As you read, consider:
 1. What were the different varieties of abolitionism?
 2. How did abolitionism challenge the barriers to racial equality and free speech?
 3. How was racism evident even in the abolitionist movement? What steps did some abolitionists take to fight racism in American society?

THE ABOLITIONISTS

A group of abolitionists known as the Oberlin Rescuers outside
the Cuyahoga County Jail, Ohio, from which they had rescued a fugitive
​slave named John Price (Hulton/Archive)

Colonization and Gradual Emancipation

The American Colonization Society, [founded in 1816], promoted the gradual abolition of slavery and the settlement of black Americans in Africa. Colonization struck many observers as totally impractical. Nonetheless, numerous prominent political leaders of the Jacksonian era – including Henry Clay, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, and Jackson himself – supported the Colonization Society. Many colonizationists believed that slavery and racism were so deeply embedded in American life that blacks could never achieve equality if freed and allowed to remain in the country. Like Indian removal, colonization rested on the premise that America is fundamentally a white society.

In the decades before the Civil War, several thousand black Americans did emigrate to Liberia with the aid of the Colonization Society. Some were slaves emancipated by their owners on the condition that they depart, while others left voluntarily, motivated by a desire to spread Christianity in Africa or to enjoy rights denied to them in the United States.

Illustration by Hammat Billings 1853 Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"Map of the West Coast of Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas, Including the Colony of Liberia," 1830, Library of Congress.

Printed by Homestead Print, Salem, Ohio. 1850.

Immediate Emancipation

Most African-Americans adamantly opposed the idea of colonization. In fact, the formation of the American Colonization Society galvanized free blacks to claim their rights as Americans.

The abolitionist movement that arose in the 1830s differed profoundly from its genteel, conservative predecessor. Drawing on the religious conviction that slavery was an unparalleled sin and the secular one that it contradicted the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, a new generation of reformers . . . demanded immediate abolition. Also unlike their predecessors, they directed explosive language against slavery and slaveholders and insisted that blacks, once free, should be incorporated as equal citizens of the republic rather than being deported. Perfecting American society, the insisted, meant rooting out not just slavery, but racism in all its forms.

David Walker

The first indication of the new spirit of abolitionism came in 1829 with the appearance of An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World by David Walker, a free black who had been born in North Carolina and now operated a used-clothing store in Boston. A passionate indictment of slavery and racial prejudice, the Appeal called on black Americans to mobilize for abolition – by force if necessary – and warned whites that the nation faced divine punishment if it did not mend its sinful ways. Walker called on blacks to take pride in the achievements of ancient African civilizations and to claim all their rights as Americans. “Tell us no more about colonization,” Walker wrote, addressing white readers, “for America is as much our country as it is yours.” Like other reformers, Walker used both secular and religious language. He warned that God would wreak vengeance on the United States for violating the principles of justice and heaped scorn on ministers who defended slavery for violating the golden rule espoused by Jesus Christ. Walker died in mysterious circumstances in 1830.

William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-79.

William Lloyd Garrison

Not until the appearance in 1831 of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly journal published in Boston, did the new breed of abolitionism find a permanent voice. “I will be as harsh as truth,” Garrison announced, “and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – and I will be heard.”
​
And heard he was. Some of Garrison’s ideas, such as his suggestion that the North abrogate the Constitution and dissolve the union to end its complicity in the evil of slavery, were rejected by many abolitionists. But his call for immediate abolition of slavery echoed throughout antislavery circles. Garrison’s pamphlet, Thoughts on African Colonization, persuaded many foes of slavery that blacks must be recognized as part of American society, not viewed as aliens to be shipped overseas.

Moral Suasion

Antislavery leaders took advantage of the rapid development of print technology and the expansion of literacy due to common-school education to spread their message. Like the radical pamphleteers of the American Revolution and the evangelical ministers of the Second Great Awakening, they recognized the democratic potential of printed material. Abolitionists seized on the recently invented steam printing press to produce millions of copies of pamphlets, newspapers, petitions, novels, and broadsides.

Many Southerners feared that the abolitionists intended to spark a slave insurrection. . . . Yet, despite their militant language, they rejected violence as a means of ending slavery. Many were pacifists or “non-resistants,” who believed that coercion should be eliminated from all human relationships and institutions. Their strategy was “moral suasion” and their arena the public sphere. Slaveholders must be convinced of the sinfulness of their ways, and the North of its complicity in the peculiar institution.

The Liberator, 20 January 1865.

Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895

Frederick Douglass and Black Abolitionists

Blacks played a leading role in the antislavery movement. Frederick Douglass was only one among many former slaves who published accounts of their lives in bondage; these accounts convinced thousands of Northerners of the evils of slavery. By the 1840s, black abolitionists sought an independent role within the movement, regularly holding their own conventions.

At every opportunity, black abolitionists rejected the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty. Free black communities in the North devised an alternative calendar of "freedom celebrations" centered on January 1, the date in 1808 on which the slave trade became illegal, and August 1, the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, rather than July 4. In doing so, they offered a stinging rebuke to white Americans’ claims to live in a land of freedom.

The greatest oration on American slavery and American freedom was delivered in Rochester in 1852 by Frederick Douglass. Speaking just after the annual Independence Day celebration, Douglass posed the question, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” He answered that Fourth of July festivities revealed the hypocrisy of a nation that proclaimed its believe in liberty yet daily committed “practices more shocking and bloody” than did any other country on earth.

Text for the passages above excerpted from Foner, 348-54.