Chapter Overview

Abolitionism refers to the active pursuit of the end of slavery by whatever means possible. The decades before the American Civil War saw a dramatic rise in abolitionist activity in both black and white communities. Abolitionists did their work through literature-based appeals, lectures, legal petitions, precedent casework, purchasing of slaves in order to grant freedom, hiding fugitives, rescue missions, and provocation of violent slave revolts. Events key to this antebellum abolitionist outlook include publication of David Walker's Appeal in 1829, William Lloyd Garrison's groundbreaking newspaper The Liberator, and Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt in Virginia. These events would presage the violent actions taken in 1850 by the white abolitionist John Brown and his followers during the bloody antislavery skirmishes in Kansas, actions (including Brown's subsequent execution) that many historians point to as the fuse that lit the bomb of the American Civil War in the next decade.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter you should understand the following:

• The motivations behind the black abolitionist movement in the antebellum United States
• The context of abolitionism in America, what agendas brought the major abolitionists to the battle, and whether their motivations were always pure
• The strength of the entrenched proslavery viewpoint among white Americans in this era
• The black response in literature to proslavery rhetoric in antebellum America
• The impact of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in moving escaping slaves through the North to Canada
• The gradual increase of polarization in the national views on slavery that would lead to the American Civil War in the 1860s