Who Were the Abolitionists?
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he abolitionists were the small minority of
Americans who advocated immediate emancipation of the slaves and equal rights
for African Americans. Most came from the cities and factory towns of the
Northeast and Old Northwest, but a significant number came from the upper
South, such as the Kentucky Whig Cassius Clay and the missionary John Fee.
Their ranks included successful businessmen, like Arthur and Lewis Tappan of
New York; ministers, like the Reverend Elijah Lovejoy of East Alton, Illinois,
and Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore; and even former slaveholders, such as
James Birney of Alabama and Angelina and Sarah Grimké of South Carolina.
Factory workers and skilled craftspeople were especially likely to sign antislavery
petitions. Virtually all were deeply
religious women and men, who were convinced that slavery violated divine law. A
disproportionate share were Quaker or Baptist in background. It seems likely
that a majority of the grass-roots support for abolition came from women.
Most abolitionists were members of the country's
second generation, who had no personal memories of the American Revolution. One
of their goals was to realize the highest moral ideals of the Revolutionary
generation.
In the Upper South, a number of
abolitionists—such as Charles Torrey of New York, who died in a Maryland
jail--helped slaves escape from bondage. Antislavery evangelicals gave slaves
bibles, established integrated churches, and preached against the sin of
slavery. Others, like Kentuckian William S. Bailey attempted to publish
antislavery newspapers. A few founded utopian communities in the upper South,
like the Frances Wright, an English radical who founded Nashoba, near Memphis,
Tenn., as an experiment in interracial living. Still others, like Eli Thayer of
Worcester, Mass., sought to promote the emigration of "free soilers"
(advocates of free labor) into the upper South. These brave women and men
risked their lives to force the South to confront the moral issue of slavery.
African Americans were always at the forefront of
the abolitionist cause. African American abolitionists included religious
leaders, like the Reverend James Pennington; journalists like Charles Remond;
and fugitive slaves, like Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery and
who aroused antislavery fervor in the North were their eyewitness accounts of
life in bondage.