American abolitionism was the long campaign to end chattel slavery in the United States. It began with Quaker protests in the colonial era, won gradual emancipation in the Northern states after the Revolution, became a militant mass movement from the 1830s, and reached its goal only through the American Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865. Its arguments helped split the country and shape the politics that led to secession.
Colonial and revolutionary beginnings
On 18 February 1688 a small group of German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, among them Francis Daniel Pastorius, drafted a two-page protest against slavery and sent it to their Quaker meeting; it is usually seen as the starting point of the American movement. In the 1730s James Oglethorpe kept slavery out of the new colony of Georgia, partly for strategic reasons, though the ban was later revoked. In 1775 Thomas Paine published an essay against African slavery, and in April of that year Quakers in Philadelphia formed the first American abolition society, later led by Benjamin Franklin.
Gradual emancipation in the North
The Revolution put the language of equality to the test. Vermont banned slavery in 1777, Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780, and freedom suits under the Massachusetts constitution effectively ended slavery there by 1783. By 1804 every Northern state had passed laws for gradual or immediate abolition, although some, such as New York and New Jersey, moved slowly. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 barred slavery from the lands that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves from 1 January 1808. No Southern state followed, and slavery there hardened into an institution defended with growing vigour.
Immediatism
In the 1830s Northern opinion shifted from gradual emancipation and the resettlement of freed people in Africa towards immediate abolition. William Lloyd Garrison launched his weekly paper The Liberator on 1 January 1831 and kept it running until 1865. Black activists and churches were central: the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass became the movement's most famous speaker and published his own paper, the North Star. In 1835 abolitionists mailed more than a million anti-slavery pieces into the South, provoking gag rules in Congress. The movement also divided, over the role of women, over whether the Constitution was a pro-slavery pact, and over electoral politics; the Liberty Party, formed in 1840, made abolition its only platform. Many abolitionists also aided fugitives on the Underground Railroad.
The crisis of the 1850s
The Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850, required Northerners to help return escaped slaves and outraged abolitionists. Harriet Beecher Stowe answered with Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the most influential anti-slavery book of the age. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 opened new territory to slavery, prompting the creation of the Republican Party, which sought to contain slavery rather than abolish it at once, and leading to violence in "Bleeding Kansas". In October 1859 a band of 22 men led by John Brown seized the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a slave uprising; he was captured, tried and hanged, and his raid deepened Southern fears.
War and emancipation
After Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, Southern states seceded and war began in April 1861. Step by step the Union turned against slavery: it was abolished in the District of Columbia on 16 April 1862 and in federal territories that June, and the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863 in Confederate-held areas. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the country except as punishment for a crime, freeing the last enslaved people in Kentucky and Delaware.
On our maps
Our 1800 and 1815 maps show the young United States divided between free and slave states; our 1878 map shows the reunited country after emancipation.