Beginning in the 1780s—during the time of the American Revolution—there arose in western Europe and the United States a movement to abolish, or end, the institution of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade that supported it. Advocates of this movement were called abolitionists.
From the 16th to the 19th century, some 10 million black Africans were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. They were sold as laborers on the sugar and cotton plantations of South and North America and the islands of the Caribbean Sea. In the late 1600s, Quaker and Mennonite Christians in the British colonies of North America began protesting slavery on religious grounds. Nevertheless, the institution of slavery continued to expand in North America. This was especially true in the Southern colonies.
By the late 1700s ideas about slavery were changing in the Western world. An intellectual movement in Europe known as the Enlightenment had made strong arguments that certain rights, including liberty, belong to all individuals. The leaders of the American Revolution issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This document enunciated a belief in the equality of all human beings. In 1789 the French Revolution began, and its basic document was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the fundamental charters of human liberties. There was a gradual but steady increase in opposition to keeping human beings as private property.
Slavery was illegal in England, but it flourished in Britain’s colonies in the Americas, as did the slave trade. The first formal organization to emerge in the abolitionist movement was the Abolition Society, founded in 1787 in England. Its leaders were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. The society’s first success came in 1807 when Britain abolished the slave trade with its colonies. When slavery itself showed no signs of disappearing, the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Britain in 1823 under the leadership of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a member of Parliament. In 1833 Parliament finally passed a law abolishing slavery in all British colonies.
In the United States abolitionists were handicapped by the fact that abolitionism threatened the harmony of the Northern and Southern states in the union. Abolitionism also ran counter to the U.S. Constitution, which left the question of whether slavery should be legal to the individual states. The states of the North abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804, while slavery remained legal in the South. A provision in the Constitution, which was written in 1787, also prohibited Congress from abolishing the slave trade for 20 years. The slave trade was finally banned in the United States in 1807, but widespread smuggling of slaves continued until about 1862. The abolishment of the slave trade coincided with a reinvigorated cotton economy in the South, which depended on slave labor. From that time on, the North and the South grew more and more different, in both economy and social attitudes.
Between 1800 and 1830 the antislavery movement in the North looked for ways to eventually eliminate slavery from the United States. One popular plan was to colonize Liberia, in Africa, as a refuge for former black slaves. The American Colonization Society began settling freed slaves and freeborn blacks there in the 1820s.
While many abolitionists were working for the gradual abolishment of slavery, a much more strident form of abolitionism emerged in the 1830s. It called for the immediate outlawing of slavery. The most notable leader of this movement was William Lloyd Garrison. On January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of his newspaper, the Liberator, calling for the immediate emancipation, or freeing, of all slaves in the United States. This was the most extreme of abolitionist positions, and it never gained a large following in the North. But the zeal with which Garrison and his associates pursued their cause gave them a great deal of both influence and notoriety.
Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. For some 30 years this organization was a powerful but divisive influence in the United States. It never had the support of a majority of Northerners. Most did not like what they saw as its extremism; they were aware that the U.S. Constitution left it to the states to decide about slavery, and they did not want to see the union divided. And even though the Northern states had abolished slavery, Northern whites did not want a large black population living in their midst.
Garrison was perhaps the best-known American abolitionist. Others included clergymen and people active in religious communities such as Theodore Dwight Weld and Theodore Parker. Literary figures such as John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Lydia Maria Child also joined the movement. Free blacks, particularly former slaves Frederick Douglass and William Wells , were eloquent speakers for the cause.
American abolitionists spoke out against slavery throughout the North. Some of them urged the secession of the North from the union and arranged boycotts of goods shipped from the South. An organized system called the Underground Railroad was established to help slaves escape to the North and to Canada. Free blacks, such as freed slave Harriet Tubman, were the most active in helping slaves flee the South. Northern abolitionists, philanthropists, and such religious leaders as Quaker Thomas Garrett also participated in the Underground Railroad.
A number of factors combined to give the U.S. abolitionist movement increased momentum in the 1840s and ’50s. Chief among these factors was the question of whether slavery should be permitted or be outlawed in the country’s new western territories and states. Northerners and Southerners took increasingly strong stands on opposite sides of that issue. In addition, many Northerners were repelled at the ruthlessness of slave hunters under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. This law provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves. Also influential was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to which there was a far-reaching emotional response.
In 1859 the United States was jolted by the actions of a militant abolitionist named John Brown, who believed that violence was the only way left to free the slaves. Brown led a raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), in an attempt to get weapons to arm blacks for a rebellion in the South. Although the raid was unsuccessful, Southern slaveholders became convinced that abolitionists would stop at nothing to eradicate slavery. Brown’s raid is thought to have helped to bring about the American Civil War.
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but he was opposed to the spread of slavery into the West. Many people in the South felt that their entire way of life, based on the cheap labor provided by slaves, was greatly threatened by Lincoln’s election. As a result, the Southern states seceded from the union, and the Civil War broke out. The war began as a power struggle to preserve the union. However, it ultimately led Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which freed the slaves in the areas of the rebellion. After the war, slavery was abolished throughout the United States by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
Although the institution of slavery did not exist in the countries of western Europe, it did exist in their colonies. The French were the first to outlaw slavery in all their territories. In 1794 the revolutionary government freed all French slaves. Bloody uprisings in Haiti a few years later led Napoleon I, the emperor of France, to reestablish slavery there in 1802. By 1819, however, the French slave trade was outlawed, and in 1848 slavery was banned in all French colonies.
In Latin America slavery was abolished gradually, on a country-by-country basis. In Chile the first antislavery law was passed as early as 1811. The slave trade was abolished and children born of slaves were freed. However, adult slaves were not emancipated until 1823. In Venezuela abolition was also gradual, primarily because the government did not want to pay slaveholders all at once for the loss of their human property. Freed slaves were forced, as compensation, to work for former owners for a number of years. Slavery finally ended in South America in 1888 with the passage of an antislavery law in Brazil.
The removal of slavery from the entire Western Hemisphere could not occur until all trading in slaves was abolished. With this in mind, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in England in 1839. By 1862 international treaties allowing the right to search ocean vessels had been signed by most Western countries, including the United States. Within a few years the slave trade was destroyed.