The Beginnings of the Antislavery Movement
In the 1820s, African Americans and a few white Quaker allies led the fight to abolish slavery. They published pamphlets, lectured to small audiences, and helped runaway slaves escape. In 1829 David Walker wrote the most militant statement of black abolitionist sentiment, Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens. The free son of an enslaved father, Walker left his North Carolina home for Boston in the 1820s. There he became an agent and a writer for Freedom’s Journal, the country’s first newspaper published by African Americans. In his Appeal, Walker criticized the false promises of African colonization and warned that slaves would claim their freedom by force if whites did not agree to emancipate them. Quaker abolitionists, such as Benjamin Lundy, the editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, admired Walker’s courage but rejected his call for violence.
William Lloyd Garrison, a white Bostonian who worked on Lundy’s Baltimore newspaper, was inspired by Walker’s radical stance. In 1831 he returned to Boston and launched his own abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, urging white antislavery activists to embrace the black perspective. White reformers, he claimed, worried more about the moral and practical problems that slavery posed for whites than about the wrongs it imposed on blacks. From blacks’ perspective, Garrison claimed, the goal must be immediate, uncompensated emancipation.
The Liberator demanded that whites take an absolute stand against slavery where it existed and halt its spread. With the aid of like-minded reformers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City, Garrison organized the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in 1833. By the end of the decade, the AASS boasted branches in dozens of towns and cities, from Boston to Salem, Ohio. Members supported lecturers and petition drives, criticized churches that refused to denounce slavery, and proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution was a proslavery document. Some Garrisonians also participated in the work of the underground railroad, a secret network of activists who assisted fugitives fleeing enslavement.
In 1835 Sarah and Angelina Grimké joined the AASS and soon began lecturing for the organization. Daughters of a prominent South Carolina planter, they had moved to Philadelphia and converted to Quakerism. As Southerners, their denunciations of slavery carried particular weight. Yet as women, their public presence aroused fierce opposition. In 1837 Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts decried their presence in front of “promiscuous” audiences of men and women.
The Grimkés were not the first women to speak out against slavery. Maria Stewart, a free black widow, lectured in Boston in 1831–1832. She demanded that northern blacks take more responsibility for ending slavery in the South and for fighting racial discrimination everywhere. In 1833 free black and white Quaker women formed an interracial organization, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The organization built on the earlier efforts of white Quakers and free blacks in Philadelphia to boycott slave-produced goods such as cotton and sugar.
The abolitionist movement and the AASS quickly expanded to the frontier, and by 1836 Ohio claimed more antislavery groups than any other state. That year, Ohio women initiated a petition to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which was circulated from Rhode Island to Illinois. The petition campaign inspired the first national meeting of women abolitionists, held in New York City in 1837. But in Ohio and the rest of the Midwest, female and male abolitionists worked side by side, claiming it was their Christian duty “to unite our efforts for the accomplishment of the holy object of our association.” See e-Document Project 10: Debating Abolition.
