Introduction
Beginning in Europe in the late 1700s, the abolitionist movement worked to end slavery. At first the aim was to end the slave trade between Africa and Europe, North America, and South America. The movement later focused on freeing those who were already in slavery. Followers of the movement were known as abolitionists.
Slave trade and slavery
The European trade in African slaves began in the 15th century. The Portuguese were the first to introduce slaves into Europe, when their ships carried Africans to Spain. After Europeans had discovered the Americas, descendants of those slaves were taken to Haiti in the Caribbean. The demand for labor on the sugar and cotton plantations in the colonies of North America, the West Indies, and South America created a market for slaves. The transportation of African slaves to the New World was soon flourishing.
In the 1600s Quakers and Mennonites in the British colonies of North America condemned slavery on religious grounds. There were few other protest, however, and the practice of slavery continued to expand. Between the 15th and the 19th century some 15 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.
Abolition of slavery
By the late 1700s opposition to slavery began to develop. The European movement known as the Enlightenment argued in favor of the idea that all men had certain rights. In 1776 American leaders, who were seeking independence from British colonial rule, issued the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all human beings were created equal. The basic document of the French Revolution, which began in 1789, was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Slowly but steadily, opposition grew to the holding of other human beings as private property.
The first formal organization to emerge in the abolitionist movement was the Abolition Society, founded in 1787 in England. Its leaders were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. The society's first success came in 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade with its colonies. Slavery itself, however, did not disappear. In response, British abolitionists founded the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823. The society succeeded in freeing all slaves in the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere in 1833.
Other countries followed the example of the British. The French were the first to ban slavery in all of their territories. In 1802, however, Napoleon I reestablished slavery in Haiti, then a French possession. By 1819 the French slave trade was outlawed, and in 1848 slavery was again banned in all French colonies.
Slavery was abolished country by country in South America. In Chile, for example, the first antislavery law was passed as early as 1811. The slave trade was abolished, and children born of slaves were freed. Adult slaves, however, were not freed until 1823. In Venezuela abolition was undertaken gradually, primarily because the government did not want to pay slaveholders for the loss of their human property. As compensation, the government forced freed slaves to work for their former owners for a number of years. Slavery finally ended in South America with the passage in 1888 of an antislavery law in Brazil.
Slavery could not be abolished, however, until all trading, selling, and buying of slaves had ended. With this in mind, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in England in 1839. Britain and the United States signed a treaty in 1842 under which each agreed to station a naval squadron on the African coast to prevent the shipment of slaves. This action brought the organized trade in African slaves to an end. Widespread smuggling and illegal trade in slaves, however, continued until the early 1860s.
United States
In the United States the slave trade was officially abolished in 1807, but the smuggling of slaves continued until the Civil War. As cotton plantations developed in the South, the demand for slaves increased. The Southern states thus became advocates of slavery. In contrast, by 1804 all of the states north of Maryland had abolished slavery. The North became the center of the abolitionist movement in the United States.
The most radical form of the U.S. abolitionist movement called for an immediate end to slavery by law. The best known leader of this movement was William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the newspaper Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833–70). Others who were drawn to the movement included the clergyman Theodore Parker and the writers John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell. Former slaves such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown also were associated with the movement.
Under Garrison's influence the abolitionists urged the separation of the North from the Union and arranged for the boycott of goods shipped from the South. They also established the Underground Railroad, a system by which sympathetic followers helped escaping slaves reach places of safety in the North or in Canada. The American Anti-Slavery Society was a powerful organization for 30 years, but it never gained the support of a majority of Northerners. The U.S. Constitution did not prohibit slavery, and the society was seen as a threat to the Union.
The abolitionist movement continued to gain force, however. For one thing the North opposed the extension of slavery into new western states and territories. People also were repulsed by the mercilessness of the slave hunters who operated under the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), which required that slaves who had escaped be returned. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which presented vivid descriptions of the suffering and oppression of slaves, became extraordinarily popular. John Brown's raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 was designed to promote a slave uprising. Although it failed to do so, the daring raid made Brown a hero among abolitionists.
In November 1860 Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery, was elected president of the United States. The South felt threatened, and over the next three months a series of Southern states left the Union and formed the Confederacy. This led to the American Civil War (1861–65). During the fighting, in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the Confederate states. In 1865, after the defeat of the Confederacy, slavery in the United States was abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
