thumb|200px|right|[[Josiah Wedgwood#"Am I Not A Man And A Brother?"|"''Am I Not A Man And A Brother?''" Medallion as part of the anti-slavery campaign by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787]] Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.

In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first European law abolishing colonial slavery in 1542, although it was not to last (to 1545). In the 17th century, Quaker and evangelical religious groups condemned it as un-Christian; in the 18th century, rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment criticized it for violating the rights of man. Though anti-slavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century, they had little immediate effect on the centers of slavery: the West Indies, South America, and the Southern United States. The Somersett's case in 1772 that emancipated slaves in England, helped launch the movement to abolish slavery. Pennsylvania passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780. Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. Britain abolished slavery throughout the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the French colonies abolished it 15 years later, while slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Abolitionism in the West was preceded by the New Laws of the Indies in 1542, in which Emperor Charles V declared free all Native American slaves, abolishing slavery of these races, and declaring them citizens of the Empire with full rights. The move was inspired by writings of the Spanish monk Bartolomé de las Casas and the School of Salamanca. Spanish settlers replaced the Native American slaves with enslaved laborers brought from Africa and thus did not abolish slavery.

In Eastern Europe, abolitionism has played out in movements to end the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia and to emancipate the serfs in Russia ( Emancipation reform of 1861 ).

In East Asia, abolitionism was evidenced in, for instance, the writings of Yu Hyongwon, a 17th-century Korean Confucian scholar who wrote extensively against slave-holding in 17th-century Korea.

Today, child and adult slavery and forced labour are illegal in most countries, as well as being against international law.

United Kingdom and the British Empire

Some of the first court cases to challenge the legality of slavery took place in Scotland. The cases were Montgomery v Sheddan (1756), Spens v Dalrymple (1769), and set the precedent of legal procedure in British courts that would later lead to successful outcomes for the plaintiffs.

The court case of 1569 involving Cartwright who had bought a slave from Russia ruled that English law could not recognise slavery. This ruling was overshadowed by later developments, but was upheld by the Lord Chief Justice in 1701 when he ruled that a slave became free as soon as he arrived in England.

William Wilberforce later took on the cause of abolition in 1787 after the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in which he led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire with the Slave Trade Act 1807. He continued to campaign for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which he lived to see in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

The last known form of enforced servitude of adults (villeinage) had disappeared in Britain at the beginning of the 17th century. But by the 18th century, traders began to import African and Indian and East Asian slaves to London and Edinburgh to work as personal servants. Men who migrated to the North American colonies often took their East Indian slaves or servants with them, as East Indians were documented in colonial records. They were not bought or sold in London, and their legal status was unclear until 1772, when the case of a runaway slave named James Somersett forced a legal decision. The owner, Charles Steuart, had attempted to abduct him and send him to Jamaica to work on the sugar plantations. While in London, Somersett had been baptised and his godparents issued a writ of ''habeas corpus''. As a result Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench, had to judge whether the abduction was legal or not under English Common Law, as there was no legislation for slavery in England.

In his judgment of 22 June 1772 Mansfield declared: "Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." Although the exact legal implications of the judgement are actually unclear when analysed by lawyers, it was generally taken at the time to have decided that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law in England. This judgment emancipated the 10,000-14,000 slaves or possible slaves in England, who were mostly domestic servants. It also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions (such as the North American colonies) could not be enforced in England.

The Somersett case became a significant part of the common law of slavery in the English speaking world, and helped launch the movement to abolish slavery. After reading about the Somersett's Case, Joseph Knight, an enslaved African in Scotland, left his master John Wedderburn. A similar case to Steuart's was brought by Wedderburn in 1776, with the same result: chattel slavery was ruled not to exist under the law of Scotland. Nonetheless, legally mandated, hereditary slavery of Scots in Scotland existed from 1606 until 1799, when colliers and salters were legally emancipated by an act of the Parliament of Great Britain (39 Geo.III. c56). A prior law enacted in 1775 (15 Geo.III. c. 28) was intended to end what the act referred to as "a state of slavery and bondage," but it was ineffectual, necessitating the 1799 act.

First steps

Despite the ending of slavery in Great Britain, slavery was a strong institution in the Southern Colonies of British America and the West Indian colonies of the British Empire. By 1783, an anti-slavery movement was beginning among the British public. That year the first British abolitionist organization was founded by a group of Quakers. The Quakers continued to be influential throughout the lifetime of the movement, in many ways leading the campaign. On 17 June 1783 the issue was formally brought to government by Sir Cecil Wray (Member of Parliament for Westminster), who presented the Quaker petition to parliament. Also in 1783, Dr Beilby Porteus issued a call to the Church of England to cease its involvement in the slave trade and to formulate a workable policy to draw attention to and improve the conditions of Afro-Caribbean slaves. The exploration of the African continent, by such British groups as the African Association (1788), promoted the abolitionists' cause by showing Europeans that the Africans had legitimate, complex cultures. The African Association also had close ties with William Wilberforce, perhaps the most important political figure in the battle for abolition in the British Empire.

Black people also played an important part in the movement for abolition. In Britain, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography was published in nine editions in his lifetime, campaigned tirelessly against the slave trade.

Growth of the movement

In May 1787, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, referring to the Atlantic slave trade, the trafficking in slaves by British merchants who took manufactured goods from ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, sold or exchanged these for slaves in West Africa where the African chieftain hierarchy was tied to slavery, shipped the slaves to British colonies and other Caribbean countries or the American colonies, where they sold or exchanged them mainly to the Planters for rum and sugar, which they took back to British ports. This was the so-called Triangle trade because these mercantile merchants traded in three places each round-trip. Political influence against the inhumanity of the slave trade grew strongly in the late 18th century. Many people, some African, some European by descent, influenced abolition. Well known abolitionists in Britain included James Ramsay who had seen the cruelty of the trade at first hand, Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and other members of the Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers, as well as Quakers who took most of the places on the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, having been the first to present a petition against the slave trade to the British Parliament and who founded the predecessor body to the Committee. As Dissenters, Quakers were not eligible to become British MPs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so the Anglican evangelist William Wilberforce was persuaded to become the leader of the parliamentary campaign. Clarkson became the group's most prominent researcher, gathering vast amounts of information about the slave trade, gaining first hand accounts by interviewing sailors and former slaves at British ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and London. Mainly because of Clarkson's efforts, a network of local abolition groups was established across the country. They campaigned through public meetings and the publication of pamphlets and petitions. One of the earliest books promoted by Clarkson and the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was the autobiography of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano. The movement had support from such freed slaves, from many denominational groups such as Swedenborgians, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and others, and reached out for support from the new industrial workers of the cities in the midlands and north of England. Even women and children, previously un-politicised groups, became involved in the campaign although at this date women often had to hold separate meetings and were ineligible to be represented in the British Parliament, as indeed were the majority of the men in Britain.

One particular project of the abolitionists was the negotiation with African chieftains for the purchase of land in West African kingdoms for the establishment of 'Freetown' – a settlement for former slaves of the British Empire and the United States, back in west Africa. This privately negotiated settlement, later part of Sierra Leone eventually became protected under a British Act of Parliament in 1807–8, after which British influence in West Africa grew as a series of negotiations with local Chieftains were signed to stamp out trading in slaves. These included agreements to permit British navy ships to intercept Chieftains' ships to ensure their merchants were not carrying slaves.

In 1796, John Gabriel Stedman published the memoirs of his five-year voyage to Surinam as part of a military force sent out to subdue bosnegers, former slaves living in the inlands. The book is critical of the treatment of slaves and contains many images by William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi depicting the cruel treatment of runaway slaves. It became part of a large body of abolitionist literature.

Slave Trade Act 1807

The Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. The Act imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. Such a law was bound to be eventually passed, given the increasingly powerful abolitionist movement. The timing might have been connected with the Napoleonic Wars raging at the time. At a time when Napoleon took the retrograde decision to revive slavery which had been abolished during the French Revolution and to send his troops to re-enslave the people of Haiti and the other French Caribbean possessions, the British prohibition of the slave trade gave the British Empire the high moral ground.

The act's intention was to entirely outlaw the slave trade within the British Empire, but the trade continued and captains in danger of being caught by the Royal Navy would often throw slaves into the sea to reduce the fine. In 1827, Britain declared that participation in the slave trade was piracy and punishable by death. Between 1808 and 1860, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.

Slavery Abolition Act 1833

After the 1807 act, slaves were still held, though not sold, within the British Empire. In the 1820s, the abolitionist movement again became active, this time campaigning against the institution of slavery itself. In 1823 the first Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Britain. Many of the campaigners were those who had previously campaigned against the slave trade. Sam Sharpe contributed to the abolition of slavery with his Christmas rebellion in 1831.

On 28 August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was given Royal Assent, which paved the way for the abolition of slavery within the British Empire and its colonies. On 1 August 1834, all slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, but they were indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system which was abolished in two stages; the first set of apprenticeships came to an end on 1 August 1838, while the final apprenticeships were scheduled to cease on 1 August 1840, six years later.

On 1 August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly Negroes being addressed by the Governor at Government House in Port of Spain, Trinidad, about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out the voice of the Governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and ''de facto'' freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838, making Trinidad the first British colony with slaves to completely abolish slavery. The government set aside £20 million to cover compensation of slave owners across the Empire, but the former slaves received no compensation or reparations.

Campaigning after the act

In 1839, a successor organization to the Anti-Slavery Society was formed, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which worked to outlaw slavery in other countries and also to pressure the government to help enforce the suppression of the slave trade by declaring slave traders pirates and pursuing them. This organization continues today as Anti-Slavery International.

France

As in other "New World" colonies, the Atlantic slave trade provided the French colonies with manpower for the sugar cane plantations. The French West Indies included Anguilla (briefly), Antigua and Barbuda (briefly), Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haïti, Montserrat (briefly), Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sint Eustatius (briefly), St Kitts and Nevis (St Kitts, but not Nevis), Trinidad and Tobago (Tobago only), Saint Croix (briefly), Saint-Barthélemy (until 1784 when became Swedish for nearly a century), the northern half of Saint Martin, and the current French overseas ''départements'' of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean sea. The slave trade was regulated by Louis XIV's ''Code Noir''. The revolt of slaves in the largest French colony of St. Domingue in 1791 was the beginning of what became the Haïtian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. The institution of slavery was first abolished in St. Domingue in 1793 by Sonthonax, who was the Commissioner sent to St. Domingue by the Convention, after the slave revolt of 1791, in order to safeguard the allegiance of the population to revolutionary France. The Convention, the first elected Assembly of the First Republic (1792–1804), then abolished slavery in law in France and its colonies on 4 February 1794. Abbé Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (''Société des Amis des Noirs''), led by Jacques Pierre Brissot, were part of the abolitionist movement, which had laid important groundwork in building anti-slavery sentiment in the metropole. The first article of the law stated that "Slavery was abolished" in the French colonies, while the second article stated that "slave-owners would be indemnified" with financial compensation for the value of their slaves. The constitution of France passed in 1795 included in the declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery was abolished.

However, Napoleon did not include any declaration of the Rights of Man in the Constitution promulgated in 1799, and decided to re-establish slavery after becoming First Consul, promulgating the law of 20 May 1802 and sending military governors and troops to the colonies to impose it. On 10 May 1802, Colonel Delgrès launched a rebellion in Guadeloupe against Napoleon's representative, General Richepanse. The rebellion was repressed, and slavery was re-established. The news of this event sparked the rebellion that led to the loss of the lives of tens of thousands of French soldiers, a greater loss of civilian lives, and Haïti's gaining independence in 1804, and the consequential loss of the second most important French territory in the Americas, Louisiana, which was sold to the United States of America. The French governments refused to recognise Haiti and only did so in the 1830s when Haiti agreed to pay a substantial amount of reparations. Then, on 27 April 1848, under the Second Republic (1848–52), the decree-law Schœlcher again abolished slavery. The state bought the slaves from the ''colons'' (white colonists; ''Békés'' in Creole), and then freed them. At about the same time, France started colonising Africa. Its activities there included transferring the population to mines, forestry, and rubber plantations under isolated, harsh working conditions often compared to slavery.

Debates about the dimensions of colonialism continue. On 10 May 2001, the Taubira law officially acknowledge slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. 10 May was chosen as the day dedicated to recognition of the crime of slavery. Anti-colonial activists also want the French Republic to recognise African Liberation Day.

Although the crime of slavery was formally recognised, four years later, the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) voted on 23 February 2005 for a law to require teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa." This resolution was met with public uproar and accusations of historic revisionism, both inside France and abroad. Because of this law, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, president of Algeria, refused to sign the envisioned "friendly treaty" with France. Famous writer Aimé Césaire, leader of the ''Négritude'' movement, refused to meet UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who cancelled his planned visit to Martinique. President Jacques Chirac (UMP) repealed the controversial law at the beginning of 2006.

Moldavia and Wallachia

In the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (both now part of Romania), the enslavement of the Roma (often referred to as Gypsies) was still legal at the beginning of the 19th century. Abolitionism was associated with the progressive pro-European and anti-Ottoman movement, which gradually gained power in the two principalities. Between 1843 and 1855, all of the 250,000 enslaved Roma people were liberated. Many migrated to Western Europe and North America.

In the Americas

Bartolomé de las Casas was a 16th-century Spanish Dominican priest, the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, who as a settler in the New World witnessed, and was driven to oppose, the poor treatment of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists and advocated before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor on behalf of rights for the natives. Originally having proposed to replace the slave labor of the natives with the importation of slaves from Africa, he eventually recanted this stance as well, and became an advocate for the Africans in the colonies. His book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, is largely responsible for the passage of the new Spanish colonial laws known as the New Laws of 1542, which abolished native slavery for the first time in European colonial history and ultimately led to the Valladolid debate.

Latin America

Slavery was abolished in most of Latin America during the Independence Wars (1810–1822), but remained a practice in the region up to 1873 in Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil. The United Provinces of the Río de la Plata declared freedom of wombs in 1813, but without abolishing slavery completely. The United Provinces would gave room to Argentina and Uruguay. Argentina abolished slavery with the signing of the Argentine Constitution of 1853. Slavery was abolished in Uruguay during the ''Guerra Grande'', by both the government of Fructuoso Rivera and the government in exile of Manuel Oribe.

In some parts of Africa and in much of the Islamic world, it persisted as a legal institution well into the 20th century.

Canada

With slaves escaping to New York and New England, legislation for gradual emancipation was passed in Upper Canada (1793) and Lower Canada (1803). In Upper Canada the Assembly no slaves could be imported; slaves already in the province would remain enslaved until death, no new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, and children born to female slaves would be slaves but must be freed at age 25. In practice some slavery continued until abolished in the entire British Empire in the 1830s.

United States

In eleven States constituting the American South, slavery was a social and powerful economic institution, integral to the agricultural economy. By the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million. American abolitionism labored under the handicap that it was accused of threatening the harmony of North and South in the Union. The abolitionist movement in the North was led by social reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society; writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe; former slaves such as Frederick Douglass; and free blacks such as brothers Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston, who helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society.

The 1860 presidential victory of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery to the Western United States, marked a turning point in the movement. Convinced that their way of life was threatened, the Southern states seceded from the Union, which led to the American Civil War. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the Confederate States; the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865) prohibited slavery throughout the country.

Calls for abolition

The first American movement to abolish slavery came in the spring of 1688 when German and Dutch Quakers of Mennonite descent in Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia) wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends. Though the Quaker establishment took no immediate action, the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, was an unusually early, clear and forceful argument against slavery and initiated the process that finally led to the banning of slavery in the Society of Friends (1776) and in the state of Pennsylvania(1780). The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14 April 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers who had strong religious objections to slavery. The society ceased to operate during the Revolution and the British occupation of Philadelphia. After the Revolution, it was reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president.Rhode Island Quakers, associated with Moses Brown, co-founder of Brown University, and who also settled at Uxbridge, Massachusetts prior to 1770, were among the first in America to free slaves. Benjamin Rush was another leader, as were many Quakers. John Woolman gave up most of his business in 1756 to devote himself to campaigning against slavery along with other Quakers. The first article published in what later became the United States advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery was allegedly written by Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775 in the ''Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser'', more popularly known as ''The Pennsylvania Magazine'', or ''American Museum''.

Abolition in the North

Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 under the Congress of the Confederation, slavery was prohibited in the territories north west of the Ohio River. By 1804, abolitionists succeeded in passing legislation that would eventually (in conjunction with the 13th amendment) emancipate the slaves in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. However, emancipation in the free states was so gradual that both New York and Pennsylvania listed slaves in their 1840 census returns, and a small number of black slaves (18) were held in New Jersey in 1860.

The principal organized bodies to advocate this reform were the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society and the New York Manumission Society. The last was headed by powerful politicians: John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, later Federalists and Aaron Burr, later Democratic-Republican Vice-President of the United States. That bill did not pass, because of controversy over the rights of freed slaves; every member of the Legislature, but one, voted for some version of it. New York did enact a bill in 1799, which did end slavery over time, but made no provision for the freedmen. New Jersey in 1804 was the last northern state to enact the gradual elimination slavery (again in a gradual fashion); there were still eighteen "perpetual apprentices" in New Jersey in the 1860 Census. Despite the actions of abolitionists, free blacks were subject to racial segregation in the North.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, agreement was reached that allowed the Federal government to abolish the importation of slaves into the United States, but not prior to 1808. By that time, all the states had passed individual laws abolishing or severely limiting the international buying or selling of slaves. The importation of slaves into the United States was officially banned on January 1, 1808. but not its internal slave trade.

Manumission by owners

After 1776, Quaker and Moravian advocates helped persuade numerous slaveholders in the Upper South to free their slaves. Manumissions increased for nearly two decades. Many individual acts of manumission freed thousands of slaves in total. Slaveholders freed slaves in such number that the percentage of free Negroes in the Upper South increased sharply from one to ten percent, with most of that increase in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By 1810 three-quarters of blacks in Delaware were free. The most notable of individuals was Robert Carter III of Virginia, who freed more than 450 people by "Deed of Gift", filed in 1791. This number was more slaves than any single American had freed or would ever free. Often slaveholders came to their decisions by their own struggles in the Revolution; their wills and deeds frequently cited language about the equality of men supporting their manumissions. Slaveholders were also encouraged to do so because the economics of the area was changing. They were shifting from labor-intensive tobacco culture to mixed crop cultivation and did not need as many slaves.

The free black families began to thrive, together with African Americans free before the Revolution, mostly descendants of unions between working class white women and African men. By 1860, in Delaware 91.7 percent of the blacks were free, and 49.7 percent of those in Maryland. These first free families often formed the core of artisans, professionals, preachers and teachers in future generations. Northern teachers suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists. They pointed to John Brown's attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising as proof that multiple Northern conspiracies were afoot to ignite bloody slave rebellions. Although some abolitionists did call for slave revolts, no evidence of any other Brown-like conspiracy has been discovered. The North felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests". However, many conservative Northerners were uneasy at the prospect of the sudden addition to the labor pool of a huge number of freed laborers who were used to working for very little, and thus seen as being willing to undercut prevailing wages.. The famous, "fiery" Abolitionist, Abby Kelley Foster, from Massachusetts, was considered an "ultra" abolitionist who believed in full civil rights for all black people. She held to the views that the freed slaves would colonize Liberia. Parts of the anti-slavery movement became known as "Abby Kellyism". She recruited Susan B Anthony to the movement.

Colonization and the founding of Liberia

In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations were established advocating the movement of black people from the United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization, while others advocated emigration. During the 1820s and 1830s the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to freedom in Africa. It had broad support nationwide among white people, including prominent leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay and James Monroe, who saw this as preferable to emancipation, with Clay stating: "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off". Clay argued that as blacks could never be fully integrated into society due to "unconquerable prejudice" by white Americans, it would be better for them to emigrate to Africa. There was however, considerable opposition among African Americans, many of whom did not see colonization as a viable or acceptable solution to their daunting problems in the United States. One notable opponent of such plans was the wealthy free black abolitionist James Forten of Philadelphia.

After a series of attempts to plant small settlements on the coast of West Africa, the A.C.S. established the colony of Liberia in 1821–22. Over the next four decades, it assisted thousands of former slaves and free black people to move there from the United States. The disease environment they encountered was extreme, and most of the migrants died fairly quickly. Enough survived to declare independence in 1847. American support for colonization waned gradually through the 1840s and 1850s, largely because of the efforts of abolitionists to promote emancipation of slaves and granting of American citizenship. Americo-Liberians ruled Liberia continuously until the military coup of 1980.

Emigration

The emigrationist tradition dated back to the Revolutionary War era. Initially, the thought was that free African Americans would want to emigrate to Africa, but over time other ideas became popular. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade relations with the United States. The Haytian Union was the name of a group formed to promote relations between the countries.

Cincinnati's Black community sponsored founding the Wilberforce Colony, an initially successful settlement of African American immigrants to Canada. The colony was one of the first such independent political entities. It lasted for a number of decades and provided a destination for about 200 black families emigrating from a number of locations in the United States.

Religion and morality

The Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s in religion inspired groups that undertook many types of social reform. For some that meant the immediate abolition of slavery because it was a sin to hold slaves and a sin to tolerate slavery. "Abolitionist" had several meanings at the time. The followers of William Lloyd Garrison, including Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, demanded the "immediate abolition of slavery", hence the name. A more pragmatic group of abolitionists, like Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan, wanted immediate action, but that action might well be a program of gradual emancipation, with a long intermediate stage. "Antislavery men", like John Quincy Adams, did not call slavery a sin. They called it an evil feature of society as a whole. They did what they could to limit slavery and end it where possible, but were not part of any abolitionist group. For example, in 1841 Adams represented the Amistad African slaves in the Supreme Court of the United States and argued that they should be set free. In the last years before the war, "antislavery" could mean the Northern majority, like Abraham Lincoln, who opposed ''expansion'' of slavery or its influence, as by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Southerners called all these abolitionists, without distinguishing them from the Garrisonians.

Historian James Stewart (1976) explains the abolitionists' deep beliefs: "All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution."

Slave owners were angry over the attacks on what some Southerners (including the politician John C. Calhoun ) referred to as their peculiar institution of slavery. Starting in the 1830s, there was a vehement and growing ideological defense of slavery. Slave owners claimed that slavery was a positive good for masters and slaves alike, and that it was explicitly sanctioned by God. Biblical arguments were made in defense of slavery by religious leaders such as the Rev. Fred A. Ross and political leaders such as Jefferson Davis. There were Southern biblical interpretations that directly contradicted those of the abolitionists, such as the theory that a curse on Noah's son Ham and his descendants in Africa was a justification for enslavement of blacks.

Garrison and immediate emancipation

A radical shift came in the 1830s, led by William Lloyd Garrison, who demanded "immediate emancipation, gradually achieved". That is, he demanded that slave-owners repent immediately, and set up a system of emancipation. Theodore Weld, an evangelical minister, and Robert Purvis, a free African American, joined Garrison in 1833 to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (Faragher 381). The following year Weld encouraged a group of students at Lane Theological Seminary to form an anti-slavery society. After the president, Lyman Beecher, attempted to suppress it, the students moved to Oberlin College. Due to the students' anti-slavery position, Oberlin soon became one of the most liberal colleges and accepted African American students. Along with Garrison, were Northcutt and Collins as proponents of immediate abolition. These two ardent abolitionists felt very strongly that it could not wait and that action needed to be taken right away. Abby Kelley Foster became an "ultra abolitionist" and a follower of William Lloyd Garrison. She led Susan B. Anthony into the anti-slavery cause. After 1840 "abolition" usually referred to positions like Garrison's; it was largely an ideological movement led by about 3000 people, including free blacks and people of color, many of whom, such as Frederick Douglass, and Robert Purvis and James Forten in Philadelphia, played prominent leadership roles. Abolitionism had a strong religious base including Quakers, and people converted by the revivalist fervor of the Second Great Awakening, led by Charles Finney in the North in the 1830s. Belief in abolition contributed to the breaking away of some small denominations, such as the Free Methodist Church.

Evangelical abolitionists founded some colleges, most notably Bates College in Maine and Oberlin College in Ohio. The well-established colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, generally opposed abolition, although the movement did attract such figures as Yale president Noah Porter and Harvard president Thomas Hill.

In the North, most opponents of slavery supported other modernizing reform movements such as the temperance movement, public schooling, and prison- and asylum-building. They were split bitterly on the role of women's activism.

Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison repeatedly condemned slavery for contradicting the principles of freedom and equality on which the country was founded. In 1854, Garrison wrote:

I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form – and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing – with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul. I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or to promote any object. Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence. Convince me that liberty is not the inalienable birthright of every human being, of whatever complexion or clime, and I will give that instrument to the consuming fire. I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together.

''Uncle Tom’s Cabin''

The most influential abolitionist tract was ''Uncle Tom’s Cabin'' (1852), the best-selling novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (which made the escape narrative part of everyday news), Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery. Her depiction of the evil slave owner Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee who kills the Christ-like Uncle Tom, outraged the North, helped sway British public opinion against the South, and inflamed Southern slave owners who tried to refute it by showing some slave owners were humanitarian.

Irish Catholics

Daniel O'Connell, the Catholic leader of the Irish in Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in America. O'Connell had played a leading role in securing Catholic Emancipation (the removal of the civil and political disabilities of Roman Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland) and he was one of William Lloyd Garrison's models. Garrison recruited him to the cause of American abolitionism. O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobald Mathew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United States for abolition.

The Repeal Associations in the United States mostly took a pro-slavery position. Several reasons have been suggested for this: that Irish immigrants were competing with free blacks for jobs, and disliked having the same arguments used for Irish and for black freedom; that they were loyal to the United States Constitution, which defended ''their'' liberties, and disliked the fundamentally extra-constitutional position of the Abolitionists; and that they perceived abolitionism as Protestant, and were therefore suspicious of them. In addition, slaveholders had no hesitation in voicing their support for the freedom of Ireland, a white nation outside the United States. However, it would be difficult to find evidence in the letters or oral tradition of immigrant families that would differentiate them from most Americans of the period. In fact with most immigrants settling in the North, there was actually very little competition for work between poor immigrants and the North's relatively small African-American population. Most of the energy of immigrant families was directed at securing their daily livings and spiritual lives with what was left over for politics channelled into local issues concerning public safety and education.

Radical Irish nationalists – those who broke with O'Connell over his refusal to contemplate the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland – had a diversity of views about slavery. John Mitchel, who spent the years 1853 to 1875 in America, was a passionate propagandist in favor of slavery; three of his sons fought in the Confederate Army. On the other hand, his former close associate Thomas Francis Meagher served as a Brigadier General in the United States Army during the American Civil War.

The Catholic Church in America had long ties in slaveholding Maryland and Louisiana. Despite a firm stand for the spiritual equality of black people, and the resounding condemnation of slavery by Pope Gregory XVI in his bull ''In Supremo Apostolatus'' issued in 1839, the American church continued in deeds, if not in public discourse, like most of America, to avoid confrontation with slaveholding interests. In 1842, the Archbishop of New York while denouncing slavery, objected to O'Connell's petition if authentic as unwarranted foreign interference. The Bishop of Charleston declared that, while Catholic tradition opposed slave trading, it had nothing against slavery. However, in 1861, the Archbishop of New York wrote to Secretary of War Cameron: "That the Church is opposed to slavery...Her doctrine on that subject is, that it is a crime to reduce men naturally free to a condition of servitude and bondage, as slaves." No American bishop supported extra-polictical abolition or interference with state's rights before the Civil War. During the Civil War, however, the Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who was an ally of Lincoln and Seward would denounce Southern bishops as follows: "In their periodicals in New Orleans and Charleston, they have justified the attitude taken by the South on principles of Catholic theology, which I think was an unnecessary, inexpedient, and, for that matter, a doubtful if not dangerous position, at the commencement of so unnatural and lamentable a struggle."

One historian observed that ritualist churches separated themselves from heretics rather than sinners; he observed that Episcopalians and Lutherans also accommodated themselves to slavery. (Indeed, one southern Episcopal bishop was a Confederate general.) There were more reasons than religious tradition, however, as the Anglican Church had been the established church in the South during the colonial period. It was linked to the traditions of landed gentry and the wealthier and educated planter classes, and the Southern traditions longer than any other church. In addition, while the Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening initially opposed slavery in the South, by the early decades of the 19th century, Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had come to an accommodation with it in order to evangelize with farmers and artisans. By the Civil War, the Baptist and Methodist churches split into regional associations because of slavery.

After O'Connell's failure, the American Repeal Associations broke up; but the Garrisonians rarely relapsed into the "bitter hostility" of American Protestants towards the Roman Church. Some antislavery men joined the Know Nothings in the collapse of the parties; but Edmund Quincy ridiculed it as a mushroom growth, a distraction from the real issues. Although the Know-Nothing legislature of Massachusetts honored Garrison, he continued to oppose them as violators of fundamental rights to freedom of worship.

In deeds, however, if not by proclamations, the Irish would play a leading roll in defeating the South and ending slavery. General William Tecumseh Sherman, General Phil Sheridan, General George Meade, General John Reynolds, and Dennis Hart Mahan were all raised by Irish families. Indeed Sherman and Sheridan attended mass at the same Catholic church in Ohio as children. 137 Irish immigrants were awarded the Medal of Honor for Civil War valor, far more than any other immigrant group. After participating in the assault that broke the Confederate center at Antietam New York City's Irish Brigade would be worse than decimated in repeated desperate assaults on the stonewall at Fredericksburg on the eve of Emancipation. In the war's little known last chapter, after Appomottox, General Phil Sheridan took command to the Union army's African-American 25th Corps and was sent by Grant with an armada to pacify Texas. Later President Johnson would relieve Sheridan of command because of Sheridans aggressive enforcement of Reconstruction in Texas and Louisiana.

In the final analysis, none of Lincoln's most prominent opponents were Irish: George McClellan, August Belmont, Fernando Wood, James Bennett, and Clement Vallandigham. Of these only Bennett, who shared a mutual dislike of each other with the "Archbishop of New York" was a Catholic.

Progress of abolition in the United States

To 1804

Although there were several groups that opposed slavery (such as the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage), at the time of the founding of the Republic, there were few states which prohibited slavery outright. The Constitution had several provisions which accommodated slavery, although none used the word. Passed unanimously by the Congress of the Confederation in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, a vast area which had previously belonged to individual states in which slavery was legal.

American abolitionism began very early, well before the United States was founded as a nation. An early law abolishing slavery (but not temporary indentured servitude) in Rhode Island in 1652 floundered within 50 years. Samuel Sewall, a prominent Bostonian and one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials, wrote The Selling of Joseph in protest of the widening practice of outright slavery as opposed to indentured servitude in the colonies. This is the earliest-recorded anti-slavery tract published in the future United States.

In 1777, Vermont, not yet a state, became the first jurisdiction in North America to prohibit slavery: slaves were not directly freed, but masters were required to remove slaves from Vermont. The first state to begin a gradual abolition of slavery was Pennsylvania, in 1780. All importation of slaves was prohibited, but none freed at first; only the slaves of masters who failed to register them with the state, along with the "future children" of enslaved mothers. Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went into effect were not freed until 1847.

Massachusetts took an opposite and much more radical position. Its Supreme Court ruled in 1783, that a black man was, indeed, a man; and therefore free under the state's constitution.

All of the other states north of Maryland began gradual abolition of slavery between 1781 and 1804, based on the Pennsylvania model. Rhode Island had limited slave trading in 1774 (Virginia had also attempted to do so before the Revolution, but the Privy Council had vetoed the act), all the other northern states also limited the slave trade by 1786, and Georgia in 1798. These northern emancipation acts typically provided that slaves born before the law was passed would be freed at a certain age, and so remnants of slavery lingered; in New Jersey, a dozen "permanent apprentices" were recorded in the 1860 census.

South

The institution remained solid in the South, however and that region's customs and social beliefs evolved into a strident defense of slavery in response to the rise of a stronger anti-slavery stance in the North. In 1835 alone abolitionists mailed over a million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the south. In response southern legislators banned abolitionist literature and encouraged harassment of anyone distributing it.

Immediate abolition

Abolitionists included those who joined the American Anti-Slavery Society or its auxiliary groups in the 1830s and 1840s as the movement fragmented. The fragmented anti-slavery movement included groups such as the Liberty Party; the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; the American Missionary Association; and the Church Anti-Slavery Society. Historians traditionally distinguish between moderate antislavery reformers or gradualists, who concentrated on stopping the spread of slavery, and radical abolitionists or immediatists, whose demands for unconditional emancipation often merged with a concern for black civil rights. However, James Stewart advocates a more nuanced understanding of the relationship of abolition and antislavery prior to the Civil War:

While instructive, the distinction [between antislavery and abolition] can also be misleading, especially in assessing abolitionism's political impact. For one thing, slaveholders never bothered with such fine points. Many immediate abolitionists showed no less concern than did other white Northerners about the fate of the nation's "precious legacies of freedom." Immediatism became most difficult to distinguish from broader anti-Southern opinions once ordinary citizens began articulating these intertwining beliefs.

Anti-slavery people were outraged by the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a white man and editor of an abolitionist newspaper on 7 November 1837, by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois. Nearly all Northern politicians rejected the extreme positions of the abolitionists; Abraham Lincoln, for example. Indeed many northern leaders including Lincoln, Stephen Douglas (the Democratic nominee in 1860), John C. Fremont (the Republican nominee in 1856), and Ulysses S. Grant married into slave owning southern families without any moral qualms.

Antislavery as a principle was far more than just the wish to limit the extent of slavery. Most Northerners recognized that slavery existed in the South and the Constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene there. Most Northerners favored a policy of gradual and compensated emancipation. After 1849 abolitionists rejected this and demanded it end immediately and everywhere. John Brown was the only abolitionist known to have actually planned a violent insurrection, though David Walker promoted the idea. The abolitionist movement was strengthened by the activities of free African-Americans, especially in the black church, who argued that the old Biblical justifications for slavery contradicted the New Testament.

African-American activists and their writings were rarely heard outside the black community; however, they were tremendously influential to some sympathetic white people, most prominently the first white activist to reach prominence, William Lloyd Garrison, who was its most effective propagandist. Garrison's efforts to recruit eloquent spokesmen led to the discovery of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who eventually became a prominent activist in his own right. Eventually, Douglass would publish his own, widely distributed abolitionist newspaper, the ''North Star''.

In the early 1850s, the American abolitionist movement split into two camps over the issue of the United States Constitution. This issue arose in the late 1840s after the publication of ''The Unconstitutionality of Slavery'' by Lysander Spooner. The Garrisonians, led by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, publicly burned copies of the Constitution, called it a pact with slavery, and demanded its abolition and replacement. Another camp, led by Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and eventually Douglass, considered the Constitution to be an antislavery document. Using an argument based upon Natural Law and a form of social contract theory, they said that slavery existed outside of the Constitution's scope of legitimate authority and therefore should be abolished.

Another split in the abolitionist movement was along class lines. The artisan republicanism of Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright stood in stark contrast to the politics of prominent elite abolitionists such as industrialist Arthur Tappan and his evangelist brother Lewis. While the former pair opposed slavery on a basis of solidarity of "wage slaves" with "chattel slaves", the Whiggish Tappans strongly rejected this view, opposing the characterization of Northern workers as "slaves" in any sense. (Lott, 129–130) Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the Underground Railroad. This was made illegal by the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Nevertheless, participants like Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Amos Noë Freeman and others continued with their work. Abolitionists were particularly active in Ohio, where some worked directly in the Underground Railroad. Since the state shared a border with slave states, it was a popular place for slaves' escaping across the Ohio River and up its tributaries, where they sought shelter among supporters who would help them move north to freedom. Two significant events in the struggle to destroy slavery were the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. In the South, members of the abolitionist movement or other people opposing slavery were often targets of lynch mob violence before the American Civil War.

Numerous known abolitionists lived, worked, and worshipped in Downtown Brooklyn, from Henry Ward Beecher, who auctioned slaves into freedom from the pulpit of Plymouth Church, to Nathan Egelston, a leader of the African and Foreign Antislavery Society, who also preached at Bridge Street AME and lived on Duffield Street. His fellow Duffield Street residents, Thomas and Harriet Truesdell were leading members of the Abolitionist movement. Mr. Truesdell was a founding member of the Providence Anti-slavery Society before moving to Brooklyn in 1851. Harriet Truesdell was also very active in the movement, organizing an antislavery convention in Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. The Tuesdell's lived at 227 Duffield Street. Another prominent Brooklyn-based abolitionist was Rev. Joshua Leavitt, trained as a lawyer at Yale who stopped practicing law in order to attend Yale Divinity School, and subsequently edited the abolitionist newspaper ''The Emancipator'' and campaigned against slavery, as well as advocating other social reforms. In 1841 Leavitt published his ''The Financial Power of Slavery'', which argued that the South was draining the national economy due to its reliance on slavery.

John Brown

Historian Frederick Blue called John Brown "the most controversial of all nineteenth-century Americans." When Brown was hanged after his attempt to start a slave rebellion in 1859, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, large memorial meetings took place throughout the North, and famous writers such as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown. Whereas Garrison was a pacifist, Brown resorted to violence. Historians agree he played a major role in starting the war. Some historians regard Brown as a crazed lunatic while David S. Reynolds hails him as the man who "killed slavery, sparked the civil war, and seeded civil rights." For Ken Chowder he is "the father of American terrorism."

His famous raid in October 1859, involved a band of 22 men who seized the federal Harpers Ferry Armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, knowing it contained tens of thousands of weapons. Brown believed that the South was on the verge of a gigantic slave uprising and that one spark would set it off. Brown's supporters George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe and Gerrit Smith were all abolitionist members of the Secret Six who provided financial backing for Brown's raid. Brown's raid, says historian David Potter, "was meant to be of vast magnitude and to produce a revolutionary slave uprising throughout the South." The raid was a fiasco. Not a single slave revolted. Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army was dispatched to put down the raid, and Brown was quickly captured. Brown was tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. At his trial, Brown exuded a remarkable zeal and single-mindedness that played directly to Southerners' worst fears. Few individuals did more to cause secession than John Brown, because Southerners believed he was right about an impending slave revolt. Shortly before his execution, Brown prophesied, "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood."

Civil War

Union leaders identified slavery as the social and economic foundation of the Confederacy, and from 1862 were determined to end that support system. Meanwhile pro-Union forces gained control of the Border States and began the process of emancipation in Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, and in the next 24 months it effectively ended slavery throughout the Confederacy. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in Dec. 1865) officially ended slavery in the United States, and freed the 50,000 or so remaining slaves in the border states.

Notable opponents of slavery

==National abolition dates==

Commemoration

The abolitionist movements and the abolition of slavery have been commemorated in different ways around the world in modern times. The United Nations General Assembly declared 2004 the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition. This proclamation marked the bicentenary of the birth of the first black state, Haiti. Numerous exhibitions, events and research programmes were connected to the initiative.

2007 witnessed major exhibitions in British museums and galleries to mark the anniversary of the 1807 abolition act – 1807 Commemorated 2008 marks the 201st anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. It also marks the 175th anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire.

The Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa held a major international conference entitled, "Routes to Freedom: Reflections on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade", from 14 to 16 March 2008. Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover delivered the keynote speech announcing the creation of two major scholarships intended for University of Ottawa law students specializing in international law and social justice at the conference's gala dinner.

Brooklyn, New York has begun work on commemorating the abolitionist movement in New York.

Contemporary abolitionism

On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 states: :''No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.''

Although outlawed in most countries, slavery is nonetheless practiced secretly in many parts of the world. Enslavement still takes place in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. There are an estimated 27 million victims of slavery worldwide. In Mauritania alone, estimates are that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved. Many of them are used as bonded labour.

Modern-day abolitionists have emerged over the last several years, as awareness of slavery around the world has grown, with groups such as Anti-Slavery International, the American Anti-Slavery Group, International Justice Mission, and Free the Slaves working to rid the world of slavery. Zach Hunter, for example, began a movement called Loose Change to Loosen Chains when he was in seventh grade. Also featured on CNN and other national news organizations, Hunter has gone on to help inspire other teens and young adults to take action against injustice with his books, ''Be the Change'' and ''Generation Change''.

In the United States, The Action Group to End Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery is a coalition of NGOs, foundations and corporations working to develop a policy agenda for abolishing slavery and human trafficking. Since 1997, the United States Department of Justice has, through work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, prosecuted six individuals in Florida on charges of slavery in the agricultural industry. These prosecutions have led to freedom for over 1000 enslaved workers in the tomato and orange fields of South Florida. This is only one example of the contemporary fight against slavery worldwide. Slavery exists most widely in agricultural labor, apparel and sex industries, and service jobs in some regions.

In 2000, the United States passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) "to combat trafficking in persons, especially into the sex trade, slavery, and involuntary servitude." The TVPA also "created new law enforcement tools to strengthen the prosecution and punishment of traffickers, making human trafficking a Federal crime with severe penalties."

The United States Department of State publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, identifying countries as either Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List or Tier 3, depending upon three factors: "(1) The extent to which the country is a country of origin, transit, or destination for severe forms of trafficking; (2) The extent to which the government of the country does not comply with the TVPA's minimum standards including, in particular, the extent of the government's trafficking-related corruption; and (3) The resources and capabilities of the government to address and eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons."

See also

Abolition of slavery timeline

Abolitionism and Queen Charlotte's paintings

American Anti-Slavery Society

American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a spin-off of the American Anti-Slavery Society

Anti-Slavery Society

Come-outer

Compensated emancipation

List of opponents of slavery

James Redpath

Slavery in the British and French Caribbean

Slavery in the British Virgin Islands

The Slave Power

Footnotes

References

Great Britain and World

Brown, Christopher Leslie. ''Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism'' (2006)

Davis, David Brion, ''The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823'' (1999); ''The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture'' (1988)

Drescher, Seymour. ''Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery'' (2009)

Finkelman, Paul, ed. ''Encyclopedia of Slavery'' (1999)

Gordon, M. ''Slavery in the Arab World'' (1989)

Gould, Philip. ''Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World'' (2003)

Hellie, Richard. ''Slavery in Russia: 1450–1725'' (1982)

Hinks, Peter, and John McKivigan, eds. ''Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition'' (2 vol. 2006) ISBN 0-313-33142-1; 846pp; 300 articles by experts

Hochschild, Adam. ''Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves'' (2005)

Kolchin, Peter. ''Unfree Labor; American Slavery and Russian Serfdom'' (1987)

Morgan, Kenneth. ''Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America'' (2008)

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. "Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World" (2007)

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. ''The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery'' (1997)

Thomas, Hugh. ''The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870'' (2006)

United States and Canada

Abzug, Robert H. ''Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination''. Oxford, 1994. ISBN 0-19-503752-9.

Bacon, Jacqueline. ''The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition''. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2002. ISBN 1-57003-434-6.

Barnes, Gilbert H. ''The Anti-Slavery Impulse 1830–1844''. Reprint, 1964. ISBN 0-7812-5307-1.

Berlin, Ira and Leslie Harris. ''Slavery in New York''. New Press, 2005. ISBN 1-56584-997-3.

Blue, Frederick J. ''No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics.'' Louisiana State Univ Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8071-2976-3.

Bordewich, Fergus M. ''Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.'' HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-06-052430-8.

Davis, David Brion, ''Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World'' Oxford, 2006. ISBN 0-19-514073-7.

Filler, Louis. ''The Crusade Against Slavery 1830–1860''. 1960. ISBN 0-917256-29-8.

ISBN 978-0-374-53125-6. Winner, 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction; Nominee (Nonfiction), National Book Critics Circle Award 2007. See, Governor General's Award for English language non-fiction.

David Nathaniel Gellman. ''Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery And Freedom, 1777–1827'' Louisiana State Univ Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8071-3174-1.

Griffin, Clifford S. ''Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States 1800–1865''. Rutgers Univ Press, 1967. ISBN 0-313-24059-0.

Harrold, Stanley. ''The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861''. Univ Press of Kentucky, 1995. ISBN 0-8131-0968-X.

Harrold, Stanley. ''The American Abolitionists''. Longman, 2000. ISBN 0-582-35738-1.

Harrold, Stanley. ''The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves''. Univ Press of Kentucky, 2004. ISBN 0-8131-2290-2.

Hassard, John. ''The Life of John Hughes: First Archbishop of New York''. Arno Press, 1969

Horton, James Oliver. "Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation" ''New-York Journal of American History'' 2004 65(3): 16–24. ISSN 1551–5486

Huston, James L. "The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse." ''Journal of Southern History'' 56:4 (November 1990): 609–640.

Mayer, Henry ''All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery'' St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 0-312-18740-8.

McKivigan, John R. ''The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865'' Cornell Univ Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8014-1589-6.

McPherson, James M. ''The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP'' Princeton Univ Press, 1975. ISBN 0-691-04637-9.

Osofsky, Gilbert. "Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism" ''American Historical Review'' 1975 80(4): 889–912. ISSN 0002-8762 in JSTOR

Perry, Lewis and Michael Fellman, eds. ''Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists''. Louisiana State Univ Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8071-0889-8.

Peterson, Merrill D. ''John Brown: The Legend Revisited''. Univ Press of Virginia, 2002. ISBN 0-8139-2132-5.

Pierson, Michael D. ''Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics''. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8078-2782-7.

Schafer, Judith Kelleher. ''Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862''. Louisiana State Univ Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8071-2862-7.

Salerno, Beth A. ''Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America''. Northern Illinois Univ Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87580-338-5.

Speicher, Anna M. ''The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers''. Syracuse Univ Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8156-2850-1.

Stauffer, John. ''The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race.'' Harvard Univ Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-00645-3.

Vorenberg, Michael. ''Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment''. Cambridge Univ Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-65267-7.

Zilversmit, Arthur. ''The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North''. University of Chicago Press, 1967. ISBN 0-226-98332-3.

External links

Mémoire St Barth | History of St Barthélemy (archives & history of slavery, slave trade and their abolition), Comité de Liaison et d'Application des Sources Historiques.

Largest Surviving Anti Slave Trade Petition from Manchester, UK 1806

Original Document Proposing Abolition of Slavery 13th Amendment

"John Brown's body and blood" by Ari Kelman: a review in the TLS, 14 February 2007.

''Scotland and the Abolition of the Slave Trade – schools resource''

Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Twentieth Century Solutions of the Abolition of Slavery

''Elijah Parish Lovejoy: A Martyr on the Altar of American Liberty''

Brycchan Carey's pages listing British abolitionists

Teaching resources about Slavery and Abolition on blackhistory4schools.com

The National Archives (UK): The Abolition of the Slave Trade

Towards Liberty: Slavery, the Slave Trade, Abolition and Emancipation Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives (UK)]

The slavery debate

The slave trade: myths and preconceptions

John Brown Museum

American Abolitionism

History of the British abolitionist movement by Right Honourable Lord Archer of Sandwell

"Slavery – The emancipation movement in Britain", lecture by James Walvin at Gresham College, 5 March 2007 (available for video and audio download)

Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery | Scholatic.com

Canada and the Journey to Freedom"

1807 Commemorated

The Action Group

US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2008

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio

The Liberator Files, Horace Seldon's collection and summary of research of William Lloyd Garrison's ''The Liberator'' original copies at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

University of Detroit Mercy Black Abolitionist Archive, a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period.

Abolitionist movement

Category:Political movements Category:African diaspora history Category:Slavery

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Name	Harriet Tubman
Birth name	Araminta Ross
Birth date	c. 1820 or 1821
Birth place	Dorchester County, Maryland
Death date	March 10, 1913 (aged 93)
Death place	Auburn, New York, US
Death cause	Pneumonia
Resting place	Fort Hill Cemetery, Auburn, New York, U.S.A
Residence	Auburn, New York, U.S.A
Nationality	American
Other names	Minty, Moses
Employer	Edward Brodess
Occupation	Slave, Civil War Nurse, Suffragist, Civil Rights activist
Religion	Christian
Spouse	John Tubman (md.1844-1851) Nelson Davies (1869-1888)(his death)
Children	Gertie (adopted)
Parents	Harriet Greene Ben Ross
Relatives	Modesty (grandmother) Linah (sister) Mariah Ritty (sister) Soph (sister) Robert (brother) Ben (brother) Rachel (sister) Henry (brother) Moses (brother)
Footnotes	}}

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.

As a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten by masters to whom she was hired out. Early in her life, she suffered a head wound when hit by a heavy metal weight. The injury caused disabling seizures, narcoleptic attacks, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, which occurred throughout her life. A devout Christian, Tubman ascribed the visions and vivid dreams to revelations from God.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". Large rewards were offered for the return of many of the fugitive slaves, but no one then knew that Tubman was the one helping them. When the Southern-dominated Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, requiring law officials in free states to aid efforts to recapture slaves, she helped guide fugitives farther north into Canada, where slavery was prohibited.

When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves in South Carolina. After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She became active in the women's suffrage movement in New York until illness overtook her. Near the end of her life, she lived in a home for elderly African-Americans that she had helped found years earlier.

Early life and education

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to slave parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near Blackwater River in Madison, Maryland. As with many slaves in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Araminta's birth was recorded, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later." Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820. In her Civil War widow's pension records, Tubman claimed she was born in 1820, 1822, and 1825, an indication, perhaps, that she had only a general idea of when she was born.

Modesty, Tubman's maternal grandmother, arrived in the United States on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she was of Ashanti lineage (from what is now Ghana), though no evidence exists to confirm or deny this assertion. Her mother Rit (who may have been the child of a white man) was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father Ben was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808, and according to court records, they had nine children together: Linah, born in 1808, Mariah Ritty in 1811, Soph in 1813, Robert in 1816, Minty (Harriet) in 1822, Ben in 1823, Rachel in 1825, Henry in 1830, and Moses in 1832.

Rit struggled to keep their family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other slaves and free blacks in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.

Childhood

Because Tubman’s mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her family, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and a baby, as was typical in large families. At the age of five or six, Brodess hired her out to a woman named "Miss Susan" as a nursemaid. Tubman was ordered to keep watch on the baby as it slept; when it woke and cried, Tubman was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.

As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. Tubman spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.

Head injury

One day, the adolescent Tubman was sent to a dry-goods store for supplies. There, she encountered a slave owned by another family, who had left the fields without permission. His overseer, furious, demanded that Tubman help restrain the young man. She refused, and as the slave ran away, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at him. He struck Tubman instead, which she said "broke my skull". She later explained her belief that her hair – which "had never been combed and ... stood out like a bushel basket" – might have saved her life. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. She was sent back into the fields, "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn't see." Her boss said she was "not worth a sixpence" and returned her to Brodess, who tried unsuccessfully to sell her. She began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. These episodes were alarming to her family, who were unable to wake her when she fell asleep suddenly and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.

The severe head wound occurred when Tubman was becoming deeply religious. As an illiterate child, she had been told Bible stories by her mother. The particular variety of her early Christian belief remains unclear, but Tubman acquired a passionate faith in God. She rejected white interpretations of scripture that urged slaves to be obedient and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. After her head injury, Tubman began having visions and potent dreams, which she considered signs from the divine. This religious perspective instructed her throughout her life.

Family and marriage

By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted, freed from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his real age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.

Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the eastern shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.

Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.

Escape from slavery

In 1849, Tubman became ill again, and her value as a slave was diminished as a result. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at his action and the unjust hold he kept on her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. "I prayed all night long for my master," she said later, "till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, she switched tactics. "I changed my prayer," she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way." A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.

Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and the family would be broken apart, as that frequently happened in the settlement of an estate. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's slaves. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to," she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."

Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Dr. Anthony Thompson, who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the slaves were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge ''Democrat'', offering a reward of up to 100 dollars for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.

Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. Beforehand, she tried to send word to her mother of her plans. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow slave, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning," she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land". While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal, but well-organized, system was composed of free and enslaved blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck in Caroline County contained a substantial Quaker community, and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for fleeing slaves - northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly 90 miles (145 kilometers), her traveling by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.

Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star, and trying to avoid slave catchers, eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used a variety of deceptions for protection. At one of the earliest stops, the lady of the house ordered Tubman to sweep the yard to make it appear as though she worked for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, it is likely that Tubman hid in these locales during the day. Because the routes she followed were used by other fugitive slaves, Tubman did not speak about them until later in her life.

Particulars of her first journey remain shrouded in secrecy. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:

"When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

"Moses"

After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman began thinking of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and ''they'' should be free." She began to work odd jobs and save money. At the same time, the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which forced law enforcement officials (even in states that had outlawed slavery) to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, and imposed heavy punishments on those who abetted escape. The law increased risks for escaped slaves, and more began to try to get to Canada, which had abolished slavery. Racial tensions increased in Philadelphia, as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free blacks for work.

In December 1850, Tubman received a warning that her niece Kessiah was going to be sold (along with her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta) in Cambridge. Tubman returned to the land of her enslavement. She went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the time of the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while he pretended to make arrangements to pay, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe 60 miles (100 kilometers) to Baltimore. They met up with Tubman, who brought the family safely to Philadelphia.

The following spring, she headed back into Maryland to help guide away other family members. On her second trip, she brought back her brother Moses, and two other unidentified men. It is likely that Tubman was by this time working with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that she became more confident with each trip to Maryland. As she led more individuals out of slavery, she was named "Moses" by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, an allusion to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt.

During an interview with author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman revealed some of the names of helpers and places she used along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck in Caroline County, Maryland. From there, she would travel northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and onto the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still, a famous black agent, is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and Canada.

In the fall of 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband, John. She once again saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. John, meanwhile, had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some slaves who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.

Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States more dangerous for escaped slaves, many began migrating further north to Canada. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter...." The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.

Douglass and Tubman showed a great admiration for one another as they struggled together against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. It read in part:

Journeys and methods

For 11 years Tubman returned again and again to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in 13 expeditions, including her three other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions for about 50 to 60 other fugitives who escaped to the north. Her dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning. Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Since Tubman was known to be illiterate, the man ignored her.

Her religious faith was another important resource as she ventured again and again into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path.

She also carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. Once a slave agreed to join her expedition, there was no turning back; she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to return. Tubman told the tale of one voyage with a group of fugitive slaves, when morale sank and one man insisted he was going to go back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada. It is more than likely that Tubman carried the handgun as protection from ever-present slave catchers and their vicious dogs.

Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, five-foot-tall, disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was behind so many slave escapes in their community. In fact, by the late 1850s they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. They even entertained the possibility that John Brown himself had come to the Eastern Shore to lure slaves away before his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry in October 1859. While a popular legend persists about a reward of US$40,000 for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to drum up support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming US$40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her." Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere US$400. No such reward has been found in period newspapers. (The federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in Lincoln's assassination.) A reward offering of US$12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation exists for that figure either. Catherine Clinton suggests that the US$40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region. Despite the best efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman was never captured, and neither were the fugitives she guided. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for 20 dollars. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father had harbored a group of eight escaped slaves, and was at risk of arrest. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north into the Canadian city of St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.

John Brown and Harpers Ferry

In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.

Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. After he began the first battle, he believed, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the south. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in Canada who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.

On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort, and with more detailed plans for the assault.

Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In the autumn of 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Canada, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.

The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason and hanged in December. His actions were seen by abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."

Auburn and Margaret

In early 1859, abolitionist U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York for US$1,200. The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the south under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.

Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. The circumstances of this expedition remain clouded in mystery. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl had left behind a twin brother and a loving home in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her." Indeed, Alice described it as a "kidnapping".

However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence exists for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.

In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister, Rachel, and Rachel's two children, Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could only be rescued if she could pay a US$30 bribe. She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennals family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers, forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn, New York on December 28, 1860.

Civil War

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband" – property seized by northern forces – and put them to work without pay in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head District in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.

Tubman soon met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does ''the right thing''," she said.

Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.

Scouting and the Combahee River Raid

When Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black men, women, and children from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and before long she was leading a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies were put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.

Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that it was being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight," she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.

More than 700 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts - most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."

For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and eventually nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn, to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home.

Tubman returned to Auburn at the end of the war. During a train ride to New York, the conductor told her to move into the smoking car. She refused, explaining her government service. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the smoking car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train.

Despite her years of service, she had never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Tubman did not receive a pension for her service in the Civil War until 1899. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially taxing for her.

Later life

Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a Civil War veteran named Nelson Davis. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869, they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They spent the next 20 years together, and in 1874 they adopted a baby girl named Gertie.

Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah H. Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled ''Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman''. The 132-page volume was published in 1869, and brought Tubman some US$1,200 in revenue. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. Bradford released another volume in 1886 called ''Harriet, the Moses of her People'', which presented a less caustic view of slavery and the South. It, too, was published as a way to help alleviate Tubman's poverty.

Because of the debt she had accumulated (including delayed payment for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about US$5,000, they claimed – for US$2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer, and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone. New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. Wisconsin Representative Gerry W. Hazelton introduced a bill (H.R. 3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy...." It was defeated.

Suffragist activism

In her later years,Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.

Tubman traveled to New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.

This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called ''The Woman's Era'' launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.

AME Zion Church, illness, and death

At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people." The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.

As Tubman aged, the sleeping spells and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable." She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

By 1911, her body was so frail that she had to be admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless," prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you."

Legacy

Harriet Tubman, widely known and well-respected while she was alive, became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum.

When she died, Tubman was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The city commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Still, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address. The Harriet Tubman home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church. Today, it welcomes visitors as a museum and education center.

Bradford's biographies were followed by Earl Conrad's ''Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist''. Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisher – the search took four years – and endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1942. Despite her popularity and significance, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, until Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003, and Larson and Clinton both published their biographies in 2004.

Tubman was celebrated in many other ways throughout the nation in the 20th century. Dozens of schools were named in her honor, and both the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn and the Harriet Tubman Museum in Cambridge serve as monuments to her life. In 1937 the gravestone for Harriet Tubman Davis was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the ''SS Harriet Tubman'', its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. In 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in honor of Tubman as the first in a series honoring African Americans. She is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. In 1999, the Canadian government designated the Salem Chapel, British Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Catharines as a National Historic Site of Canada because of its association with Tubman. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Harriet Tubman on his list of the 100 Greatest African Americans. In 2008, Towson University named a new residence hall after Tubman.

Movies

A Woman Called Moses (1978)

The Quest for Freedom (1992)

References

Bibliography

Anderson, E. M. (2005). ''Home, Miss Moses: A novel in the time of Harriet Tubman.'' Higganum, CT: Higganum Hill Books. ISBN 0-9776556-0-1.

Bradford, Sarah (1961). ''Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People.'' New York: Corinth Books. .

Bradford, Sarah (1971). ''Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman.'' Freeport: Books for Libraries Press. ISBN 0-836-98782-9.

Clinton, Catherine (2004). ''Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.'' New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-14492-4.

Conrad, Earl (1942). ''Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist.'' New York: International Publishers. . Douglass, Frederick (1969). ''Life and times of Frederick Douglass: his early life as a slave, his escape from bondage, and his complete history, written by himself.'' London: Collier-Macmillan. .

Humez, Jean (2003). ''Harriet Tubman: The Life and Life Stories.'' Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-19120-6.

Larson, Kate Clifford (2004). ''Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.'' New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-45627-0.

Sterling, Dorothy (1970). ''Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman''. New York: Scholastic, Inc. ISBN 0-5904362-8-7.

External links

Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress

Full text of ''Harriet, The Moses of Her People'', from Project Gutenberg

Full text of ''Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman'', from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson

Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom| Scholastic.com

Harriet Tubman Free School (named in her honor)

The Tubman Museum of African American History

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Name	William Lloyd Garrison
Occupation	American abolitionist
Birth date	December 12, 1805
Birth place	Newburyport, Massachusetts
Death date	May 24, 1879
Death place	New York City, New York, }}

William Lloyd Garrison (December 12, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper ''The Liberator'', and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States. Garrison was also a prominent voice for the women's suffrage movement.

Early life

William Lloyd Garrison was born on December 12, 1805, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of immigrants from the British colony of New Brunswick, in present-day Canada. Under the Seaman’s Protection act, Abijah Garrison, a merchant sailing pilot and master, had obtained American papers and moved his family to Newburyport in 1806 . With the impact of the Congressional Embargo Act of 1807 on commercial shipping, the elder Garrison became unemployed and deserted the family in 1808. Garrison's mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, was reported to have been tall, charming and of a strong religious character. At her request, Garrison was known by his middle name, Lloyd. She died in 1823, in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Garrison sold homemade lemonade and candy as a youth, and also delivered wood to help support the family. In 1819, at fourteen, Garrison began working as an apprentice compositor for the Newburyport Herald. He soon began writing articles, often under the pseudonym ''Aristides,'' taking the name of an Athenian statesman and general known as “the Just.” After his apprenticeship ended, he and a young printer named Isaac Knapp bought their own newspaper, the short lived ''Free Press''. One of their regular contributors was poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. In this early work as a small town newspaper writer, Garrison acquired skills he would later use as a nationally known writer, speaker and newspaper publisher. In 1828, he was appointed editor of the ''National Philanthropist'' in Boston, Massachusetts, the first American journal to promote legally mandated temperance.

Career as a reformer

At age 25, Garrison joined the Abolition movement. For a brief time he became associated with the American Colonization Society, an organization that believed free blacks should emigrate to a territory on the west coast of Africa. Although some members of the society encouraged granting freedom to slaves, the majority saw the relocation as a means to reduce the number of free blacks in the United States and thus help preserve the institution of slavery. By late 1829–1830 "Garrison rejected colonization, publicly apologized for his error, and then, as was typical of him, he censured all who were committed to it." (William E. Cain, ''William Lloyd Garrison and the fight against Slavery: Selections from the Liberator'')

''Genius of Universal Emancipation''

Garrison began writing for and became co-editor with Benjamin Lundy of the Quaker ''Genius of Universal Emancipation'' newspaper in Baltimore, Maryland. Garrison's experience as a printer and newspaper editor allowed him to revamp the layout of the paper and freed Lundy to spend more time traveling as an anti-slavery speaker. Garrison initially shared Lundy's gradualist views, but, while working for the ''Genius'', he became convinced of the need to demand immediate and complete emancipation. Lundy and Garrison continued to work together on the paper in spite of their differing views, agreeing simply to sign their editorials to indicate who had written it.

One of the regular features that Garrison introduced during his time at the ''Genius'' was "The Black List," a column devoted to printing short reports of "the barbarities of slavery — kidnappings, whippings, murders." One of Garrison's "Black List" columns reported that a shipper from Garrison's home town of Newburyport, Massachusetts—one Francis Todd—was involved in the slave trade, and that he had recently had slaves shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans on his ship ''Francis''. Todd filed a suit for libel against both Garrison and Lundy, filing in Maryland in order to secure the favor of pro-slavery courts. The state of Maryland also brought criminal charges against Garrison, quickly finding him guilty and ordering him to pay a fine of $50 and court costs. (Charges against Lundy were dropped on the grounds that he had been traveling and not in control of the newspaper when the story was printed.) Garrison was unable to pay the fine and was sentenced to a jail term of six months. He was released after seven weeks when the antislavery philanthropist Arthur Tappan donated the money for the fine, but Garrison had decided to leave Baltimore and he and Lundy amicably agreed to part ways.

''The Liberator''

In 1831, Garrison returned to New England and founded a weekly anti-slavery newspaper of his own, ''The Liberator''. In the first issue, Garrison stated:

Initial circulation of ''The Liberator'' was relatively limited; there were fewer than 400 subscriptions during the paper's second year. However, the publication gained subscribers and influence over the next three decades, until, after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery nation-wide by the Thirteenth Amendment, Garrison published the last issue (number 1,820) on December 29, 1865, writing in his "Valedictory" column,

Organizations

In 1832, Garrison founded the New-England Anti-Slavery Society. The next year, he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. That same year, 1833, Garrison also visited the United Kingdom and assisted in the anti-slavery movement there. He intended that the Anti-Slavery Society should not align itself with any political party and that women should be allowed full participation in society activities. Garrison was influenced by the ideas of Susan Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone and other feminists who joined the society. These positions were seen as controversial by the majority of Society members and there was a major rift in the Society. In 1839, two brothers, Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, left and formed a rival organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which did not admit women. A segment of the Society also withdrew and aligned itself with the newly founded Liberty Party, a political organization which named James G. Birney as its Presidential candidate. By the end of 1840, Garrison announced the formation of a third new organization, the Friends of Universal Reform, with sponsors and founding members including prominent reformers Maria Chapman, Abby Kelley Foster, Oliver Johnson, and Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott).

Meanwhile, on September 4, 1834, Garrison married Helen Eliza Benson (1811–1876), the daughter of a retired abolitionist merchant. The couple had five sons and two daughters, of whom a son and a daughter died as children.

In 1853, Garrison credited Reverend John Rankin of Ohio as a primary influence on his career, calling him his "anti-slavery father" and saying that Rankin's "... book on slavery was the cause of my entering the anti-slavery conflict." (Hagedorn, p. 58)

Controversy

Garrison made a name for himself as one of the most articulate, as well as most radical, opponents of slavery. His approach to emancipation stressed nonviolence and passive resistance, and he attracted a vocal following. While some other abolitionists of the time favored gradual emancipation, Garrison argued for "immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves". On July 4, 1844 he went so far as to publicly burnt a copy of the Constitution condemning it as "declaring it "a Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell," referring to the compromise that had written slavery into the Constitution.".

Garrison and ''The Liberator'' were ardently supported by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which held meetings, sponsored lectures, and helped to strengthen the female anti-slavery network throughout the Northeast. Garrison was an important contributor to the suffrage movement.

One of the most controversial events in pre-Civil War Boston history resulted from an Anti-Slavery Society lecture. In the fall of 1835, the society invited George Thompson, a fiery British abolitionist, to address them. When Thompson was unable to attend, Garrison agreed to take his place. An unruly mob threatened to storm the building in search of Thompson. The Mayor and police persuaded the Boston Female Anti-Slavery members to leave. The mob, however, pursued Garrison through the streets of Boston. Garrison was rescued from lynching and lodged overnight in the Leverett Street Jail before leaving the city for several weeks.

In 1849, Garrison became involved in one of Boston's most notable trials of the time. Washington Goode, a black seaman had been sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow black mariner, Thomas Harding. In ''The Liberator'' Garrison argued that the verdict relied on "circumstantial evidence of the most flimsy character ..." and feared that the determination of the government to uphold its decision to execute Goode was based on race. As all other death sentences since 1836 in Boston had been commuted, Garrison concluded that Goode would be the last person executed in Boston for a capital offense writing, "Let it not be said that the last man Massachusetts bore to hang was a colored man!" Despite the efforts of Garrison and many other prominent figures of the time, Goode was hanged on May 25, 1849.

Garrison's outspoken anti-slavery views repeatedly put him in danger. Besides his imprisonment in Baltimore, the government of the State of Georgia offered a reward of $5,000 for his arrest, and he was the object of vituperation and frequent death threats. On the eve of the Civil War, a sermon preached in a Universalist chapel in Brooklyn, New York, denounced "the blood thirsty sentiments of Garrison and his school; and did not wonder that the feeling of the South was exasperated, taking as they did, the insane and bloody ravings of the Garrisonian traitors for the fairly expressed opinions of the North."

Garrison occasionally allowed essays in ''The Liberator'' from a select few, including 14-year-old Anna Dickinson, who in 1856 wrote an impassioned article pleading for emancipation of the slaves.

After abolition

After the abolition of slavery in the United States, Garrison continued working on other reform movements, especially temperance and women's suffrage. He ended the run of ''The Liberator'' at the end of 1865, and in May 1865, announced that he would resign the Presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and proposed a resolution to declare victory in the struggle against slavery and dissolve the Society. The resolution prompted sharp debate, however, by critics — led by his long-time ally Wendell Phillips — who argued that the mission of the AAS was not fully completed until black Southerners gained full political and civil equality. Garrison maintained that while complete civil equality was vitally important, the special task of the AAS was at an end, and that the new task would best be handled by new organizations and new leadership. With his long-time allies deeply divided, however, he was unable to muster the support he needed to carry the resolution, and the motion was defeated 118–48. Garrison went through with his resignation, declining an offer to continue as President, and Wendell Phillips assumed the Presidency of the AAS. Garrison declared that "My vocation, as an Abolitionist, thank God, has ended." Returning home to Boston, he told his wife resignedly, "So be it. I regard the whole thing as ridiculous." He withdrew completely from the AAS, which continued to operate for five more years, until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. (According to Henry Mayer, Garrison was hurt by the rejection, and remained peeved for years; "as the cycle came around, always managed to tell someone that he was ''not'' going to the next set of [AAS] meetings" [594].)

After his withdrawal from AAS and the end of ''The Liberator'', Garrison continued to participate in public debate and to support reform causes, devoting special attention to the causes of women's rights and of civil rights for blacks. During the 1870s, he made several speaking tours, contributed columns on Reconstruction and civil rights for ''The Independent'' and the ''Boston Journal'', took a position as associate editor and frequent contributor with the ''Woman's Journal'', and participated in the American Woman Suffrage Association with his old allies Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone. While working with the AWSA in 1873, he finally healed his long estrangements from Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, affectionately reuniting with them on the platform at an AWSA rally organized by Kelly and Stone on the one hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. When Charles Sumner died in 1874, some Republicans suggested Garrison as a possible successor to his Senate seat; Garrison declined on grounds of his moral opposition to taking government office.

Final years and death

Garrison spent more time at home with his family, writing weekly letters to his children, and caring for his increasingly ill wife, who had suffered a small stroke on December 30, 1863, and was increasingly confined to the house. Helen died on January 25, 1876, after a severe cold worsened into pneumonia. A quiet funeral was held in the Garrison home, but Garrison, overcome with grief and confined to his bedroom with a fever and severe bronchitis, was unable to join the service downstairs. Wendell Phillips gave a eulogy and many of Garrison's old abolitionist friends joined him upstairs to offer their private condolences. Garrison recovered slowly from the loss of his wife, and began to attend Spiritualist circles in the hope of communicating with Helen. Garrison made a final visit to England in 1877, where he visited George Thompson and other old friends from the British abolitionist movement. Garrison, ailing from kidney disease, continued to weaken during April 1879, and went to live with his daughter Fanny's family in New York City. In late May his condition worsened, and his five surviving children rushed to join him. Fanny asked if he would enjoy singing some hymns, and although Garrison was unable to sing, his children sang his favorite hymns for him while he beat time with his hands and feet. On Saturday morning, Garrison lost consciousness, and died just before midnight on May 24, 1879. Garrison was buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood on May 28, 1879, after a public memorial service with eulogies by Theodore Dwight Weld and Wendell Phillips. Eight abolitionist friends, both white and black, served as his pallbearers. Flags were flown at half-staff all across Boston. Frederick Douglass, then employed as a United States Marshal, spoke in memory of Garrison at a memorial service in a church in Washington, D.C., saying "It was the glory of this man that he could stand alone with the truth, and calmly await the result".

Garrison's son, also named William Lloyd Garrison (1838–1909), was a prominent advocate of the single tax, free trade, woman's suffrage, and of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. A second son, Wendell Phillips Garrison (1840–1907), was literary editor of the The Nation from 1865 to 1906. Two other sons (George Thompson Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, his biographer) and a daughter, Helen Frances Garrison (who married Henry Villard), survived him. Fanny's son Oswald Garrison Villard was a prominent journalist and a founding member of the NAACP.

Honoring Garrison's 200th birthday, in December 2005 his descendants gathered in Boston for the first family reunion in about a century. They discussed the legacy and impact of their most notable family member.

Veneration

Garrison is honored together with Maria Stewart with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on December 17.

Works online

Address to the Colonization Society, a Fourth of July oration delivered in 1829 at the Park Street Church in Boston. This was Garrison's first major public statement against slavery.

An Address Delivered in Marlboro Chapel, a Fourth of July oration delivered in 1838, discussing Garrison's views of slave rebellion and the prospects for violence. From the Antislavery Literature Project.

To the Public, Garrison's introductory column for ''The Liberator'' (January 1, 1831).

Truisms, from ''The Liberator'' (January 8, 1831).

The Insurrection, Garrison's reaction to news of Nat Turner's rebellion, in ''The Liberator'' (September 3, 1831).

On the Constitution and the Union, from ''The Liberator'' (December 29, 1832).

Declaration of Sentiments, adopted by the Boston Peace Convention (September 18, 1838), reprinted in ''The Liberator'' (September 28, 1838).

Abolition at the Ballot Box, from ''The Liberator'' (June 28, 1839).

The American Union, from ''The Liberator'' (January 10, 1845).

The Tragedy at Harper's Ferry, Garrison's first public commentary on John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, from ''The Liberator'' (October 28, 1859).

John Brown and the Principle of Nonresistance, a speech given for a meeting in the Tremont Temple, Boston, on December 2, 1859, the day that John Brown was hanged. Reprinted in ''The Liberator'' (December 16, 1859).

The War—Its Cause and Cure, from ''The Liberator'' (May 3, 1861).

Valedictory: The Final Number of ''The Liberator'', closing column for ''The Liberator'' (December 29, 1865).

No Union With Slaveholders

William Lloyd Garrison works Cornell University Library Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection

William Lloyd Garrison works reprinted by Cornell University Digital Library Collections.

The Liberator Files, Horace Seldon's collection and summary of research of William Lloyd Garrison's ''The Liberator'' original copies at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

Reading Garrison’s Letters, Horace Seldon's insight into the thought, work and full life of Garrison, based on "Letters of William Lloyd Garrison" edited by Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, from the Belknap Press of Harvard University.

References

Bibliography

Abzug, Robert H. ''Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-503752-9.

Hagedorn, Ann. ''Beyond The River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad''. Simon & Schuster, 2002. ISBN 0-684-87065-7.

Mayer, Henry. ''All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.'' New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 0-312-25367-2.

Laurie, Bruce ''Beyond Garrison''. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-60517-2.

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. ''Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World''. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007)

"Shall He Be Hung?". ''The Liberator'' Vol. XIX. No. 13. March 30, 1849. Page 52.

External links

William Lloyd Garrison profile on Spartacus Educational

''The Liberator Files'' online

Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Category:19th-century American newspaper publishers (people) Category:American abolitionists Category:American Christian pacifists Category:American journalists Category:American newspaper founders Category:Anglican saints Category:Lecturers Category:People from Newburyport, Massachusetts Category:People of Massachusetts in the American Civil War Category:19th century in Boston, Massachusetts Category:1805 births Category:1879 deaths Category:American people of Canadian descent

ca:William Lloyd Garrison de:William Lloyd Garrison es:William Lloyd Garrison fr:William Lloyd Garrison it:William Lloyd Garrison la:Gulielmus Lloyd Garrison nl:William Lloyd Garrison ja:ウィリアム・ロイド・ガリソン pl:William Lloyd Garrison pt:William Lloyd Garrison ru:Гаррисон, Уильям Ллойд simple:William Lloyd Garrison fi:William Lloyd Garrison tr:William Lloyd Garrison

Name	Frederick Douglass
Birth date	February 1818
Birth place	Talbot County, Maryland, United States
Death date	February 20, 1895 (aged about 77)
Death place	Washington, D.C., United States
Occupation	Abolitionist, author, editor, diplomat
Spouse	Anna Murray-Douglass (1838–1882)Helen Pitts (1884 to his death)
Parents	Harriet Bailey and perhaps Aaron Anthony
Political party	Republican
Children	Charles Remond DouglassRosetta DouglassLewis Henry DouglassFrederick Douglass Jr.Annie Douglass (died at 10)
Signature	Douglass Signature.svg }}

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Douglass wrote several autobiographies, eloquently describing his life as a slave, and his struggles to be free. His first autobiography, ''Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave'', was published in 1845 and was his best-known work, influential in gaining support for abolition. He wrote two more autobiographies, with his last, ''Life and Times of Frederick Douglass'', published in 1881 and covering events through and after the Civil War. After the Civil War, Douglass remained active in the United States' struggle to reach its potential as a "land of the free". Douglass actively supported women's suffrage. Following the war, he worked on behalf of equal rights for freedmen, and held multiple public offices.

Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

Life as a slave

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who later became known as Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, between Hillsboro and Cordova, probably in his grandmother's shack east of Tappers Corner () and west of Tuckahoe Creek. The exact date of Douglass' birth is unknown. He chose to celebrate it on Feb. 14. The exact year is also unknown (on the first page of ''Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave'', he stated: "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.")

After this separation, he lived with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. His mother died when Douglass was about seven. At age seven, Douglass was separated from his grandmother and moved to the Wye House plantation, where Aaron Anthony worked as overseer. When Anthony died, Douglass was given to Lucretia Auld, wife of Thomas Auld. She sent Douglass to serve Thomas' brother Hugh Auld in Baltimore.

When Douglass was about twelve years old, Hugh Auld's wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet despite the fact that it was against the law to teach slaves to read. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman, who treated Douglass like one human being ought to treat another. When Hugh Auld discovered her activity, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom. Douglass later referred to this statement as the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he had ever heard. As told in his autobiography, Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of men with whom he worked. Mrs. Auld one day saw Douglass reading a newspaper; she ran over to him and snatched it from him, with a face that said education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

He continued, secretly, to teach himself how to read and write. Douglass is noted as saying that "knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom." As Douglass began to read newspapers, political materials, and books of every description, he was exposed to a new realm of thought that led him to question and condemn the institution of slavery. In later years, Douglass credited ''The Columbian Orator'', which he discovered at about age twelve, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights.

When Douglass was hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation to read the New Testament at a weekly Sunday school. As word spread, the interest among slaves in learning to read was so great that in any week, more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. For about six months, their study went relatively unnoticed. While Freeland was complacent about their activities, other plantation owners became incensed that their slaves were being educated. One Sunday they burst in on the gathering, armed with clubs and stones, to disperse the congregation permanently.

In 1833, Thomas Auld took Douglass back from Hugh after a dispute ("[A]s a means of punishing Hugh," Douglass wrote). Dissatisfied with Douglass, Thomas Auld sent him to work for Edward Covey, a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker." He whipped Douglass regularly. The sixteen-year-old Douglass was nearly broken psychologically by his ordeal under Covey, but he finally rebelled against the beatings and fought back. After losing a physical confrontation with Douglass, Covey never tried to beat him again.

From slavery to freedom

Douglass first tried to escape from Freeland, who had hired him out from his owner Colonel Lloyd, but was unsuccessful. In 1836, he tried to escape from his new owner Covey, but failed again. In 1837, Douglass met and fell in love with Anna Murray, a free black in Baltimore about five years his senior. Her freedom strengthened his belief in the possibility of his own.

On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped by boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was dressed in a sailor's uniform, provided to him by Murray, who also gave him part of her savings to cover his travel costs, and carried identification papers which he had obtained from a free black seaman. He crossed the Susquehanna River by ferry at Havre de Grace, then continued by train to Wilmington, Delaware. From there he went by steamboat to "Quaker City" (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and continued to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York; the whole journey took less than 24 hours.

Frederick Douglass later wrote of his arrival in New York: }}

Once he had arrived, he sent for Murray to follow him to New York; she arrived with the necessary basics for them to set up home. They were married on 15 September 1838 by a black Presbyterian minister eleven days after his arrival in New York. At first, they adopted Johnson as their married name.

Abolitionist activities

The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After meeting and staying with Nathan and Mary Johnson, they adopted Douglass as their married name. Douglass joined several organizations, including a black church, and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal ''The Liberator''. In 1841 he first heard Garrison speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly invited to speak.

After he told his story, he was encouraged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. Douglass was inspired by Garrison and later stated that "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [of the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison was likewise impressed with Douglass and wrote of him in ''The Liberator''. Several days later, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket. Then 23 years old, Douglass conquered his nervousness and gave an eloquent speech about his rough life as a slave.

In 1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. During this tour, he was frequently accosted, and at a lecture in Pendleton, Indiana, was chased and beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family, the Hardys. His hand was broken in the attack; it healed improperly and bothered him for the rest of his life. A stone marker in Falls Park in the Pendleton Historic District) commemorates this event.

Autobiography

Douglass' best-known work is his first autobiography ''Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave'', published in 1845. At the time, some skeptics questioned whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. The book received generally positive reviews and became an immediate bestseller. Within three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also translated into French and Dutch and published in Europe.

Douglass published three versions of his autobiography during his lifetime (and revised the third of these), each time expanding on the previous one. The 1845 ''Narrative'', which was his biggest seller, was followed by ''My Bondage and My Freedom'' in 1855. In 1881, after the Civil War, Douglass published ''Life and Times of Frederick Douglass'', which he revised in 1892.

Travels to Ireland and Britain

Douglass' friends and mentors feared that the publicity would draw the attention of his ex-owner, Hugh Auld, who might try to get his "property" back. They encouraged Douglass to tour Ireland, as many former slaves had done. Douglass set sail on the ''Cambria'' for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and arrived in Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine was beginning.

"Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab - I am seated beside white people - I reach the hotel - I enter the same door - I am shown into the same parlour - I dine at the same table - and no one is offended... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, 'We don't allow niggers in here!' " --from ''My Bondage and My Freedom''.

He also met and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell who was to prove to be a great inspiration.

Douglass spent two years in Ireland and Britain, where he gave many lectures in churches and chapels. His draw was such that some facilities were "crowded to suffocation"; an example was his hugely popular London Reception Speech, which Douglass delivered at Alexander Fletcher's Finsbury Chapel in May 1846. Douglass remarked that in England he was treated not "as a color, but as a man."

During this trip Douglass became legally free, as Irish and British supporters raised funds to purchase his freedom from his owner. British sympathizers led by Ellen Richardson of Newcastle upon Tyne collected the money needed. In 1846 Douglass met with Thomas Clarkson, one of the last living British abolitionists, who had persuaded Parliament to abolish slavery in Great Britain and its colonies.

Return to the United States

After returning to the US, Douglass produced some abolitionist newspapers: ''The North Star'', ''Frederick Douglass Weekly'', ''Frederick Douglass' Paper'', ''Douglass' Monthly'' and ''New National Era''. The motto of ''The North Star'' was "Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren."

In September 1848, Douglass published a letter addressed to his former master, Thomas Auld, berating him for his conduct, and enquiring after members of his family still held by Auld. In a graphic passage, Douglass asked Auld how he would feel if Douglass had come to take away his daughter Amanda as a slave, treating her the way he and members of his family had been treated by Auld.

Women's rights

In 1848, Douglass was the only African American to attend the first women's rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to pass a resolution asking for women's suffrage. Many of those present opposed the idea, including influential Quakers James and Lucretia Mott. Douglass stood and spoke eloquently in favor; he said that he could not accept the right to vote as a black man if women could not also claim that right. He suggested that the world would be a better place if women were involved in the political sphere.

"In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world."

Douglass' powerful words rang true with enough attendees that the resolution passed.

Douglass refines his ideology

In 1851, Douglass merged the ''North Star'' with Gerrit Smith's ''Liberty Party Paper'' to form ''Frederick Douglass' Paper'', which was published until 1860. Douglass came to agree with Smith and Lysander Spooner that the United States Constitution was an anti-slavery document.

This reversed his earlier agreement with William Lloyd Garrison that it was pro-slavery. Garrison had publicly expressed his opinion by burning copies of the document. Further contributing to their growing separation, Garrison was worried that the ''North Star'' competed with his own ''National Anti-Slavery Standard'' and Marius Robinson's ''Anti-Slavery Bugle''. Douglass' change of position on the Constitution was one of the most notable incidents of the division in the abolitionist movement after the publication of Spooner's book ''The Unconstitutionality of Slavery'' in 1846. This shift in opinion, and other political differences, created a rift between Douglass and Garrison. Douglass further angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass delivered an address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti Slavery Sewing Society, which eventually became known as "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" It was a blistering attack on the hypocrisy of the United States in general and the Christian church in particular.

Douglass believed that education was key for African Americans to improve their lives. For this reason, he was an early advocate for desegregation of schools. In the 1850s, he was especially outspoken in New York. While the ratio of African American to white students there was 1 to 40, African Americans received education funding at a ratio of only 1 to 1,600. This meant that the facilities and instruction for African-American children were vastly inferior. Douglass criticized the situation and called for court action to open all schools to all children. He stated that inclusion within the educational system was a more pressing need for African Americans than political issues such as suffrage.

Douglass was acquainted with the radical abolitionist John Brown but disapproved of Brown's plan to start an armed slave rebellion in the South. Brown visited Douglass' home two months before he led the raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Douglass fled for a time to Canada, fearing guilt by association and arrest as a co-conspirator. Douglass believed that the attack on federal property would enrage the American public. Douglass later shared a stage at a speaking engagement in Harpers Ferry with Andrew Hunter, the prosecutor who successfully convicted Brown.

In March 1860, Douglass' youngest daughter Annie died in Rochester, New York, while he was still in England. Douglass returned from England the following month. He took a route through Canada to avoid detection.

Civil War years

Before the Civil War

By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the country, known for his orations on the condition of the black race and on other issues such as women's rights. His eloquence gathered crowds at every location. His reception by leaders in England and Ireland added to his stature.

Fight for emancipation and suffrage

Douglass and the abolitionists argued that because the aim of the Civil War was to end slavery, African Americans should be allowed to engage in the fight for their freedom. Douglass publicized this view in his newspapers and several speeches. Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 on the treatment of black soldiers, and with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of black suffrage.

President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, declared the freedom of all slaves in Confederate-held territory. (Slaves in Union-held areas and Northern states would become freed with the adoption of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865.) Douglass described the spirit of those awaiting the proclamation: "We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky ... we were watching ... by the dim light of the stars for the dawn of a new day ... we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries."

During the U.S. Presidential Election of 1864, Douglass supported John C. Frémont. Douglass was disappointed that President Lincoln did not publicly endorse suffrage for black freedmen. Douglas believed that since African American men were fighting in the American Civil War, they deserved the right to vote.

With the North no longer obliged to return slaves to their owners in the South, Douglass fought for equality for his people. He made plans with Lincoln to move the liberated slaves out of the South. During the war, Douglass helped the Union by serving as a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. His son Frederick Douglass Jr. also served as a recruiter and his other son, Lewis Douglass, fought for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment at the Battle of Fort Wagner.

Slavery everywhere in the United States was outlawed by the post-war (1865) ratification of the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment provided for citizenship and equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment protected all citizens from being discriminated against in voting because of race. Douglass' support for the 15th Amendment, which failed to give women the vote, led to a temporary estrangement between him and the women's rights movement.

Lincoln's death

At the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park, Douglass was the keynote speaker. In his speech, Douglass spoke frankly about Lincoln, balancing the good and the bad in his account. He called Lincoln "the white man's president" and cited his tardiness in joining the cause of emancipation. He noted that Lincoln initially opposed the expansion of slavery but did not support its elimination. But Douglass also asked, "Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word?"

The crowd, roused by his speech, gave him a standing ovation. A long-told anecdote claims that the widow Mary Lincoln gave Lincoln's favorite walking stick to Douglass in appreciation. Lincoln's walking stick still rests in Douglass' house known as Cedar Hill. It is both a testimony and a tribute to the effect of Douglass' powerful oratory.

Reconstruction era

After the Civil War, Douglass was appointed to several political positions. He served as president of the Reconstruction-era Freedman's Savings Bank; and as chargé d'affaires for the Dominican Republic. After two years, he resigned from his ambassadorship because of disagreements with U.S. government policy. In 1872, he moved to Washington, D.C., after his house on South Avenue in Rochester, New York burned down; arson was suspected. Also lost was a complete issue of ''The North Star''.

In 1868, Douglass supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant. President Grant signed into law the Klan Act and the second and third Enforcement Acts. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending ''habeas corpus'' in South Carolina and sending troops there and into other states; under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made and the Ku Klux Klan received a serious blow. Grant's vigor in disrupting the Klan made him unpopular among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him. An associate of Douglass wrote of Grant that African Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services."

In 1872, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States, as Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket. He was nominated without his knowledge. During the campaign, he neither campaigned for the ticket nor acknowledged that he had been nominated. Douglass continued his speaking engagements. On the lecture circuit, he spoke at many colleges around the country during the Reconstruction era, including Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1873. He continued to emphasize the importance of voting rights and exercise of suffrage. In a speech delivered on 15 November 1867, Douglass said "A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex".

In 1877, Douglass visited Thomas Auld, who was by then on his deathbed, and the two men reconciled. Douglass had met with Auld's daughter, Amanda Auld Sears, some years prior; she had requested the meeting and had subsequently attended and cheered one of Douglass' speeches. Her father told her she had done well in reaching out to Douglass. The visit appears to have brought closure to Douglass, although he received some criticism for making it.

White insurgents had quickly arisen in the South after the war, organizing first as secret vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Through the years, armed insurgency took different forms, the last as powerful paramilitary groups such as the White League and the Red Shirts during the 1870s in the Deep South. They operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", turning out Republican officeholders and disrupting elections. Their power continued to grow in the South; more than 10 years after the end of the war, white Democrats regained political power in every state of the former Confederacy and began to reassert white supremacy. They enforced this by a combination of violence, late 19th century laws imposing segregation and a concerted effort to disfranchise African Americans. From 1890–1908, white Democrats passed new constitutions and statutes in the South that created requirements for voter registration and voting that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. This disfranchisement and segregation were enforced for more than six decades into the 20th century.

Douglass' stump speech for 25 years after the end of the Civil War was to emphasize work to counter the racism that was then prevalent in unions.

Family life

Douglass and Anna had five children: Rosetta Douglass, Lewis Henry Douglass, Frederick Douglass, Jr., Charles Remond Douglass, and Annie Douglass (died at the age of ten). Charles and Rossetta helped produce his newspapers. Anna Douglass remained a loyal supporter of her husband's public work, even though Douglass' liaisons with Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing, two women he was professionally involved with, caused recurring speculation and scandals.

In 1877, Douglass bought the family's final home in Washington D.C., on a hill above the Anacostia River. He and Anna named it ''Cedar Hill'' (also spelled ''CedarHill''). They expanded the house from 14 to 21 rooms, and included a china closet. One year later, Douglass purchased adjoining lots and expanded the property to 15 acres (61,000 m²). The home has been designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

Anna Murray-Douglass died in 1882, leaving him with a sense of great loss and depression for a time. He found new meaning from working with activist Ida B. Wells.

In 1884, Douglass married again, to Helen Pitts, a white feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts, Jr., an abolitionist colleague and friend of Douglass. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), she worked on a radical feminist publication named ''Alpha'' while living in Washington, D.C. The couple faced a storm of controversy with their marriage, since Pitts was both white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass. Her family stopped speaking to her; his was bruised, as his children felt his marriage was a repudiation of their mother. But feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the couple. Douglass responded to the criticisms by saying that his first marriage had been to someone the color of his mother, and his second to someone the color of his father. The new couple traveled to England, France, Italy, Egypt and Greece from 1886 to 1887.

After Reconstruction

As white Democrats regained power in the state legislatures of the South after Reconstruction, they began to impose new laws that disfranchised blacks and to create labor and criminal laws limiting their freedom. Many African Americans, called Exodusters, moved to large northern cities and to places like Kansas. In the latter case it was to form all-black towns where it was felt they could have a greater level of freedom and autonomy. Douglass spoke out against the movement, urging blacks to stick it out. He had become out of step with his audiences, who condemned and booed him for this position.

In 1877, Douglass was appointed a United States Marshal. In 1881, he was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia.

In 1888, Douglass spoke at Claflin College, a black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina and the oldest such institution in the state. He urged his audiences to struggle and protest against slavery.

At the 1888 Republican National Convention, Douglass became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States in a major party's roll call vote.

He was appointed minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti (1889–1891). In 1892 the Haitian government appointed Douglass as its commissioner to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He spoke for Irish Home Rule and the efforts of leader Charles Stewart Parnell in Ireland. He briefly revisited Ireland in 1886.

Also in 1892, Douglass constructed rental housing for blacks, now known as Douglass Place, in the Fells Point area of Baltimore. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

Death

On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. During that meeting, he was brought to the platform and given a standing ovation by the audience. Shortly after he returned home, Frederick Douglass died of a massive heart attack or stroke in Washington, D.C. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

Legacy and honors

In 1921, members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity (the first African-American intercollegiate fraternity) designated Frederick Douglass as an honorary member. Douglass is the only man to receive an honorary membership posthumously.

The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, sometimes referred to as the South Capitol Street Bridge, just south of the US Capitol in Washington DC, was built in 1950 and named in his honor.

In 1962, his home in Anacostia (Washington, DC) became part of the National Park System, and in 1988 was designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

In 1965, the U.S. Postal Service honored Douglass with a stamp in the Prominent Americans series.

In 1999, Yale University established the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for works in the history of slavery and abolition, in his honor. The annual $25,000 prize is administered by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Frederick Douglass to his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2003, Douglass Place, the rental housing units that Douglass built in Baltimore in 1892 for blacks, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Douglass is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on February 20.

In 2007, the former Troup-Howell bridge which carried Interstate 490 over the Genesee River was redesigned and renamed the Frederick Douglass-Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge.

In 2010, a statue (by Gabriel Koren) and memorial (designed by Algernon Miller) of Douglass were unveiled at Frederick Douglass Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park in New York City.

On June 12, 2011, Talbot County, Maryland, honored Douglass by installing a seven-foot bronze statute of Douglass on the lawn of the county courthouse in Easton, Maryland.

Numerous public schools have been named in his honor.

Works

Writings

''A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave'' (1845)

"The Heroic Slave". ''Autographs for Freedom''. Ed. Julia Griffiths, Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. pp. 174–239.

''My Bondage and My Freedom'' (1855)

''Life and Times of Frederick Douglass'' (1881, revised 1892)

Douglass founded and edited the abolitionist newspaper ''The North Star'' from 1847 to 1851. He merged ''The North Star'' with another paper to create the ''Frederick Douglass' Paper''.

Speeches

"The Church and Prejudice"

''Self-Made Men''

"Speech at National Hall, Philadelphia July 6, 1863 for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments"

"What to a slave is the 4th of July?"

Cultural representation

The 1989 film ''Glory'' featured Frederick Douglass as a friend of Francis George Shaw. He was played by Raymond St. Jacques.

Douglass is the protagonist of the novel ''Riversmeet'' (Richard Bradbury, Muswell Press, 2007), a fictionalized account of his 1845 speaking tour of the British Isles.

The 2004 mockumentary film, an alternative history called ''C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America'', featured the figure of Douglass.

The 2008 documentary film called ''Frederick Douglass and the White Negro'' tells the story of Frederick Douglass in Ireland and the relationship between African Americans and Irish Americans during the American Civil War.

Frederick Douglass is a major character in the alternate history novel ''How Few Remain'' by Harry Turtledove.

Frederick Douglass appears in ''Flashman and the Angel of the Lord,''by George MacDonald Fraser.

Frederick Douglass appears as a Great Humanitarian in the 2008 strategy video game Civilization Revolution.

Douglass, his wife, and his mistress, Ottilie Assing, are the main characters in Jewell Parker Rhodes' ''Douglass' Women'', a novel (New York: Atria Books, 2002).

See also

List of African-American abolitionists

Slave narrative

African-American literature

The Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and the White Negro

References

Houston A. Baker, Jr., Introduction, ''Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'', Penguin, 1986 edition.

Further reading

;Scholarship

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed. ''Frederick Douglass, Autobiography'' (Library of America, 1994) ISBN 978-0-940450-79-0

Foner, Philip Sheldon. ''The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass''. New York: International Publishers, 1950.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin, and Oscar Handlin. ''Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass.'' Library of American Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980; Longman (1997). ISBN 0-673-39342-9

Lampe, Gregory P. ''Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice,.'' Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. ISBN-X (alk. paper) ISBN (pbk. alk. paper) (on his oratory)

Levine, Robert S. ''Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity.'' Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ISBN (alk. paper). ISBN (pbk.: alk. paper) (cultural history)

McFeely, William S. ''Frederick Douglass.'' New York: Norton, 1991. ISBN 0-393-31376-X

McMillen, Sally Gregory. ''Seneca Falls and the origins of the women's rights movement.'' Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-19-518265-0

Oakes, James. ''The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics.'' New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2007. ISBN 0-393-06194-9

Quarles, Benjamin. ''Frederick Douglass.'' Washington: Associated Publishers, 1948.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; edited by Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch. ''Elizabeth Cady Stanton, As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences'', Harper & Brothers, 1922.

Webber, Thomas, ''Deep Like Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community 1831–1865.'' New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (1978).

Woodson, C.G., ''The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War''. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, (1915); Indy Publ. (2005) ISBN 1-4219-2670-9

;For young readers

Miller, William. ''Frederick Douglass: The Last Day of Slavery''. Illus. by Cedric Lucas. Lee & Low Books, 1995. ISBN 1-880000-42-3

Weidt, Maryann N. ''Voice of Freedom: a Story about Frederick Douglass.'' Illus. by Jeni Reeves. Lerner Publications, (2001). ISBN 1-57505-553-8

;Documentary films

''Frederick Douglass and the White Negro'' [videorecording] / Writer/Director John J Doherty, produced by Camel Productions, Ireland. Irish Film Board/TG4/BCI.; 2008

''Frederick Douglass'' [videorecording] / produced by Greystone Communications, Inc. for A&E; Network ; executive producers, Craig Haffner and Donna E. Lusitana.; 1997

''Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History'' [videorecording] / a co-production of ROJA Productions and WETA-TV.

''Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Editor'' [videorecording]/a production of Schlessinger Video Productions.

''Race to Freedom'' [videorecording] : the story of the underground railroad / an Atlantis

External links

Douglass sources online

The Frederick Douglass Papers Edition : A Critical Edition of Douglass' Complete Works, including speeches, autobiographies, letters, and other writings.

Works by Frederick Douglass at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions illustrated)

Works by Frederick Douglass at Online Books Page

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

The Heroic Slave. From Autographs for Freedom, Ed. Julia Griffiths. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company. Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington. London: Low and Company., 1853.

My Bondage and My Freedom. Part I. Life as a Slave. Part II. Life as a Freeman. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time. Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Co., 1881.

Frederick Douglass lecture on Haiti – Given at the World's Fair in Chicago, January 1893.

Fourth of July Speech

Letter to Thomas Auld (September 3, 1848)

The Frederick Douglass Diary (1886-87)

The Liberator Files, Items concerning Frederick Douglass from Horace Seldon's collection and summary of research of William Lloyd Garrison's ''The Liberator'' original copies at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? July 5, 1852 EDSITEment Launchpad

Resource Guides

Frederick Douglass: Online Resources from the Library of Congress

Biographical information

''Frederick Douglass Project'' at the University of Rochester.

Frederick Douglass (American Memory, Library of Congress) Includes timeline.

Timeline of Frederick Douglass and family

Timeline of "The Life of Frederick Douglass" – Features key political events

Read more about Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass NHS – Douglass' Life

Frederick Douglass NHS – Cedar Hill National Park Service site

Frederick Douglass Western New York Suffragists

Mr. Lincoln and Freedom: Frederick Douglass

Mr. Lincoln's White House: Frederick Douglass

Memorials to Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass National Historic Site The Washington, DC home of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass Gardens at Cedar Hill Frederick Douglass Gardens

Frederick Douglass Circle in Harlem overlooking Central Park has a statue of Frederick Douglass. North of this point, 8th Avenue is referred to as Frederick Douglass Boulevard

The Frederick Douglass Prize A national book prize

Lewis N. Douglas as a Sergeant Major in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry

Category:1818 births Category:1895 deaths Category:19th-century American newspaper editors Category:19th-century American newspaper publishers (people) Category:African American United States presidential candidates Category:African American United States vice-presidential candidates Category:African American memoirists Category:African American publishers (people) Category:African American writers Category:African Americans' rights activists Category:American Methodists Category:American abolitionists Category:American autobiographers Category:American feminists Category:American newspaper founders Category:Anglican saints Category:American slaves Category:American suffragists Category:Male feminists Category:Burials at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Journalists from Upstate New York Category:People from Baltimore, Maryland Category:People from Rochester, New York Category:People from Talbot County, Maryland Category:United States Marshals Category:United States ambassadors to Haiti Category:United States ambassadors to the Dominican Republic Category:United States presidential candidates, 1888 Category:United States vice-presidential candidates, 1872

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name	Lysander Spooner
birth date
birth place	Athol, Massachusetts
death date
nationality	American
genre	Nonfiction
subject	Political philosophy
notableworks	No Treason, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery
influenced	Murray Rothbard, Randy Barnett, Frederick Douglass
signature	}}

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government.

Life overview

Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808, and died "at one o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1887, in his little room at 109 Myrtle Street, [Boston,] surrounded by trunks and chests bursting with the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which he had gathered in his active pamphleteer's warfare over half a century long."

Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law or the "Science of Justice" wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not.

Early years

Legal career

His activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law. Spooner had studied law under the prominent lawyers and politicians John Davis and Charles Allen, but he had never attended college. According to the laws of the state, college graduates were required to study with an attorney for three years, while non-graduates were required to do so for five years.

With the encouragement of his legal mentors, Spooner set up his practice in Worcester after only three years, openly defying the courts. He saw the three-year privilege for college graduates as a state-sponsored discrimination against the poor and also providing a monopoly income to those who met the requirements. He argued that "no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor." In 1836, the legislature abolished the restriction. He opposed all licensing requirements for lawyers, doctors or anyone else that was prevented from being employed by such requirements. To prevent a person from doing business with a person without a professional license he saw as a violation of the natural right to contract.

After a disappointing legal career - his radical writing seems to have kept away potential clients - and a failed career in real estate speculation in Ohio, Spooner returned to his father's farm in 1840.

American Letter Mail Company

Being an advocate of self-employment and opponent of government regulation of business, Spooner started his own business called American Letter Mail Company which competed with the U.S. Post Office. Postal rates were notoriously high in the 1840s, and in 1844, Spooner founded the American Letter Mail Company, which had offices in various cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Stamps could be purchased and then attached to letters which could be sent to any of its offices. From here agents were dispatched who traveled on railroads and steamboats, and carried the letters in hand bags. Letters were transferred to messengers in the cities along the routes who then delivered the letters to the addressees. This was a challenge to the United States Post Office's monopoly. As he had done when challenging the rules of the Massachusetts bar, he published a pamphlet titled "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails." Although Spooner had finally found commercial success with his mail company, legal challenges by the government eventually exhausted his financial resources. He closed up shop without ever having had the opportunity to fully litigate his constitutional claims. The lasting legacy of Spooner's challenge to the postal service was the 3-cent stamp, adopted in response to the competition his company provided.

Abolitionism

Spooner attained his greatest fame as a figure in the abolitionist movement. His most famous work, a book titled ''The Unconstitutionality of Slavery'', was published in 1845 to great acclaim among many abolitionists but criticism from others. Spooner's book contributed to a controversy within the abolitionist movement over whether the United States Constitution supported the institution of slavery. The "disunionist" faction, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, argued the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves (as, for example, in the provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves in Article IV, Section 2). They also cited the frequent appeals to Constitutional compromise by Southern politicians, who insisted that protection of the "peculiar institution" was part of the sectional compromise on which the Constitution was based. The disunionists thus argued that keeping the free states in a political union with the slave states made the citizens of the free states complicit in the slave system, and denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." More generally, Wendell Phillips disputed Spooner's notion that any unjust law should be held legally void by judges.

Spooner challenged the claim that the ''text'' of the Constitution supported slavery. Although he recognized that the Founders had probably not ''intended'' to outlaw slavery when writing the Constitution, he argued that only the ''meaning'' of the text, not the private intentions of its writers, was enforceable. Spooner used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments in order to show that the clauses usually interpreted as supporting slavery did not, in fact, support it, and that several clauses of the Constitution prohibited the states from establishing slavery under the law. Spooner's arguments were cited by other pro-Constitution abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, which adopted it as an official text in its 1848 platform. Frederick Douglass, originally a Garrisonian disunionist, later came to accept the pro-Constitution position, and cited Spooner's arguments to explain his change of mind.

From the publication of this book until 1861, Spooner actively campaigned against slavery. He published subsequent pamphlets on Jury Nullification and other legal defenses for escaped slaves and offered his legal services, often free of charge, to fugitives. In the late 1850s, copies of his book were distributed to members of Congress sparking some debate over their contents. Even Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi, a slavery proponent, praised the argument's intellectual rigor and conceded it was the most formidable legal challenge he had seen from the abolitionists to date. In 1858, Spooner circulated a "Plan for the Abolition of Slavery," calling for the use of guerrilla warfare against slaveholders by black slaves and non-slaveholding free Southerners, with aid from Northern abolitionists. Spooner also "conspir[ed] with John Brown to promote a servile insurrection in the South," and participated in an aborted plot to free Brown after his capture following the failed raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia (Harper's Ferry is now part of the state of West Virginia).

In 1860, Spooner was actively courted by William Seward to support the fledgling Republican Party. An admitted sympathizer with the Jeffersonian political philosophy, Spooner adamantly refused the request and soon became an outspoken abolitionist critic of the party. To Spooner, the Republicans were hypocrites for purporting to oppose slavery's expansion but refusing to take a strong, consistent moral stance against slavery itself. Although Spooner had advocated the use of violence to ''abolish slavery'', he denounced the Republicans' use of violence to prevent the Southern states from seceding during the American Civil War. He published several letters and pamphlets about the war, arguing that the Republican objective was not to eradicate slavery, but rather to preserve the Union by force. He blamed the bloodshed on Republican political leaders, such as Secretary of State William H. Seward and Senator Charles Sumner, who often spoke out against slavery but would not attack it on a constitutional basis, and who pursued military policies seen as vengeful and abusive.

Although he denounced the institution of slavery, Spooner recognized the right of the Confederate States of America to secede as the manifestation of government by consent, a constitutional and legal principle fundamental to Spooner's philosophy; the Northern states, in contrast, were trying to deny the Southerners that right through military force. He "vociferously opposed the Civil War, arguing that it violated the right of the southern states to secede from a Union that no longer represented them." He believed they were attempting to restore the Southern states to the Union, against the wishes of Southerners. He argued that the right of the states to secede derives from the natural right of slaves to be free. This argument was unpopular in the North and in the South after the War began, as it conflicted with the official position of both governments.

As a means to end slavery without bloodshed, Spooner offered ''compensated emancipation'', a method tested and proven in those nations that had orchestrated the peaceful abolition of slavery.

Views on economics and self-employment

Spooner believed that it is beneficial if people are self-employed so that they could enjoy the full fruits of their labor rather than having to share them with an employer. He argued that various forms of government intervention in the free market made it difficult for people to start their own businesses. For one, he believed that laws against high interest rates, or "usury" prevented those with capital from extending credit because they could not be compensated for high risks of not being repaid: "If a man have not capital of his own, upon which to bestow his labor, it is necessary that he be allowed to obtain it on credit. And in order that he may be able to obtain it on credit, it is necessary that he be allowed to contract for such a rate of interest as will induce a man, having surplus capital, to loan it to him; for the capitalist cannot, consistently with natural law, be compelled to loan his capital against his will. All legislative restraints upon the rate of interest, are, therefore, nothing less than arbitrary and tyrannical restraints upon a man’s natural capacity amid natural right to hire capital, upon which to bestow his labor....The effect of usury laws, then, is to give a monopoly of the right of borrowing money, to those few, who can offer the most approved security."

Spooner also believed that government restrictions on issuance of private money made it inordinately difficult for individuals to obtain the capital on credit to start their own businesses, thereby putting them in a situation where "a very large portion of them, to save themselves from starvation, have no alternative but to sell their labor to others" and those who do employ others are only able to afford to pay "far below what the laborers could produce, [than] if they themselves had the necessary capital to work with." Spooner said that there was "a prohibitory tax --- a tax of ten per cent. --- on all notes issued for circulation as money, other than the notes of the United States and the national banks" which he argued caused an artificial shortage of credit, and that eliminating this tax would result in making plenty of money available for lending such that: "All the great establishments, of every kind, now in the hands of a few proprietors, but employing a great number of wage labourers, would be broken up; for few or no persons, who could hire capital and do business for themselves would consent to labour for wages for another." Economist Murray Rothbard, in 1974, argued against Spooner's theory. Though agreeing that government should not have any regulations on money, he argued that "an increase in the supply of money does not confer any benefit whatever on society" but simply dilutes the purchasing power. Moreover, Rothbard said that in an anarchist society, the quantity of money would actually not increase as Spooner theorizes, but that supply would be even more limited than when governments and central banks manage the money supply, and fortunately so.

Reconstruction

Spooner harshly condemned the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed. Though he approved of the abolition of black slavery, he criticized the North for failing to make this the purpose of their cause. Instead of fighting to abolish slavery, they fought to "preserve the union" and, according to Spooner, to bolster business interests behind that union. Spooner believed a war of this type was hypocritical and dishonest, especially on the part of Radical Republicans like Sumner who were by then claiming to be abolitionist heroes for ending slavery. Spooner also argued that the war came at a great cost to liberty and proved that the rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence no longer held true - the people could not "dissolve the political bands" that tie them to a government that "becomes destructive" of the consent of the governed because if they did so, as Spooner believed the South had attempted to do, they would be met by the bayonet to enforce their obedience to the former government.

The Union government's actions during the war caused Spooner to radicalize his views to an anarchistic view. In response, Spooner published a series of political tracts, ''No Treason''. The most famous of these is ''No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority''. In this lengthy essay, Spooner argued that the Constitution was a contract of government (see social contract theory) which could not logically apply to anyone other than the individuals who signed it, and was thus void. Furthermore, since the government now existing under the Constitution pursued coercive policies that were contrary to the Natural Law and to the consent of the governed, it had been demonstrated that that document could not adequately stop many abuses against liberty or prevent tyranny from taking hold. Spooner bolstered his argument by noting that the federal government, as established by a legal contract, could not legally bind all persons living in the nation since none had ever signed their names or given their consent to it - that consent had always been assumed, which fails one of the most basic burdens of proof for a valid contract in the courtroom.

Spooner widely circulated the ''No Treason'' pamphlets, which also contained a legal defense against the crime of treason itself intended for former Confederate soldiers (hence the name of the pamphlet, arguing that "no treason" had been committed in the war by the South). These excerpts were published in ''DeBow's Review'' and in some other well-known southern periodicals of the time.

George Woodcock describes Spooner's essays as an "eloquent elaboration" of Josiah Warren and the early American development of Proudhon's ideas, and associates his works with that of Stephen Pearl Andrews.

Later life

Spooner became a member of the socialist First International. Spooner continued to write and publish extensively in the decades following Reconstruction, producing works such as "Natural Law or The Science of Justice" and "Trial By Jury." In "Trial By Jury" he defended the doctrine of "Jury Nullification", which holds that in a free society a trial jury not only has the authority to rule on the facts of the case, but also on ''the legitimacy of the law under which the case is tried'', and which would allow juries to refuse to convict if they regard the law they are asked to convict under as illegitimate. He became closely associated with Benjamin Tucker's anarchist journal ''Liberty'', which published all of his later works in serial format, and for which he wrote several editorial columns on current events. He argued that ''". . . almost all fortunes are made out of the capital and labour of other men than those who realise them. Indeed, except by his sponging capital and labour from others."''

Spooner died on May 14, 1887 at the age of 79 in his residence, 109 Myrtle Street, Boston. Benjamin Tucker arranged his funeral service and wrote a "loving obituary," entitled "Our Nestor Taken From Us," which appeared in ''Liberty'' on May 28, and predicted "that the name Lysander Spooner would be 'henceforth memorable among men.'"

Influence

Spooner's influence extends to the wide range of topics he addressed during his lifetime. He is remembered today primarily for his abolitionist activities and for his challenge to the post office monopoly, which had a lasting influence of significantly reducing postal rates. Spooner's writings contributed to the development of libertarian political theory in the United States, and were often reprinted in early libertarian journals such as the ''Rampart Journal'' and ''Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought''. His writings were also a major influence on Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard and libertarian law professor and legal theorist Randy Barnett.

In January 2004, Laissez Faire Books established the Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty. The honor is awarded monthly to the most important contributions to the literature of liberty, followed by an annual award to the author of the top book on liberty for the year. The annual "Spooner" earns $1,500 cash for the winning author. Conversely, proponents of market socialism cite Spooner for his opposition to wage labor.

Spooner's ''The Unconstitutionality of Slavery'' was cited in the 2008 ''District of Columbia v. Heller'' Supreme Court case which struck down the federal district's ban on handguns. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, quotes Spooner as saying the right to bear arms was necessary for those who wanted to take a stand against slavery. It was also cited by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion in ''McDonald v. Chicago'' the following year.

Publications

The Deist's Immortality, and An Essay On Man's Accountability For His Belief (1834)

The Deist's Reply to the Alleged Supernatural Evidences of Christianity (1836)

Constitutional Law, Relative to Credit, Currency, and Banking (1843)

The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails (1844)

The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845)

Poverty: Its Illegal Causes, and Legal Cure (1846)

Illegality of the Trial of John W. Webster (1850)

An Essay on Trial by Jury (1852)

The Law of Intellectual Property (1855)

A Plan For The Abolition Of Slavery (and) To The Non-Slaveholders of the South (1858)

Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States (1860)

A New System of Paper Currency (1861)

A Letter to Charles Sumner (1864)

Considerations for Bankers, and Holders of United States Bonds (1864)

No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)

Forced Consent (1873)

Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)

Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds (1877)

Gold and Silver as Standards of Value: The Flagrant Cheat in Regard to Them (1878)

Natural Law, or the Science of Justice (1882)

A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (1882)

A Letter to Scientists and Inventors, on the Science of Justice (1884)

A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, The Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People (1886)

See also

Individualist anarchism

Mutualism

Market socialism

Voluntaryism

Natural rights

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Notes

External links

Works online

Essay On The Trial By Jury

"To the Non-Slaveholders of the South: A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery" (1858)

Vices Are Not Crimes: A vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)

''No Treason'' (1867 1870 text)

''Natural Law, or the Science of Justice'' (1882)

"A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard: Challenging His Right - And that of All the Other So-Called Senators and Representative in Congress - To Exercise Any Legislative Power Whatever Over the People of the United States" (1882)

The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1860)

The Law of Intellectual Property: or an essay on the right of authors and inventors to a perpetual property in their ideas (1855)

''Let's Abolish Government'' (1972); three collected essays

''Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States'' (1860).

Audio books

'No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority' read by Marc Stevens

Secondary sources

Lysander Spooner Quotes at Liberty-Tree.ca.

Spooner Memorial Resolutions, offered by Benjamin Tucker at the Lysander Spooner Memorial Services held in Wells Memorial Hall, Boston, on Sunday, May 29, 1887.

Lysander Spooner's Bibliography via The Wayback Machine.

LysanderSpooner.org.

The Ideas of Lysander Spooner — Libertarian or libertarian socialist? by Iain MacSaorsa

Lysander Spooner: Libertarian Pietist by Murray Rothbard.

Category:1808 births Category:1887 deaths Category:American abolitionists Category:American anarchists Category:American anti-war activists Category:American essayists Category:American journalists Category:American lawyers Category:American legal writers Category:American people of English descent Category:American political philosophers Category:American political theorists Category:American political writers Category:Anarchism theorists Category:Deist thinkers Category:Individualist anarchists Category:People of Massachusetts in the American Civil War Category:People from Worcester County, Massachusetts Category:Philosophy writers

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