There was the great Quaker religion. The only religious body on American soil to institutionalize immediate abolition and equality of race as part of their doctrine. There was Anthony Benezet, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Dwight Weld, Wendell Phillips, Calvin Stowe, Mary Birkett Card, Frederick Douglass, Susan & Angelina Grimke, Arthur & Lewis Tappan, Lane Seminary (lead by Calvin Stowe), Oberlin College, Charles Grandison Finney, Charles Stuart, Benjamin Lundy, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and numerous other societies, institutions and political supporters, not to forget the age of Enlightenment and enlightenment philosophers,and noted British Scientist such as Chalres Darwin and Adam Smith.
Angelina & Susan Grimke, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Maria Weston Chapman, Lidia Maria Child, Lucy Stone, Catherine Beecher & Susan B. Anthony all began initially as outspoken women, who were active in their community, who had fought for their own education, and had found in Abolitionism a calling, which evolved into their realization that women, needed to fight for the same rights as the enslaved class following on the heels of emancipation.
The major blow to slavery in England, was felled in the most major way through an ordinance clerk named Granville Sharp who took it upon himself to determine that slavery was illegal on British soil.
he studied the law and presented his case to Baron Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice. The case involved a slave by the name of James Somerset, who was a slave in Virginia brought to England by his master and who ran away rather than to be sold back into slavery in Jamaica. His master had caught him. The issue was, Since there was no slavery in Britain, could he be held as a slave and considered a slave? Sharpe felt the conclusion was unavoidably "no". with no statutes on the books, there could be no debate between the rights of personal property and the rights of individual freedom.
At this time there were 20,000 slaves worth a considerable amount of money (700 pounds sterling). As stated in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mid-Nineteenth Century United States'by Moira Davison Reynolds (p72), "Mansfield hesitated for months; as Abraham Lincoln would be later..."
he rendered his decision:
Is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from this decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by he law of England. And therefore the black must be discharged.
The second and final death knell for British Slavery was struck by William Wilberforce up until 1825 and continued by Thomas Fowell Buxon. In 1833 a law was passed to free all slaves in the British colonies after a five- to seven-year period of apprenticeship, with "compensation" to their masters. Wilberforce died 2 days before the vote.
Charles Darwin had written, "It makes one's blood boil ... that we Englishmen and our American descendants with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty."
Theodore Dwight Weld was founded by Charles Stuart and emboldened by Finney, and financed by the Tappans. The famous Lane Seminary debates took place while Calvin Stowe (Harriet's husband) was head of divinity and her father (Lynam Beecher) was the President. The Tappans financed Lane and later Oberlin. Theodore Weld married Susan Grimke. The Grimke sisters wrote for the Liberator with Garrison, and were trained by Weld. It was a small fraternity and leadership cadre of committed revolutionaries, -White revolutionaries.
These folks guided by their conscience and their religious understanding, fought against the system of slavery and the nation that backed it, eventually pushing the nation into an unavoidable war to settle the matter.
In the past, I had naively thought that these abolitionist, being White, had stuck their necks out "when they didn't have to". But after reading about them, their influences, their passions, their actions, I can see that their actions were as immediate, vital and essential to their persons as breathing, or loving their own children. for them, there certainly was no option to turn a blind eye to the system of slavery which brought so much fell doom to this nation.
What abolitionist did, as well as feminist was to no less than fundamentally redefine America, what an American was, and to redefine the role and status of women and the African American.
The civil war, despite the propaganda of the north to "preserve the union" was the union splitting in two. What if the south had won? They would have been allowed to become a separate and distinct nation. Slavery would have thrived for many more years, possibly decades. If and when emancipation occurred, imagine the impact of a southern confederacy upon the development and rights of the African-American? To this day, the voting rights act of 1964 is needed to ensure federal oversight of the African-American right to vote in several notorious southern states.
Would free blacks have been allowed to stay in the south? what would the jail and prison population of the south look like? Without the vast infusion of Northerner money to spur the development of southern historically black colleges and universities, what would the state of black education look like?
And had the south won the war, would any anti-slavery southerners have remained? or would they have fled north? once again, making the condition of black slaves and free blacks all the more bleak and dire.
The abolitionist played a key role in redefining America as well as playing a vital role in creating the moral grounds for the urgent need to not only fight the south, but to take it over and to transform it into a land of the free, while also purging the north from their remnants of racism and discrimination.
Another aspect of the abolitionist/feminist struggle concerned colonization. The vast majority of blacks were against the establishment of an African homeland for repatriated slaves. They believed, as did many whites that Blacks, having been born on American soil, were true Americans. Others articulated a moral and ethical responsibility to provide for the education and integration of Blacks as just and right. Harriet Beecher Stowe raises the issue of reparations in her, 'A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin'. Some whites and blacks were in favor of a black homeland in the interest of independence,and the right to build a republic unfettered by the chains of slavery past and the encumbrances of being a minority within this nation.
The vast majority of abolitionist who favored colonization, soon changed their tune. The battle cry for "immediate" emancipation did not allow for a protracted resettlement. African-Americans were just that, African, and American.
The revolutionary spirit of abolitionist should not be diminished. their role in the struggle, can not be seen as peripheral. They molded and shaped the parameters of the conflict, and in their writings and speeches, articulated some of the most revolutionary and humanist ideas. The redefined freedom, equality, the labor movement. The civil rights movement of the 1865 has a direct line of lineage to women's suffrage, the civil rights movement of 1965, to finish unfinished business, and the movement for Asian, native American and gay rights.
Prior to the intercession of the abolitionist, the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal" only applied to 11 million of the 30 million people who were in America. for half were women, who were not included in the term, "All men" for they had limited rights to property (all of their posessions and inheritance would pass to their husbands if they were married, or upon marriage) and had no right to suffrage. 4 million were slaves, who, as slaves were not considered Americans, and barely considered human, and had no rights to property, suffrage, or to testify or bring suit in a court of law. Other free blacks in the south, were not allowed to vote. many blacks in the north were also not allowed to vote. Their property and persons subject to the rule of the mob.
The U.S. constitution allowed the international slave trade for 20 years past 1776, and allowed it to flourish within the borders of the United States ad infinitum. Slaves, although not allowed to vote, were allowed to be counted as 3/5th their total to determine congressional representation, forever giving the south an additional, inflated political power because they were slave holders. The 3/5th clause alone in 1850 free white population was 6,184,477. The Slave population was
3,200,364 or gave the south the power of an additional 25% of their population. As an example of the gained political strength of the south, in 1833, they had 98 representatives in Congress, vs. the 73 they would have had, if slaves were not counted.
[In 1860, South Carolina 57% of the population was slave; Mississippi 55%; Louisiana 47%; Alabama 45%; Florida & Georgia 43%; North Carolina 33%; Texas & Virginia 30%, with nearly a half-million slaves in Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina]
It is particularly disturbing, that despite the fact that the south lost the war, that in American History classes, children are routinely taught about the United States Constitution and the Declaration of independence, in all it's glorious hypocrisy, without ever mentioning the fact that slavery, torture, sale and murder of human beings were all encompassed and allowed under these wonderful documents of confederation.
Black history, is American history. American history, without the nexus of Black history, is fiction, and as such, the forgotten, and overlooked chapter of Abolitionism, is one of the most important stories and movements in the history of the United States. It redefined a nation, broke it apart and put it back together again.
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