Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841–1851 (original) (raw)

What the Abolitionists Were Up Against, Revisited

What the Abolitionists Were Up Against, Revisited, 2020

Antislavery activists in the 19th century United States faced a set of formidable obstacles in moving the needle of northern popular opinion from apathy (at best) to engagement. This essay explores the hostile landscape of American social, political, and cultural life within which antislavery writers operated. They could not ignore these conditions if they were going to appeal to their largely northern, middle class audience: they had to assuage their concerns, prompt them to question assumptions, and force them to question conventional wisdom. But northern middle-class culture also provided antislavery activists with opportunities. Pushing the right buttons had the potential to transform hostility and apathy into interest and, maybe, enthusiasm in the fight against slavery. This essay does not show how antislavery women and wen pushed those buttons, but it does identify them and explores their potential to turn a culture of indifference into a culture of antislavery.

American Experience: The Abolitionists

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-), 2013

Using visual imagery, interviews with a dozen prominent scholars, and vignettes re-enacted by actors playing the five protagonists, the documentary carefully recreates the fervor and urgency that abolitionists felt in the tumultuous decades before and during the Civil War. The Abolitionists opens with depictions of the early years of Grimké and Douglass: though opposites as the daughter of a prominent slaveowner and a slave, they were united by their vehement reaction to what Douglass termed "the hell of slavery." After reviewing the nineteenth-century entrenchment of slavery in the South, viewers are introduced to Garrison's antislavery campaign of moral suasion and to Stowe's encounter with Kentucky slavery. The final protagonist, Brown, appears on the screen late in the first episode, rising to commit his life to slavery's demise after the murder of Alton antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy. Part one concludes with a love story, that of Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld; their wedding invitation was adorned with the image of a slave in chains. The love story quickly gives way to the events that disheartened abolitionists in the late 1830s, from the angry Northern opposition that led to the burning of Philadelphia Freedom Hall days after Grimké's wedding to the movement's internal fracturing. Part two opens with Douglass's escape from slavery in the fall of 1838 and subsequent encounter with Garrison and work for the movement. Douglass's published narrative became a bestseller but in the aftermath of its success and his flight to England to escape capture, a rift developed between Garrison and Douglass, especially after the latter founded his own antislavery newspaper, The North Star.

A Quest for Rights: The Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth-Century United States of America

Journal of Social Sciences Ankara University, 2017

The institution of slavery was one of the most challenging problems in the history of the United States of America. Created as part of the idea of white supremacy, slavery was in essence based on race difference or racial inferiority of the black race. These ideas led to the enslavement of Africans who were uprooted from their own lands and transported to the North American continent. Since its inception as a nation, the United States disregarded the rights of black people (or other ethic groups) on its land in all of its founding documents. However, the intriguing point was that the same years also witnessed the formation and dissemination of a process of enculturation through the ideology of domesticity, which promoted the significance of the idea of home for the white Americans. While such ideals were meant to shape the lives of particularly white middle-class women, black female slaves were suffering from homelessness and tortures in the very same houses. Observing this discrepa...

Certainty, crisis, compromise : the abolitionists of the liberator circle, 1860-1863

2017

This thesis examines the abolitionist community that corresponded through the weekly abolitionist periodical The Liberator, organised into four different circles of the Liberator Circle, over the years 1860-1863. Chief editor William Lloyd Garrison, notable agitator Wendell Phillips, editor Charles Whipple, and their coadjutors in the Liberator Circle, believed that political abolition was impossible because the entire political system was founded on the proslavery compromise of the Constitution. Furthermore, it was impossible to take an uncompromising moral stand as a politician, for achieving consensus within any given party, as well as with the opposition, required compromise, as defined by George Santayana in Character and Opinion in the United States. Garrison and his coadjutors in the Liberator Circle fervently refused to compromise over the evil of slavery, and demanded immediate abolition through the anti-political means of northern disunion. This thesis argues that from 186...

Introduction to Early American Abolitionists, a Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820

Early American Abolitionists, a Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820, eds. James G. Basker, et. al. (Gilder Lehrman Institute,), 2005

This volume reprints some fifteen anti-slavery texts that, with one or two exceptions, have been out of print for almost two centuries. They have been edited by an unusual editorial team, con sisting of scholars at every rank from undergraduate to full professor. Our overarching purpose has been to restore to view some of the extensive anti-slavery literature—pamphlets, poems, sermons, printed speeches, and more—that flourished in early America. As the twenty-first century begins, it is easy to forget that slavery was not universally accepted during the Founding Era. Despite the failure of the founders to eradicate slavery at the national level, there were—as this literature attests—energetic and articulate opponents of slavery who attacked it relentlessly and achieved significant gains in many parts of the country over the period 1760 to I820.

Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, 2011

takes up the study of American abolitionists at the point where many scholars have left off. She focuses on reformers after 1865, examining the ways in which advocates engaged in a renewed debate with a nation inclined to forget, evade, or mythologize the recent past, eager to put sectional quarrels aside, and content to accept a menacing climate of racism in the interests of sectional peace. In the last third of the nineteenth century --as in the second third --abolitionists found themselves deeply embroiled in discussions about the experience of human enslavement, the meanings of freedom, the possibilities of equality, and the responsibilities of the Republic. The memoirs abolitionists wrote to engage in this renewed debate represented a double-edged return to the past. Purposefully, the writers presented historical accounts of the antislavery movement's origins. Tragically, reformers retraced earlier ground as a way to confront resurgent racial fears and resentments in their own time that echoed those of the 1830s.

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

Journal of American History, 2016

Given the volume of recent works produced on the anti-slavery movement of the 19th-century Atlantic world, it was time for someone to create a new synthesis. Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause is a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. It provides a catalogue of antislavery figures, organizations, and publications and will likely serve as a valuable go-to reference work for years to come. Besides bringing the different waves of anti-slavery together in one place, Sinha offers her own conclusions about the anti-slavery movement, primarily that divisions of race, gender, class, and ideology were not as pronounced in the movement as some historians have made them out to be and that the overall history of the movement was one of continuity more than change. Just as importantly, in illustrating the radical nature of the movement she highlights the connection between anti-slavery sentiment and an early critique of capitalism and imperialism. Rather than seeing the movement as being broken into a series of periods that replaced each other with new ideas and tactics (though she does describe different 'waves' of abolition), Sinha focuses on continuity more than change. She describes the movement was an organic and dynamic one in which activists from one generation to the next considered the same questions and held similar tactical debates. This continuity has become increasingly obvious in the studies produced over the past decade, and Sinha builds upon a host of primary and secondary sources to show readers that, while scholars may continue to divide the movement in broad periods, the issues of each of those periods blended from one into another as the movement advanced. One of the main continuities of the anti-slavery movement was its interracial nature. Sinha begins her story in Africa, maintaining that, while there is plenty of literature on African participation in the slave trade, scholars often overlook African opposition to the slave trade and to slavery. She points out that the first antislavery writing was produced in West Africa and that the story of the rise of abolition was an interracial one from the beginning. Indeed, she concludes that 'writers of African descent were among the first to wrestle with the problems of race and slavery in the modern West' (p. 9) and that their early works discredited 'the racist logic that dehumanized Africans as slave property' (p. 26). Not only did Africans provide the first written protests, they also led rebellions that went hand in hand with protests by Quakers and other whites in North America. Just as importantly, slaves protested their condition by running away, and their actions influenced white abolitionists like Granville Sharp and led to the famous anti-slavery ruling in the Somerset