Important Figures in the Antislavery Cause
John Quincy Adams
As a
diplomat and one of the nation’s ablest secretaries of state, Adams
unintentionally helped open new territories to slavery in Florida and along the
Gulf Coast. After serving for one term as president, he played a critical role
in nurturing antislavery sentiment in the North, even though he never
considered himself an abolitionist. As
a Representative in Congress, he led a nine-year campaign to overturn the “Gag Rule,”
under which the House automatically tabled antislavery petitions. In the face
of accusations of treason and assassination threats, he succeeded in making
slavery subject to parliamentary debate. He also argued successfully on behalf
of the Amistad rebels, African blacks who had staged a revolt on Spanish slave
ship Amistad and were tried for mutiny and murder. He convinced the U.S.
Supreme Court that the rebels’ enslavement was illegal under international law
and that African captives had the same right to use violence to win their
freedom as did the American colonists during the Revolution. Perhaps most
importantly, he developed the idea that a president, under his powers as
commander-in-chief, had the authority to abolish slavery.
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASadams.htm
Richard Allen
After growing up as a slave to a
wealthy Pennsylvania lawyer and political office holder, Allen and his family
were sold in the early 1770s to a Delaware farmer. Both Allen and his master
underwent religious conversion, and his owner, convinced that slavery was
sinful, let Allen and a brother to purchase their freedom. During the early
1780s, Allen worked as a wagon drive, shoemaker, and sawyer, and also preached
to audiences of blacks and whites.
During
the mid-1780s, he became minister to a small group of free blacks in
Philadelphia. Along with Absalom Jones, he founded the Free African Society of
Philadelphia, the first African American mutual aid society.
In 1787, after
whites churchgoers relegated African American worshippers to a balcony, Richard
Allen organized the country’s first independent African American church.
“Mother Bethel” became one of the leading African American community
institutions in Philadelphia, and it served as a catalyst for the development
of black schools, mutual aid societies, and petition campaigns against the
slave trade and slavery. In 1816, he established the first African American
religious denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The next year,
he organized an African American convention in Philadelphia, which vigorously
protested against colonization.
For additional biographical
information, see:
http://www.africana.com/tt_125.htm
For an
essay on Allen, see:
James Henretta, “Richard Allen and
African-American Identity”
http://earlyamerica.com/review/spring97/allen.html
Picture credit: http://www.africana.com/tt_125.htm
Charles Ball
Born in Maryland around 1780, Ball toiled as a slave in Maryland, South
Carolina, and Georgia, and managed to escape twice. In 1837, he published his
autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Charles Ball.
For excerpts from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASball.htm
Henry Bibb (1815-1854)
Born to a white father and a slave mother in Shelby County, Ky., Bibb
was held in slavery in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and escaped in 1837.
In 1851, he moved to Canada, where he and Josiah Henson established a colony
for escaped slaves. He also founded Canada's first African American newspaper,
Voice of the Fugitive.
For excerpts from The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of an
American Slave (1849), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Sbibb.htm
James Birney
Birney was one of many Southerners to discover that it was
hopeless to work for slave emancipation in the South. He had been born to a
wealthy Kentucky slaveholding family, and like many members of the South’s
slaveholding elite, was educated at Princeton. After graduation, he moved to
Huntsville, Ala., where he practiced law and operated a cotton plantation. In
Huntsville, he developed qualms about slavery and began to work as an agent for
the American Colonization Society. Soon, his doubts about slavery had grown
into an active hatred for the institution. He returned to Kentucky, emancipated
his slaves, and in 1835 organized the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society.
In Danville, a committee of leading citizens informed him
that they would not permit him to establish an antislavery newspaper in the
city. When Birney announced that he would go through with his plans, the
committee bought out the paper’s printer and the town’s postmaster announced
that he would refuse to deliver the newspaper. In a final effort to publish his
paper, Birney moved across the Ohio River into Cincinnati, where a mob
destroyed his press while the city’s mayor looked on.
Birney helped found the Liberty Party in 1840, which called
upon Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, end the
interstate slave trade, and cease admitting new slave states to the Union. The
party also sought the repeal of local and state “black laws” which
discriminated against free blacks. The party nominated him for president in
1840 and again in 1844. Although he gathered fewer than 7100 votes in his first
campaign, he received 62,000 votes four years later, and captured enough votes
in Michigan and New York to deny Henry Clay the presidency.
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbirney.htm
Henry “Box” Brown
Born into slavery in Virginia in 1815,
Brown escaped by having himself nailed into a small box and shipped from
Richmond to Philadelphia. An orator for the American Anti-Slavery Society, he
published a narrative of his life in 1851.
For excerpts from the Narrative of
the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbox.htm
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbox.htm
A devout, Bible-quoting abolitionist and Vermont native who believed he
had a personal responsibility to overthrow slavery, John Brown first gained
public noteriety in Kansas in the mid-1850s. After receiving word that Senator
Charles Sumner had been assaulted on the Senate floor, he said "something
must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights." He
announced that the time had come "to fight fire with fire" and
"strike terror in the hearts of proslavery men." On May 24, 1856, he
and six companions dragged five proslavery men and boys from their beds at
Pottawatomie Creek, split open their skulls and cut off their hands. A war of
revenge erupted in Kansas, which left 200 dead.
As early as 1857, Brown had begun to raise money and recruit men for an
invasion of the South. He told his backers that only through insurrection could
this "slave‑cursed Republic be restored to the principles of the
Declaration of Independence."
His plan was to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia
(now West Virginia), and arm slaves from the surrounding countryside. His long‑range
goal was to drive southward into Tennessee and Alabama, raiding federal
arsenals and inciting slave insurrections. Failing that, he hoped to ignite a
sectional crisis that would destroy slavery.
At 8 o'clock Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, Brown led a raiding
party of approximately 21 men toward Harpers Ferry, where they captured the
lone night watchman and cut the town's telegraph lines. Encountering no
resistance, Brown's raiders seized the federal arsenal, an armory, and a rifle
works along with several million dollars worth of arms and munitions. Brown
then sent out several detachments to round up hostages and liberate slaves.
But Brown's play soon went awry.
During the night, a church bell began to toll, warning neighboring
farmers and militiamen from the surrounding countryside that a slave
insurrection was under way. Local townspeople arose from their beds and
gathered in the streets, armed with axes, knives, and squirrel rifles. Within
hours, militia companies from villages within a 30‑mile radius of Harpers
Ferry cut off Brown's escape routes and trapped Brown's men in the armory.
Twice, Brown sent men carrying flags of truce to negotiate. On both occasions,
drunken mobs, yelling "Kill them, Kill them," gunned the men down.
Brown's assault against slavery lasted less than two days. Early
Tuesday morning, October 18, U.S. Marines, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee
and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, arrived in Harpers Ferry. Brown and his men
took refuge in a fire engine house and battered holes through the building's
brick wall to shoot through. A hostage later described the climactic scene:
"With one son dead by his side and another shot through, he felt the pulse
of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other and commanded
his men ... encouraging them to fire and sell their lives as dearly as they
could."
Later that morning, Colonel Lee's marines stormed the engine house and
rammed down its doors. Brown and his men continued firing until the leader of
the storming party cornered Brown and knocked him unconscious with a sword.
Five of Brown's party escaped, ten were killed, and seven, including Brown
himself, were taken prisoner.
A week later, Brown was put on trial in a Virginia court, even though
his attack had occurred on federal property. During the six‑day
proceedings, Brown refused to plead insanity as a defense. He was found guilty
of treason, conspiracy, and murder, and was sentenced to die on the gallows.
The trial's high point came at the very end when Brown was allowed to
make a five‑minute speech. His words helped convince thousands of
Northerners that this grizzled man of 59, with his "piercing eyes"
and "resolute countenance," was a martyr to the cause of freedom.
Brown denied that he had come to Virginia to commit violence. His only goal, he
said, was to liberate the slaves. "If it is deemed necessary," he
told the Virginia court, "that I should forfeit my life for the
furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood with the blood of
millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel,
and unjust enactments, I say let it be done."
Brown's execution was set for December 2. Before he went to the
gallows, Brown wrote one last message: "I ... am now quite certain that
the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
At 11 a.m., he was led to the execution site, a halter was placed around his
neck, and a sheriff led him over a trapdoor. The sheriff cut the rope and the
trapdoor opened. As the old man's body convulsed on the gallows, a Virginia
officer cried out: "So perish all enemies of Virginia!"
Across the North, church bells tolled, flags flew at half‑mast,
and buildings were draped in black bunting. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared Brown
to Jesus Christ and declared that his death had made "the gallows as
glorious as the cross." Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow predicted that
Brown's execution "will be a great day in our history; the date of a new
Revolution,‑‑quite as needed as the old one." William Lloyd
Garrison, previously the strongest exponent of nonviolent opposition to
slavery, announced that Brown's death had convinced him of "the need for
violence" to destroy slavery. He told a Boston meeting that "every
slaveholder has forfeited his right to live," if he opposed immediate
emancipation.
Prominent Northern Democrats and Republicans, including Stephen Douglas
and Abraham Lincoln, spoke out forcefully against Brown's raid and his tactics.
Lincoln expressed the views of the Republican leadership, when he denounced
Brown's raid as an act of "violence, bloodshed, and treason" that
deserved to be punished by death. But Southern whites refused to believe that
politicians like Lincoln and Douglas represented the true opinion of most
Northerners. These men condemned Brown's "invasion," observed a
Virginia senator, "only because it failed."
For a brief
biography with links to documents, see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html
Picture
credit: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html
William Wells
Brown(1814-1884)
One of the nation's first African American novelists and historians,
Brown was born in Lexington, Va., and raised in Missouri. After serving as a
slave driver, he was hired out to transport slaves to the New Orleans slave
market, but managed to escape. He published a narrative of his life in slavery
in 1847. His novel Clotel (1853) offers a fictional reworking of the
story that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children by a slave mistress.
For excerpts from Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave
(1847), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbrownW.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbrownW.htm
Martha Browne
Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1808, the daughter of a slave woman and
an unknwon white man, she published her Autobiography of a Female Slave
in 1857.
For excerpts from her autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbrowne.htm
Henry Clay Bruce (1836-1902)
The Virginia-born Bruce published his autobiography, Twenty-Nine
Years a Slave, in 1895.
For excerpts form his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbruce.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbruce.htm
Annie L. Burton
Born into slavery in Alabama in 1858, Burton published an
autobiography, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, in 1909.
For excerpts
from her autobiography and her biography of Abraham Lincoln (1909), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASburton.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASburton.htm
Mary Ann
Cary (1823-1893)
After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, her family
migrated to Canada, where she edited the Provincial Freeman, an antislavery
newspaper. In 1869 she became the first female student at Howard University in
Washington.
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAWcary.htm
Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885)
A founder of the Boston Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, she
was one of three women elected to the executive committee of the American
Anti-Slavery Committee in 1839, an action that led conservatives (including
Arthur and Lewis Tappan) to leave the organization and form the American and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.
For additional information, see http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASweston.htm
Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)
A reformer, editor, and prolific writer, Child was one of the first
American women to support herself as a writer. She won acclaim for Hobomok (1824),
a romantic novel about love between an Indian brave and a white maiden, and
other historical romances. But her popularity declined after she was converted
to antislavery and attacked laws prohibiting racial intermarriage.
For excerpts from her writings, see
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASchild.htm
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASchild.htm
Joseph Cinque
The leader of the Amistad rebels, Sengbe Pieh had been born in Sierra
Leone around 1815 and was kidnapped into slavery in 1839. While he and other
Africans were being transported from the Havana and to the Cuban sugar fields,
he led a rebellion on the schooner Amistad and ordered two surviving whites to
take them back to Africa. The whites
secretly sailed northwest at night and after 63 days at sea the ship was
intercepted off the coast of Long Island.
Imprisoned in New Haven, Conn., the captives were put on trial for
mutiny and murder, but were ultimately freed when the Supreme Court ruled that
their enslavement had violated international treaties. In 1842, Cinque returned
to Sierra Leone, where he discovered that his wife and three children had been
killed. He later became a missionary.
For excerpts from press accounts of the Amistad affair, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Scinque.htm
Credits: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Scinque.htm
Lewis Clarke(1812-1897)
The Kentucky-born Clarke escaped from slavery in 1841, reached Canada,
and published his Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke in 1845.
For excerpts from his narrative, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASclark.htm
Credits: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASclark.htm
Levi Coffin(1798-1877)
A North Carolina-born Quaker, Coffin later moved to Indiana where he
reportedly helped 3,000 slaves escape to freedom. His Reminiscences
(1876) helped disseminate the popular image of the Underground Railroad as a
carefully constructed line through which conductors guided fugitives from
slavery.
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAScoffin.htm
Samuel Cornish(1795-1858)
Pastor of New York's African American Presbyterian church, the
Delaware-born Cornish founded (with John Russwurm) Freedom's Journal, the
first African American newspaper in New York, and later edited the Colored
American.
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAScornish.htm
Prudence
Crandall
In 1832,
Crandall, a Quaker schoolteacher in Canterbury, Conn., sparked a major
controversy by admitting Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free black farmer,
into her school. After white parents withdrew their students from the school,
Crandall tried to turn the institution into a school for the education of free
blacks. Hostile neighbors broke the school’s windows, contaminated its well
with manure, and denied students seats on stagecoaches and pews in church. In
1833, after the state made it a crime to teach black students who were not
residents of Connecticut, state authorities arrested Crandall. She was tried
twice, convicted, and jailed. After her release, a local mob attacked her
school building with crowbars and attempted to burn the structure. It never
reopened.
The story
of Prudence Crandall’s school is told at:
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/forum/links/others/prudence.crandall.html
and at:
http://www.projo.com/special/women/94root6.htm
For a brief
biographies, see:
http://www.ctforum.org/cwhf/crandall.htm
http://www.fwkc.com/encyclopedia/low/articles/c/c005002182f.html
http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/crandall.html
Picture
credit: http://www.plgrm.com/Heritage/women/pictures/CRANPR03.HTM
Martin Delany
Following passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, many African
Americans were convinced that they had two choices: to submit to continuing
prejudice and discrimination or to leave the country. Delany gave vivid
expression to the feelings of black anger and disillusionment. He had been born into slavery in western
Virginia, but his father purchased his family's freedom and moved them to
Pittsburgh. In 1843, Delany began
publishing an antislavery newspaper, and later joined with Frederick Douglass
to publish The North Star. He then studied medicine at Harvard, worked as a
doctor in Pittsburgh, and in 1852 published The Condition, Emigation, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, which examined why
white Americans oppressed African Americans. Convinced that blacks could never
attain true equality in the United States, he organized the National Emigration
Convention in 1854 to explore emigration to Central, Haiti, and Africa's Niger
Valley. During the Civil War he seved as a major in the Union army, and during
Reconstruction served in the Freedmen's Bureau and as a judge in South
Carolina.
For quotations from Delany's writings, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASdelaney.htm
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASdelaney.htm
Frederick Douglass 
One of America's most brilliant authors, orators, and organizers and
the nineteenth century's most famous black leader, Douglass was the first
fugitive slave to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an antislavery
meeting on Nantucket Island off the Massachusetts coast. With great power and
eloquence, he described his life in bondage. As soon as he finished, the famous
abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison asked the audience, "Have we been
listening to a thing, a piece of property, or to a man?" "A man! A
man!" five hundred voices replied. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the pioneering
feminist, vividly recalled her first glimpse of Douglass on an abolitionist
platform: "He stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath,
as with wit, satire, and indignation he graphically described the bitterness of
slavery and the humiliation of subjection."
Douglass (who was
originally named Frederick Bailey, after a Muslim ancestor, Belali Mohomet) had
personally experienced many of slavery's worst horrors. Born in 1818, the son
of a Maryland slave woman and an unknown white father, he was separated from
his mother almost immediately after his birth, and remembered seeing her only
four or five times before her death. Cared for by his maternal grandmother, a
slave midwife, he suffered another cruel emotional blow when, at the age of 6,
he was taken from his home to work on one of the largest plantations on
Maryland's eastern shore. There, Douglass suffered chronic hunger and witnessed
many of the cruelties that he later recorded in his autobiographies. He never
forgot seeing an aunt receive forty lashes with a cowskin whip or a cousin
bleeding from her shoulders and neck after a flogging by a drunken overseer.
Temporarily, Douglass
was rescued from a life of menial plantation labor when he was sent to
Baltimore to work for a shipwright. Here, his mistress taught him to read,
until her husband declared that "learning would spoil the
best" slave in the world. Douglass continued his education on his own.
With 50 cents he earned blacking boots, Douglass bought a copy of the Columbian
Orator, a collection of speeches that included a blistering attack on
slavery. This book introduced him to
the ideals of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution and inspired him to
perfect his oratorical skills.
At fifteen, his
master's death resulted in Douglass's return to plantation life. Resentful at
the loss of the relative freedom in a city, Douglass bitterly complained about
the plantation's food and refused to call his owner "Master." To crush Douglass's rebellious spirit, his
owner hired him out to a notorious "slave breaker" named Edward
Covey. For seven months, Douglass
endured abuse and beatings. But one hot
August morning he could take no more. He fought back and defeated Covey in a
fist fight. After this, he was no longer punished.
In 1836, Douglass and
two close friends, John and Henry Harris, plotted to escape slavery. When the
plan was uncovered, Douglass was thrown into jail. But instead of being sold to
slave traders and shipped to the deep South, as he expected, Douglass was
returned to Baltimore and promised freedom at the age of 25 if he behaved
himself.
In Baltimore, Douglass
worked in the city's shipyards. Virtually every day, white workers harassed him
and on one occasion beat him with bricks and metal spikes, shouting "kill
him--kill him...knock his brains out." Eventually, Douglass's owner gave
him the unusual privilege of hiring himself out for wages and living independently.
During this period of relative freedom Douglass joined the East Baltimore
Improvement Society, a benevolent and educational organization, where he met
Anna Murray, a free black woman whom he later married.
In 1838, after his
owner threaten to take away his right to hire out his time, Douglass decided to
run away. With papers borrowed from a free black sailor, he boarded a train and
rode to freedom. To conceal his identity, he adopted a new last name, Douglass,
chosen from Sir Walter Scott's poem, "Lady of the Lake."
After escaping from
slavery, he adopted a new last name--Douglass--chosen from Sir Walter Scott's
poem "Lady of the Lake," to conceal his identity; settled in New
Bedford, Massachusetts, where in worked in the shipyards; and began to attend
antislavery meetings. In August 1841, he was asked to speak to a convention of
the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
It was then that he became the first fugitive slave to speak on behalf
of the abolitionist cause.
As a travelling
lecturer, Douglass electrified audiences with his first-hand accounts of
slavery. His speeches combated the notion that slaves were content and
undermined belief in racial inferiority. When many Northerners refused to
belief that this eloquent orator could possibly have been a slave, he responded
by writing an autobiography that identified his pervious owners by name. Fear
that his autobiography made him vulnerable to kidnapping and return to slavery
led Douglass to flee to England. Only after British abolitionists purchased his
freedom for $711.66 did he return to the United States States.
Initially, Douglass
supported William Lloyd Garrison and the radical abolitionists, who believed
that moral purity was more important than political success. The radicals
questioned whether the Bible represented the word of God because it condoned
slavery; withdrew from churches that permitted slavery; and refused to vote or
hold public office. Douglass later broke with Garrison, started his own
newspaper, The North Star, and supported political action against
slavery. He was an early supporter of the Republican party, even though its
goal was to halt slavery's expansion, not to abolish the institution. Following
the Civil War, the party would reward his loyalty by appointing him marshall
and register of deeds for the District of Columbia and minister to Haiti.
Douglass supported
many reforms including temperance and women's rights. He was one of the few men
to attend the first women's rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York,
and he was the only man to vote for a resolution demanding the vote for women.
Nevertheless,
Douglass's main cause was the struggle against slavery and racial
discrimination. In the 1840s and 1850s, he not only lectured tirelessly against
slavery, he also raised funds to help fugitive slaves reach safety in Canada.
During the Civil War, he lobbied President Lincoln to make slave emancipation a
war aim and organize black regiments.
Declaring that "liberty won by white men would lack half its
lustre," he personally recruited some 2,000 African American troops for
the Union army. Among the recruits were
two of his sons, who took part in the bloody Union assault on Fort Wagner in
South Carolina in July 1863, which resulted in more than 1,500 northern casualties--but
which proved black troops' heroism in battle.
Douglass never wavered
in his commitment to equal rights. During Reconstruction, he struggled to
convince Congress to use federal power to safeguard the freedmen's rights.
Later, as the country retreated from reconstruction, Douglass passionately
denounced lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement. Toward the end of his
career, he was asked what advice he had for a young man. "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" he
replied. Despite old age, Douglass never stopped agitating. He died in 1895, at the age of 77, after
attending a women's rights meeting with Susan B. Anthony.
It is a striking
historical coincidence that the year of Douglass's death brought a new black
leader to national prominence. Seven
months after Douglass's death, Booker T. Washington, the founder of the
Tuskegee Institute, delivered a speech in Atlanta, Georgia, which catapulted
him into the public spotlight. The
"Atlanta Compromise" speech called on African Americans to end their
demands for equal rights and instead strive for economic advancement. "In
all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the finger,"
Washington declared, "yet one as the hand in all things essential to
mutual progress." Washington's philosophy of "accommodation"
with segregation represented the polar opposite of Douglass's goal of full
civil and political equality.
Picture credit: http://www.frederickdouglass.org/
For brief biographies, see:
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/DOUGLASS/home.html
http://www.africana.com/tt_155.htm
For excerpts
from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), The Life
and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) and other writings, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASdouglass.htm
For excerpts from his speeches,
see:
http://www.frederickdouglass.org/speeches/index.html
Olaudah Equiano
An Ibo born in Nigeria around 1745, Equiano was just 11 years old when
he was kidnapped into slavery. He was held captive in west Africa for seven
months and then sold to British slavers, who shipped him to Barbados and then
took him to Virginia. After serving a British naval officer, he was sold to a
Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who allowed him to purchase his freedom in
1766. In later life, he played an active role in the movement to abolish the
slave trade. He published his autobiography, The Life of Olaudah Equiano the
African, in 1789.
For excerpts
from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Sequiano.htm
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Sequiano.htm
James
Forten (1766-1842)
One of the leaders of Philadelphia's African American community, Forten
served in the navy during the Revolution, been captured by the British, and had
refused free passage to England, crying out: “I am here a prisoner for the
liberties of my country; I never, NEVER, shall prove a traitor to her
interests.” In 1814, mobilized 2,500 black volunteers to defend Philadelphia
against a threatened British invasion.
Folllowing the
Revolution, Forten, a sailmaker, became one of the most successful African
Americans in the United States, accumulating $100,000 worth of property. Even
though his business depended on white patronage, in 1797 he signed a petition
to Congress against the slave trade.
Although he had assisted Paul Cuffe (a
Quaker sea captain who was the son of a former slave), who transported the
first free blacks to west Africa, he later led opposition to the American
Colonization Society. In August, 1817, he led 3,000 black Philadelphians in a
protest against colonization.
For additional
information, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASforten.htm
Francis Fredric
Born into slavery in Virginia, he escaped to Canada after his owner
moved to Kentucky. He published his autobiography, Fifty Years of Slavery, in
1863.
For excerpts
from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASfredric.htm
Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882)
The
grandson of a Mandingo leader, Garnet was born into slavery in Maryland,
escaped in 1824 and subsequently became a Presbyterian minister in Troy, N.Y. A
white mob had protested his graduation from a New Hampshire academy. He then
attended an abolitionist-sponsored institute in upstate New York and entered
the ministry. In 1843, at the age of
27, he gave an impassioned speech in Buffalo that shocked white abolitionists. Speaking at a time when southern slavery was
expanding into the Southwest and discrimination against free blacks was
increasing, he appealed to a long tradition of black resistance to
slavery and called on slaves to refuse to work until they were properly
compensated by their masters. He subsequently founded his own African
Colonization Society and began to view emigration to Liberia as a way for
African Americans to overcome degradation and prejudice.
For additional biographical
information, see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1537.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2949.html
For Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2937.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASgarnet.htm
Picture
credit: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2949.html
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)
The symbol of radical abolition, the Boston-born Garrison was just 25
years old when he denounced colonization as a cruel hoax, designed to racially
cleanse the North while doing nothing to end slavery in the South. The son of a
drunken sailor who deserved the family before William was three, he served an
apprenticeship in the printing trade, and gained public noteriety when he was
convicted of libel for attacking a Massachusetts merchant who was shipping
maryland to Louisiana. After he was bailed out of jail, he founded the
antislavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831. The most controversial figure in
the abolitionist movement, he began to question whether the Bible represented
the word of God, demanded equal rights for women, and called for voluntary
dissolution of the Union. In 1854, he denounced the Constitution as "a
covenant with death and an agreement with Hell" because it sanctioned
slavery.
For excerpts from Garrison's writings, see:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/garrison.htm
For
Garrison on the death of John Brown, see:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/garrison.htm
For brief
biographies, see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1561.html
http://www.nps.gov/boaf/garris~1.htm
Historian
David Blight on Garrison
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i2980.html
Picture
credit: http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/garrison.htm
Moses Grandy
Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1786, Grandy escaped in 1833 and
published the narrative of his life, Life of a Slave, in 1843.
For excerpts
from his narrative, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASgrandy.htm
Angelina
Grimké and Sarah Grimké
Angelina and Sarah Grimke were among the first abolitionists to
challenge the doctrine that women should not speak before mixed audiences of
both sexes. Born to a wealthy South Carolina slaveowning family, the two
sisters grew to hate slavery and moved to Philadelphia, joined the Quakers, and
became active in the antislavery cause. In 1837, Angelina gained noteriety by
lecturing against slavery to audiences that included men. Shocked by this breach of the doctrine of
separate sexual spheres, ministers in Massachusetts called on their fellow
clergy to forbid women from speaking from church pulpits. Sarah responded with
a pamphlet entitled Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the
Sexes, one of hte first modern statements of feminist principles. She denounced
the injustice of lower pay and denial of equal educational opportunities for
women. She expressed outrage that women were "regarded by men, as pretty
toys or as mere instruments of pleasure." men and women, she concluded
should not be treated differently since both were endowed with inherent natural
rights.
For quotations from Angelina Grimke's An Appeal to the Christian
Women of the South (1836), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASgrimke.htm
Walter Hawkins
A fugitive from slavery in Maryland, Hawkins moved to Canada where he
became a bish in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He published his
autobiography, From Slavery to Bishopric, in 1891.
For excerpts
from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAShawkins.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAShawkins.htm
Josiah Henson
An inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson was
a slave for more than 30 years on a 500-acre Maryland plantation before
escaping to Canada in 1830.
Born in 1789 in Charles County, Md., Henson was sold away from his
mother to a tavern keeper. He was then sold
to Isaac Riley in Maryland’s Montgomery County, who frequently sent Henson to
the District of Columbia to sell produce.
When a “tyrannical, barbarous” man defeated Riley in a fight, he sent Henson
to get revenge. In an ambush, Henson’s
should blades were broken, and he could never again raise his hands above his
head.
In 1825, Riley sent him to Davies County, Ky., where Henson became a
preacher. There, he earned money to try
to purchase his freedom, but upon his return to Maryland, Riley rejected his
offer of $350. Henson returned to Kentucky and he and his
wife and four children escaped on foot to Lake Erie, where a Scottish ship
captain took them to Buffalo. From
there, they entered Canada. Canada had adopted an antislavery law in 1793.
In 1841, Henson and a group of abolitionists bought 200 acres near Dresden, Ontario, and established Dawn settlement, a successful farming and manufacturing community for fugitive slaves. They also founded the British American Institute, Canada’s first vocational school for blacks. To support his efforts, Henson lectured in the United States and Britain, where he was received by Queen Victoria. When the Archbishop of Canterbury asked where he had been educated, he replied: “From the University of Adversity.”
In her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe said that
Henson’s1849 autobiography helped inspire her novel. In May 1858, over a year
before his raid on Harpers Ferry, the abolitionist John Brown met with blacks
and whites at a church in Dresden started by Henson. Although about half of the
former slaves who escaped to Canada eventually returned to the United States,
Henson remained in Dresden, where he died in 1883 at the age of 94.
For excerpts
from The Life of Josiah Henson, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAShenson.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAShenson.htm
Harriet Jacobs(1813-1897)
Born into slavery in Edenton, N.C., she escaped to Philadelphia in
1834. Her slightly fictionalized autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl, published in 1861, describes the sexual abuse she suffered
under slavery.
For excerpts
from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Sjacobs.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Sjacobs.htm
Thomas Johnson
The son of a free black and a slave mother, Johnson, following the
Civil War, became a minister in Denver and a missionary in Africa. His
autobiography, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, was published in 1909.
For excerpts
from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASjohnsonJ.htm
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASjohnsonJ.htm
Elizabeth Keckley(1818-1907)
The dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley was born into slavery in
Virginia and purchased her freedom in 1855.
She published her autobiography, Thirty Years a Slave, which
contains her recollections of Abraham Lincoln, in 1868.
For excerpts
from her autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASkeckley.htm
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASkeckley.htm
John Mercer Langston (1829-1897)
The son of a Virginia planter and a slave, Langston was born in
Delaware and raised in Ohio, where he graduated from Oberlin College. He was elected
as a town clerk in 1855, recruited African American soldiers during the Civil
War, served a law professor at Howard University, and served as U.S. minister
to Haiti and a Representative in Congress.
For additional
biographical information:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASlangstonJM.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASlangstonJM.htm
Rev. Elijah Lovejoy (1802-1837)
The Reverend Elijah Lovejoy was the abolitionist movement's first martyr.
The editor of a religious newspaper in slaveholding St. Louis, he had his press
destroyed after he published an account of a lynching of an African American
and the acquital of its perpetrators.
He then moved to Alton, Ill., a town across the Mississippi River from
slaveholding St. Louis. Three times, mobs destroyed his printingpresses. When a
fourth printing press arrived, Lovejoy armed himself and guarded the new press
at the warehouse. An anti-abolitionists mob set the warehouse on fire and shot
Lovejoy as he fled the building. Lovejoy's opponents lined the streets and
cheered as the mutilated corpse was dragged through the town.
For accounts of Lovejoy's murder, see:
http://www.altonweb.com/history/lovejoy/index.html
Account of the evening as reported
by the Alton Observer
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASlovejoy.htm
Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839)
Publisher of one of the earliest antislavery newspapers, The Genius of
Universal Emancipation, Lundy was a Quaker who was born in New Jersey and later
moved to Vermont and then to Illinois.
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASlundy.htm
Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)
A delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, she
was denied the right to take part on the ground that participation would offend
British public opinion. Instead, she and two other American women, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Abby Kelly, were relegated to seats in a balcony. Eight years
later, she and Stanton organized the first women's rights convention in history
at Seneca Falls, N.Y.
Picture
credit: http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jan/mott.html#etext
For
additional biographical information, see:
http://www.oll.temple.edu/ih/IH52/Enlightenment/Mott/MottSet.html
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jan/mott.html#etext
For her writings,
see:
Autobiographical Sketch
- Taken from the Pendle Hill Pamphlet, "Lucretia Mott Speaking: Excerpts
from the Sermons & Speeches of a Famous Nineteenth Century Quaker Minister
& Reformer
Remarks on John Brown
delivered to the 24th annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,
October 25-26, 1860
Slavery
and the Woman Question excerpts from Lucretia Mott's Diary of Her 1840
attendance of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in Great Britain
Sermon delivered at the Cherry
Street Meeting in Philadelphia, September 30, 1849
Solomon Northrup
A free black born in upstate New York in 1808, Northrup took a
hazardous job requiring travel to the South. Even though he was carrying papers
proving he was a freeman and citizen, he was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in
1841, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. In 1852, Northrup's New York friends
received a letter from him and with support from the governor of New York, the
secretary of war, and a Supreme Court justice, were able to secure his freedom.
He published the narrative of his life, Twelve Years a Slave, in 1855.
For excerpts
from his narrative, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASnorthup.htm
James Pennington
Born into slavery in Maryland, he escaped into Pennsylvania around the
age of 20. He worked as a blacksmith and a schoolteacher before studying
theology at Yale and becoming a minister in Connecticut. He helped organize
African American support for the Amistad captives and represented Connecticut
at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. He published his
autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith, in 1859.
For excerpts
from his autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpennington.htm
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpennington.htm
Wendell Phillips
1811-1884)
A wealthy Boston Brahmin and a Harvard-trained attorney, he abandoned
the practice of law after he saw a Boston mob try to lynch William Lloyd
Garrison. A spellbinding orator, he became a radical abolitionist who strongly
supported women's rights.
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASphillips.htm
Robert Purvis (1810-1898)
The son of a cotton broker in South Carolina, he moved to Philadelphia,
where he established a library for African Americans and campaigned to repeal a
state law prohibiting blacks from voting. Following passage of the Fugitive Slave
Law, he served as chairman of a vigilance committee, which sought to protect
African Americans from kidnapping.
For excerpts
from an 1860 Purvis speech, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpurvis.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpurvis.htm
Charles L. Remond (1810-1873)
The
American Anti-Slavery Society's first African American lecturer was born in
Salem, Mass., and recruited black soldiers during the Civil War.
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASremond.htm
Moses Roper
The son of a North Carolina slaveowner and a slave, Roper lived in
North and South Carolina and Georgia before he escaped from slavery in 1834. He
published the narrative of his life, Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper,
in 1838.
For excerpts from his narrative, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASroper.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASroper.htm
David Ruggles (1810-1849)
The country's first African American bookseller, he wrote and edited a
number of antislavery publications. He is best known for his role in assisting
Frederick Douglass after his escape from slavery.
For additional biographical information and Douglass's account of
Ruggles, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASruggles.htm
John B. Russwurm
A graduate of Bowdoin College and one of the first African Americans to
receive a college degree, Russworm was (along with Samuel Cornish) the founder
of Freedom's Journal, New York's first black newspaper. In contrast to
most African American leaders who rejected colonization, Russwurm emigrated to
Liberia in 1829.
William Seward (1801-1872)
Born in Florida, Seward served as New York governor, U.S. Senator, and
Secretary of State during the Civil War. A Whig and later a Republican in
politics, he gained noteriety for arguing that there was a "higher
law" than the Constitution, a higher moral law that regarded slavery as
sinful.
In 1858, Seward examined the sources of the conflicts between North and
South. Some people thought the sectional conflict was "accidental,
unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore
ephemeral." Seward believed these people were wrong. The roots of the
conflict went far deeper. "It is an irrepressible conflict," he said,
"between opposing and enduring forces."
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASseward.htm
Gerrit Smith (1797-1874)
A wealthy upstate New York landholder and a founder of the Liberty
Party, he provided land to hundreds of African American families. He was one of
the "Secret Six" who financed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Va.
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASsmith.htm
Austin Stewart (1793-1860)
Born into slavery in Virginia, Stewart escaped from slavery and fled to
Canada, where he lived in Wilberforce Colony, a free black community
established by the Quakers. His autobiography, Twenty-Two Years a Slave,
was published in 1857.
For excerpts
from Twenty-Two Years a Slave, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASsteward.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASsteward.htm
William Still (1821-1902)
A leading
figure in the Underground Railroad, who helped 649 fugitives escape slavery, he
led a post-Civil War campaign to end discrimination on Philadelphia's
streetcars.
For additional
biographical information and picture credit, see: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASstill.htm
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies than any previous
work of fiction: 5000 copies in 2 days; 50,000 copies in 8 weeks; 300,000
copies in a year; a million copies in 16 months. It was translated into 37
languages and inspired at least 20 songs, two card games, countless plays and
stage shows, a comic opera‑‑and more than 30 "anti‑Tom"
replies (with titles like Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom
Without One in Boston). Yet Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin‑‑the
most famous novel in American history‑‑was out of print in the
United States during much of the twentieth century.
The mere mention of the novel immediately brings to mind one of the
most famous scenes in American literature: the slave mother Eliza, clutching
her child, fleeing slavery across ice floes on the Ohio River, pursued by
bloodhounds. Yet this scene does not actually appear in the novel itself.
Today, the phrase "Uncle Tom" is a term of derision, referring to a
black man who is humiliatingly deferential to whites. In fact the novel
portrays Uncle Tom as a dignified and brave man who dies rather than betray the
hiding place of two runaway slaves. Like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Tom believes that patient determination is the most effective protest against
oppression.
Even Americans who have never opened the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin
recognize the names of its major characters: the brutal dissolute overseer
Simon Legree; the mischievous black child Topsy; the New England spinster Miss
Ophelia St. Clare, bitterly opposed to slavery in the abstract, but unable to
touch the skin of a black child. Yet, ironically, the popular image of Uncle
Tom's Cabin comes not from the novel itself but from crude and bitterly
racist "Tom shows" that grossly distorted the original story and its
characters.
Many people who have never actually read the book think of it as a
crude anti‑Southern tract‑‑sentimental, melodramatic,
didactic, and racially condescending. This view is almost entirely incorrect.
The novel's archvillain, the drunken, degenerate Simon Legree, is a Northerner,
a native of Vermont. And one of the book's most idealized characters is a
Southern slaveowner, Augustine St. Clare, who recognizes that slavery is a
moral evil. Indeed, much of the novel's power grows out of the fact that it
treats slavery as an economic system that corrupts people's moral sensibilities
and leads them to treat "a man as a thing."
When the novel appeared in 1851, it was correctly perceived as truly a
revolutionary work. Not only was it the first serious work of fiction to depict
a black man as a hero‑‑the first to show slaves as real people with
a full range of human emotions and aspirations‑‑it was one of the
very first works of realism in American literature, blending humor, sentiment,
and pathos to depict life in all of its harsh and complex reality.
One of the supreme ironies of American literary history is that the
woman who produced the most effective written attack on slavery had little
first‑hand acquaintance with slavery. Stowe was born in Litchfield,
Connecticut, in 1811, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, an eminent
Congregationalist minister. At 21, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, when her
father became president of the Lane Theological Seminary. Three years later,
she married Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical literature at Lane,
"rich in Greek and Hebrew, Latin and Arabic, and alas! in nothing
else." When he was offered an ill‑paid professorship at Bowdoin College
in 1850, the family moved to Brunswick, Maine.
Poverty and moral fervor prompted her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.
To supplement her family's meager income, Harriet Beecher Stowe contributed
stories and sketches to local periodicals and women's magazines. During the
fall of 1850, she received a letter from a sister‑in‑law in Boston,
relating the sufferings of escaped slaves under the new Fugitive Slave Law. The
letter concluded: "Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would
write something that would make the whole nation feel what an accursed thing
slavery is!" Stowe replied: "As long as the baby sleeps with me at
night I can't do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that
thing if I live."
In February 1851, while sitting at church, she had a vision that would
become the basis of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She rushed home and wrote down
her vision‑‑of a pious slave brutally beaten to death by his master‑‑using
brown wrapping paper when she ran out of writing paper. In later years, Harriet
Beecher Stowe would say that she did not write her famous novel. "God
wrote it," she would explain. "I merely wrote His dictation."
As she wrote her novel, she drew upon a wealth of memories: an aunt's
description of her marriage to a Jamaican planter, who kept a black mistress
and a family of mulatto children; a single visit to a Kentucky slave
plantation; and especially the stories she heard from Eliza Buck, a former
slave who helped her with housework in Cincinnati, whose children had been fathered
by her former master. Stowe modeled many of her characters on people she had
met. Josiah Henson, a deeply religious former slave, provided the model for
Tom. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and ex‑slave, furnished a
model for the proud, defiant fugitive slave George Harris.
In March 1851 she asked the editor of the National Era, a
leading abolitionist weekly, if he would be interested in publishing a
serialized story about slavery. The editor responded positively and paid her a
$300 advance. The editor expected the serialized story to run for three or four
months, but the story ran on and on. After six months, the editor asked the National
Era's readers if the story should be brought to a close. They demanded that
the story continue. Even before the National Era had printed the final
installment, a small Boston publisher released a two‑volume edition of
the complete work, which had a larger immediate impact than any work of fiction
ever written.
What accounts for the intensity
with which the novel was received? Part of the answer lies in the simple fact
that Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the very first American novels to
explore seriously the pains and cruelties of slavery. Abolitionists had written
six or seven antislavery novels during the 1830s and 1840s, and ``plantation
romancers'' such as William Alexander Caruthers, William Gilmore Simms, and
John Pendleton Kennedy included faithful house servants and beautiful quadroons
in their highly romanticized portraits of plantation life. For the most part,
however, American literature simply ignored the major moral issue of the age.
But the popularity of Uncle
Tom's Cabin rested on more than the fact that it dealt with a timely social
issue. It succeeded in placing slavery into a religious and moral framework
deeply meaningful to early nineteenth‑century Americans. The novel's
structure is rooted in the Judeo‑Christian story of salvation‑‑a
story repeated again and again by religious revivalists. The novel describes
two parallel tales of redemption and deliverance. Tom, who is sold down the
river away from two kindly slaveowners to the brutal Simon Legree, ultimately
achieves spiritual salvation; George and Eliza Harris, who escape northward
from slavery, ultimately achieve physical freedom. By awakening countless
Northerners to the fact that black slaves suffered just as the ancient Hebrews
had suffered in bondage in ancient Egypt, Uncle Tom's Cabin created a
new awareness of the moral evil of slavery.
An excerpt from Uncle Tom's Cabin:
"Gentlemen, who are you, down
there, and what do you want?"
"We want a party of
runaway[s].... One George Harris and Eliza Harris, and their son, and Jim
Selden, and an old woman. We've got the officers, here, and a warrant to take
'em, too. D'ye hear? An't you George Harris, that belongs to Mr. Harris, of
Shelby county, Kentucky?"
"I am George Harris. A Mr.
Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I'm a free man, standing
on God's free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine. Jim and his
mother are here. We have arms to defend ourselves, and we mean to do it. You
can come up, if you like; but the first of you that comes within the range of
our bullets is a dead man, and the next, and the next; and so on till the last."
"O, come! come!" said a
short, puffy man, stepping forward, and blowing his nose as he did so.
"Young man, this an't no kind of talk at all for you. You see, we're
officers of justice. We've got the law on our side, and the power, and so forth;
so you'd better give up peaceably, you see; for you'll certainly have to give
up, at last."
"I know very well that you've got
the law on your side, and the power," said George, bitterly. ”You mean to
take my wife to sell in New Orleans, and put my boy like a calf in a trader's
pen, and send Jim's old mother to the brute that whipped and abused her before,
because he couldn't abuse her son. You want to send Jim and me back to be
whipped and tortured, and ground down under the heels of them that you call
masters; and your laws will bear you out in it,‑‑more shame
for you and them! But you haven't got us. We don't own your laws; we don't own
your country; we stand here as free, under God's sky, as you are; and, by the
great God that made us, we'll fight for our liberty till we die."
... If it had been only a Hungarian
youth, now bravely defending in some mountain fastness the retreat of fugitives
escaping from Austria into America, this would have been sublime heroism; but
as it was a youth of African descent, defending the retreat of fugitives
through America into Canada, of course we are too well instructed and patriotic
to see any heroism in it; and if any of our readers do, they must do it on
their own private responsibility.
For excerpts from The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASstowe.htm
Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASstowe.htm
Jacob Stroyer
Born on a slave plantation near Columbia, S.C., in 1849, one of 15
children, Stroyer later became an African Methodist Episcopal minister in
Salem, Mass. His 1898 autobiography, My Life in the South, provides vivid
descriptions of childhood under slavery.
For excerpts
from My Life in the South, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASstroyer.htm
Charles Sumner (1811-1874)
On May 19, 1856, Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts began a two-day
speech in which he denounced "The Crime Against Kansas." In his speech,
Sumner, charged that there was a southern conspiracy to make Kansas a slave
state: "It is the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful
embrace of slavery." Sumner proceeded to argue that a number of southern
senators, including Andrew Butler of South Carolina, stood behind the
conspiracy. Launching into a bitter personal diatribe, Sumner accused Butler of
taking "the harlot, Slavery," for his mistress and then made fun of a
medical disorder Butler had. At the rear of the Senate chamber, Stephen
Douglass muttered: "That damn fool will get himself killed by some other
damned fool."
On May 21, Senator Butler's nephew, Representative Preston Brooks of
South Carolina, entered a nearly empty Senate chamber, convinced that he had a
duty to "avenge the insult to my State." Sighting Sumner at his desk,
Brooks struck him with his cane. He swung so hard that the cane broke into
pieces.
Brooks caned Sumner rather than challenging him to a duel because he
wanted to use the same method slaveholders used to chastise slaves. Brooks left Sumner "as senseless as a
corpse for several minutes, his head bleeding copiously from the frightful
wounds, and the blood saturating his clothes." It took Sumner three years
to recover from his injuries and return to his Senate seat.
In the South, Brooks became an instant hero. Merchants in Charleston,
S.C. bought him a new cane inscribed "Hit him again." A vote to expel
Brooks from the House of Representatives failed because every southern
representative but one voted against expulsion. Instead, Brooks was censured.
He resigned his seat and was immediately reelected to Congress.
In the North, Sumner was regarded as a martyr to the cause of freedom.
A million copies of his "Crime Against Kansas" speech were distributed.
A young Massachusetts woman summed up popular feeling in the North, condemning
Brook's assault with these words: "If I had been there I would have torn
his eyes out and so I would now if I could."
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASsumner.htm
Arthur Tappan (1786-1865)
Lewis
Tappan (1788-1863)
Founders of the country's first commercial credit-ranking service
(which would eventually become Dun & Bradstreet), these brothers were born
in Northampton, Mass., and, after moving to New York and becoming successful in
the silk-importing trade, became important financial backers for the
abolitionist campaign. Lewis played an important behind-the-scenes roles in
defending the Amistad captives. In 1840, they broke away from the American
Anti-Slavery Society, in part over women's right to participate in the administration
of the organization and the advisability of nominating abolitionists as
independent political candidates, and help establish the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society. Strong supporters of political efforts to end slavery,
they were among the founders of the Liberty Party.
Picture
credits: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAStappanA.htm
and http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAStappanL.htm
Sojourner Truth
She was known as Isabella when she
was born into slavery around 1797 in New York’s Hudson River Valley. A decade and a half later, she adopted a new
name. As Sojourner Truth she became a legend in the struggle to abolish slavery
and extend equal rights to women.
The youngest of ten or twelve
children, she grew up in a single room in a dark and damp cellar, sleeping on
straw on top of loose boards. For sixteen years, from 1810 to 1826, she served
as a household slave in New York State, and was sold five times. One owner beat
her so savagely that her arms and shoulders bore scars for the rest of her life.
She bore a fellow slave five
children, only to see at least three of her offspring sold away. In 1826, just
a year before slavery was finally abolished in the state, she fled after her
owner broke a promise to free her and her husband. She took refuge with a farm
family that later bought her freedom.
She moved to New York City,
carrying only a bag of clothing and 25 cents. There she supported herself as a
domestic servant. It was a period of intense religious excitement, and although
she lacked formal schooling, Isabella began to preach at camp meetings and on
street corners. In the early 1830s, she found herself caught up in one of the
major sensations of the day. Briefly she resided with a religious sect led by
Robert Matthews, a former carpenter and self-declared savior, who called
himself Matthias, the last of the Apostles. Matthias, who had shoulder-length
hair and a long beard, denounced alcohol, called ministers devils, demanded
that women subordinate themselves to men, and proclaimed that marriage vows
were not binding. In the fall of 1834, national attention focused on Matthias;
he was arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted of embezzlement and murder.
In succeeding years, Isabella
became involved in many of the reform activities of the time, including the
movement to curb drinking. For a short
time she joined a utopian community in Massachusetts founded by abolitionists.
In 1843, she took on the name
Sojourner Truth, convinced that God had called on her to wander the country and
boldly speak out the truth. Her fame as a preacher, singer, and orator spread
quickly and three incidents became the stuff of legend. During the late 1840s,
when Frederick Douglass expressed doubt about the possibility of ending slavery
peacefully, she replied: “Frederick, is God dead?”
In 1851, in a speech before a
woman’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, she demanded that Americans recognize
that impoverished African American women were women too, reportedly saying: “I
could work as much and east as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear de
lash as well! And a’n’t I a woman?”
In 1858, when a hostile audience
insisted that the six-foot-tall orator spoke too powerfully to be a woman, she
reportedly bared her breasts before them.
During the Civil War she took an active
role promoting the Union cause, collecting food and supplies for black troops
and struggling to make emancipation a war aim. When the war was over, she
traveled across the North, collecting signatures on petitions calling on
Congress to set aside western land for former slaves. At her death in 1883, she
was rightly remembered as one of the nation;s most eloquent opponents of
discrimination.
For excerpts from her speeches and
the narrative of her life, see:
http://www.digitalsojourn.org/speech.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAStruth.htm
Picture credit: http://www.new-paltz.ny.us/truthtemp.html
Harriet Tubman (1820?-1913)
The "Black Moses," Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland in
1848 and free more than 300 slaves during 19 secret trips into the South.
During the Civil War, she served as a nurse and scout for the Union army.
Picture credit: http://www2.lhric.org/pocantico/tubman/images.htm
For brief biographies, see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html
http://www.incwell.com/Biographies/Tubman.html
http://www.africana.com/tt_058.htm
For excerpts from Harriet
Tubman: The Moses of Her People (1886)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAStubman.htm
Nat Turner (1800-1831)
On Aug. 22, 1831, Turner, a trusted Baptist preacher, led a slave
insurrection in Southampton County in southern Virginia, in which some 60 to 80
slaves killed some 60 whites, more than half women and children. Turner was not
captured until Oct. 31.
Turner had experienced religious visions and in 1828 became convinced
that he was to lead a war against evil when the proper signs appeared. After
his capture, he was asked whether he was mistaken in thinking that he was
charged with the holy mission of fighting against the Devil. He replied:
"Was not Christ crucified?"
For excerpts from Turner's Confessions, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASturner.htm
Bethany Veney
The Virginia-born slave was author of an 1889 autobiography A Slave
Woman.
For excerpts
from her autobiography, see:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASveney.htm
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASveney.htm
David
Walker (1785-1830)
A free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina,
wrote one of America¹s most radical and incendiary assessments of racial
prejudice of the early nineteenth century, His Appeal to the Coloured
Citizens of the World challenged Walker’s "afflicted and slumbering
brethren" to overthrow slavey. A second-hand clothing dealer in Boston, he
circulated his Appeal among black seamen who carried the document into
southern ports.
For
excerpts from Walker’s Appeal, see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2931.html
A
contemporary editorial regarding Walker’s Appeal:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aiaold/part4/4h2929.html
Historian
David Blight on Walker:
http://web-cr05.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i2983.html
Historian
William Scarborough on Walker:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i2984.html
Theodore Weld
(1803-1895)
In 1834, Weld, a 31 year old student at Lane theological seminary in
Cincinnati, led 18 days of intense discussion on slavery and convinced his
fellow students to set up schools in Cincinnati's African American ghetto.
Lane's president Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) and the board
of trustees expelled the antislavery students, many of whom subsequently became
agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society. His 1839 volume Slavery As It
Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses documented the horrors of slavery.
Picture credit:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASweld.htm
Fanny Wright (1795-1852)
The Scottish-born
reformer and lecturer received the nickname “The Great Red Harlot of
Infidelity” because of her radical ideals abot birth control, liberalized
divorce laws, and legal rights for married women. The currents of radical
antislavery thought inspired her to found Nashoba Colony in 1826 near Memphis
as an experiment in interracial living.
She established a racially-integrated cooperative community in which
slaves were to receive an education and earn enough money to purchase their
freedom. Unfortunately, publicity about her desire to abolish the nuclear
family, religion, private property, and slavery created a furor and the
community dissolved after only four years.
Picture
credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/REwright.htm
A brief
biography and excerpts from writings about her: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/REwright.htm
Zamba Zembola
Author of the 1847 slave narrative The Life and Adventures of Zamba,
an African King, which describes his kidnapping and 40 years of labor on a
slave plantation.
For excerpts from The Life and Adventures of Zamba, an African King
(1847), see
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASzamba.htm