Immediate Grassroots Abolitionism

   
Quaker Abolitionists:

Benjamin Lay  (1682 - 1759)  Urged boycotts of slave-produced products
 
John Woolman  (1720 - 1772)  Antislavery writer  

Anthony Benezet  (1713 - 1784)  "Father of Atlantic abolitionism" 


Early Black Abolitionists:

Absalom Jones  (1746 - 1816)  First African-American priest in the U.S. Episcopal Church, opposed the Fugitive Slave Act.

Richard Allen  (1760 - 1831)  Founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1816. 

James Forten  (1766 - 1842)  Revolutionary War hero, opponent of colonization.


The 1830s - 1840s abolitionists:

David Walker  (1796 - 1830)  An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World  (1829)  (text)

Walker was an outspoken black abolitionist, and he put his fiery thoughts to paper in his famous Appeal (1829). Walker targeted his emotional tract most specifically to free black northerners and southern slaves, but he also addressed northern whites and slave masters who would likely read the subversive pamphlet out of curiosity. Walker pushed for immediate emancipation rather than the gradualist approaches or colonization schemes of white anti-slavery groups such as the North Carolina Manumission Society. Walker saved his most incendiary rhetoric, however, for his southern audience. He urged slaves to rebel en masse, posing the question: "had you not rather be killed than to be slave to a tyrant?" (p. 30). Walker's publication terrified already paranoid white masters, and about them Walker notes "if they do not have enough to be frightened for yet, it will be" (p. 37).

Walker's Appeal circulated widely throughout the South and North. In 1830, members of North Carolina's General Assembly had the Appeal in mind as they tightened the state's laws dealing with slaves and free black citizens. The resulting new laws, sparked by Walker's work and fueled a year later by Nat Turner's rebellion, led to more policies that repressed African Americans, freed and slave alike.


The Second Great Awakening c. 1820 - 1855


1820s - Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a wealthy South Carolina slaveholding family, leave the south for the north and become famous speakers on the abolitionist speakers' circuit.  Both were also women's rights activists. 


William Lloyd Garrison founds the antislavery paper "The Liberator"  (1831)    

"Let Southern oppressors tremble — let their secret abettors tremble — let their Northern apologists tremble — let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.... 

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?  I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.  On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation.  No! no!  Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;  tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher;  tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.  I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead."       Liberator Vol 1 - January, 1831



The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS)  


 (1833–1870) was an abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Tappan.  Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, was a key leader of this society who often spoke at its meetings . William Wells Brown was also a freed slave who often spoke at meetings.  By 1838, the society had 1,350 local charters with around 250,000 members.  Within one year the AASS produced over one million pieces of antislavery literature.


AASS members included both whites and blacks, men and women.  Noted members included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Dwight Weld, Lewis Tappan, James G. Birney, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, Abby Kelley Foster, Stephen Symonds Foster, Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Cornish, James Forten, Charles Lenox Remond, Sarah Parker Remond, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Robert Purvis, Augustine Clarke, Wendell Phillips, and John Greenleaf Whittier, among others. Headquartered in New York City, from 1840 to 1870 the society published a weekly newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard.

Pro-slavery southerners and northerners who see abolitionists as a group likely to start a war that will dissolve the Union, begin violence against abolitionists.  Arthur Tappen's house is burnt, Garrison barely escapes a tarring, Illinois abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered defending his press (1837). 

By 1840, many members of the AASS began to find Garrison too radical, inflexible and unrealistic.  Membership plummeted but grassroots abolitionism continued.  The Liberty Party was organized by ex-AASS members to further the work an approach less radical than Garrison's. 


Charles Grandison Finney - Presbyterian minister, abolition and women's rights activist who taught at Oberlin (Ohio) College where men and women of all races were admitted.  The town of Oberlin was very abolitionist and become a stop just before Canada on the underground railroad.  

Thomas David Weld - One of the architects of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, best known for co-authoring the anti-slavery book American Slavery as It Is with his wife Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah.  The book influenced Harriet Beecher's Stowes' Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Harriet Forten Purvis, daughter of black abolitionist James Forton and wife of white abolition Robert Purvis, formed the first biracial women's abolitionist group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and ran an underground railroad station with her husband. 


Cassius Marcellus Clay - Born to a wealthy slave-owning Kentucky family, and a cousin of famed senator Henry Clay, Cassius Clay spent three terms in the Kentucky legislature and published an abolitionist newspaper in Lexington.  The subject of multiple attacks, Clay armed himself including keeping two 4 pound cannons in his office.  The boxer Muhammad Ali's father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr. was named after the abolitionist.