Anti Slavery Movement In The 19th Century

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ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENTS The men who drafted the federal constitution in 1787 were pragmatists. They realized that many of the southern states would tolerate no effort to weaken, much less abolish, the “peculiar institution” of slavery. So they worked out compromises that avoided dealing with the moral stain of slavery on a young nation dedicated to liberty. But most of them knew that there eventually would be a day of reckoning. That day of reckoning approached as the nineteenth century unfolded. EARLY OPPOSITION TO SLAVERY Efforts to weaken or abolish slavery gathered momentum with each passing year after 1800. The first organized emancipation movement appeared in 1817 with the formation of the American Colonization Society, which…show more content…
Contrary opinion, mainly from the Tappans’ New York group, ranged from outright anti-feminism to the fear of scattering shots over too many reforms. The Tappans and their supporters walked out of the convention and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. A third faction of the American Anti-Slavery Society also broke with Garrison. They had grown skeptical that the “moral suasion” promoted by Garrison would ever lead to abolition. In 1840, they formed the liberty party in an effort to elect an American president who would abolish slavery. Their nominee, James Gillespie Birney, was a former slaveholder turned abolitionist from Alabama. Birney had converted to abolitionism and moved to Ohio. In 1837, he had become executive secretary of the American Anti- Slavery Society. In the 1840 election, he polled only seven thousand votes, but in 1844 he won sixty thousand, and from that time forth an anti-slavery party contested every national election until Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. BLACK ANTI-SLAVERY ACTIVITY Many white abolitionists also balked at granting full recognition to black abolitionists of either sex.
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