penal abolitionists today teach in an institution key to modern day knowledge production and dissemination: the university. The penal abolitionist is then a system inside-outsider who should be committed to further enhancing democracy and building public spaces for critical reflection by being both tactically inside and strategically outside the system at the same time. Following the insights of Edward Said (1994), the penal abolitionist should deliberately not fully belong to a given society...
