What is Abolitionism?
Abolitionism was a movement to end slavery. It grew across Britain, France, the United States and Latin America, and it began with a campaign against the Atlantic slave trade. Its supporters came from many backgrounds. They included Quaker and evangelical Christians, followers of Enlightenment ideas about rights, free Black communities and people who had escaped slavery. They worked through petitions, pamphlets, public meetings, boycotts and the written stories of former slaves. The word is still used today by campaigners against forced labour and human trafficking.
Core beliefs
- A person cannot be owned by another person.
- Slavery breaks both natural rights and, for religious abolitionists, God's law.
- The aim is to end slavery by law, not just to make it milder.
- Freed people should be protected by the law, and many abolitionists said they deserved equal citizenship.
- Moral argument, true stories and organised pressure can change a country's mind.
- Many also argued that paid work was fairer and more productive than forced work.
History
Quakers spoke out first. Some Pennsylvania Quakers signed a protest against slavery in 1688. A British committee against the slave trade formed in 1787, and William Wilberforce took the cause into Parliament. Britain ended its slave trade in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. The Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, ended slavery in France's richest colony. Britain freed the enslaved people of its colonies from 1834, after a law passed in 1833. In the United States, William Lloyd Garrison started his newspaper The Liberator in 1831. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, became a leading speaker and writer. The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment ended American slavery in 1865. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end it, in 1888.
Variants
Abolitionists argued about speed and method. Gradualists accepted a slow end to slavery, sometimes with payment to owners. Immediatists wanted freedom at once. Garrison and his followers stressed moral persuasion and refused to take part in a political system they saw as tied to slavery. Others formed political parties to win votes. Most campaigners stayed peaceful, but John Brown tried to start an armed uprising in 1859. Some white reformers backed sending freed people to Africa. Most Black abolitionists rejected that plan and insisted that America was their home.
Criticisms
Slaveholders and their allies called abolitionists reckless extremists who threatened property, order and national unity. Violent mobs broke up some abolitionist meetings in the North. Some moderate critics thought sudden freedom would cause chaos. Historians have raised other problems. Many white abolitionists still held racial prejudice. British law paid owners for their loss but gave nothing to the people who had been enslaved. Freed people in many places were left with little land, low wages and few political rights.
In practice
Abolitionist pressure helped end the legal Atlantic slave trade and led to freedom for millions of people across the Americas. The movement also taught later campaigners how to organise. Mass petitions, consumer boycotts, travelling speakers and printed testimony all became standard tools. Many early women's rights leaders, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, learned their politics in anti-slavery groups. On the 12 axes it scores toward Democratic on Authority and toward Liberty on Security, since its core demand was freedom from bondage.