Abolitionist Movement Notes
Abolition defined = is the push to get rid of (abolish) slavery
Church pushes reform
Second Great Awakening (revive religious faith through impassioned preaching)
-By 1850 1 in 6 Americans was a church member
Unitarians (faith in the individual and look to nature to see the answers in life)
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
African Americans
-Churches were their political, social and cultural centers in North, South
they heard stories of promise for the future (Exodus with Moses)
Anti-slavery societies spring up
-1820’s get 100’s of societies
-1817 American Colonization Society (wanted blacks to be resettled in Africa)
-Others call for blacks to remain in US and become citizens
William Lloyd Garrison
-Most radical, white abolitionist
-Est. his own antislavery paper in 1831-1865 called The Liberator
-Demanded immediate emancipation and violence was okay because the end justified the means
-Hated by whites and even faced with violence in Boston
Frederick Douglas
-Former Slave who became an outspoken critic of slavery
-created The North Star
-wanted abolition without violence
Nat Turner
-led slave rebellion in August of 1831 in Southampton, Virginia
-black preacher/prophet
- killed almost 60 whites when they attacked 4 plantations then he and his 50+ followers were rounded up and executed
-led to export of extra slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South
Women involved
-Raised money, distributed literature, and collected signatures for antislavery petitions to Congress
-also involved in temperance, equal education for women, treatment of mentally
Disabled, women’s suffrage
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
-Lucretia Mott
-Sojourner Truth
-former slave, speaker for movement
Underground Railroad
-system of escape routes out of the south used by runaway slaves
-conductors helped
-Harriet Tubman
-born a slave in MD, escaped, made 19 trips back to the South to
Help free 300 slaves
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Book portraying the horrors of slavery
- written by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- 1852
- Northerners increased their protests against slavery with this depiction, South saw it as an attack on their way of life
Dred Scott v. Sandford
-1857
- A slave whose owner took him from Missouri to free territory in Illinois and Wisconsin and back to Missouri claimed that because he was taken to a free territory he was now free (living in a free state had made him free)
- Supreme Court ruled Scott had no legal standing in court because he was not, nor ever would be, a citizen
-Court went further and said territories couldn’t exclude slavery because it would be denying someone’s right to property which is protected by the 5th amendment
(seen as Supreme Court abusing its power and making a political statement against slavery)
John Brown
-abolitionist, studied slave revolts in history (Ancient Rome, etc)
-On the night of Oct. 16.1859 led a band of 21 white and black men on a raid at the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, VA (now West Virginia)
-Put down by troops and Brown was executed and portrayed as insane by historians
THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY REFUSES TO GO AWAY