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This chapter traces how American abolitionists took up evangelical media strategies in the mid- and late 1830s, launching circulating antislavery libraries that adapted evangelical space to the geographies of slavery. It mentions that the American Anti-Slavery Society urged readers to extend their “ethical horizon” beyond the local. It also details how the Society used events in the Caribbean and elsewhere to refocus evangelical zeal from Asia to the U.S. South, which transformed the world missionary enterprise into a model for national reform in the process. The chapter shows how abolitionists adapted traditional sacred geographies to chart the global contours of modernity's cruelest and most insidious institution. It maps the cosmic contours of the abolitionist spatial imagination and intervenes in scholarly debates surrounding the history of abolitionism, religious reform movements, and American literary and cultural studies.

An organized, militant movement against slavery in America began in January 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of his new paper, the Liberator. He would also found the New England (later called the Massachusetts) Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society. While historians of radical abolitionism argue that the movement was apolitical until the 1840s, the abolitionists articulated an explicit political program from the beginning and vigorously pursued their political objectives as part of their antislavery crusade. Among the prominent abolitionists who agitated the slave trade issue were Henry B. Stanton, David Lee Child, Alvan Stewart, and Samuel J. May.

This chapter presents James G. Birney's statement of the status of slavery in the Upper South. In one of his first public appearances, at the second annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, Birney told his audience that, contrary to popular opinion, slavery was not any milder in the Upper South than in the Lower South, nor less harsh than in the past. Slavery was changing, however, and according to Birney, the number of “coffles of slaves traversing the country to a market” was increasing daily, and “the system now growing into practice is for the farming states to supply those farther south with slaves, just as regularly and systematically the slave coast of Africa used to supply the colonists of Brazil or St. Domingo.”

The agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society achieved great things. The number of abolition societies more than doubled between 1835 and 1837. Petitioning was a huge part of their work. The sisters watched the events of that time form the periphery.After the exhausting months spent in the preparation of American Slavery As It Is, rest and diversion would have seemed indicated, at least for Angelina, who was expecting a baby. Instead, the summer of 1839 was taken up with an endless succession of houseguests and visitors. While the sisters were preoccupied with domestic issues, the antislavery movement passed through its greatest crisis.

Chapter One considers how abolitionists struggled to reconcile their hatred of slavery with the US Constitution, which most Americans understood to allow slavery in the states that wished to have it. William Jay, the central personality in this chapter, sought to “denationalize” slavery by making it entirely a matter of state law and absolving the federal government from any role in sustaining it. No other abolitionist had such a direct link to the Founding Fathers. Son of the eminent John Jay, William Jay tried to show how abolitionists could combat slavery while staying true to the Constitution. He feared that it would be “fatal to the cause” to challenge the existence of slavery in the states where it already was established.

This chapter explores the role that the American Bible Society (ABS) played in the American Civil War. It begins with the ABS position on slavery and its inability to distribute Bibles directly to slaves due to restrictions in its constitution. The ABS position on slavery drew the ire of several American benevolent societies, including the American Anti-Slavery Society. The chapter then examines the role of Bible distribution among Civil War soldiers during the war. It focuses on how many soldiers read the Bible and how the ABS worked with the U.S. Christian Commission to bring Bibles to the front lines of combat.

This chapter focuses on William Apess's life as a lecturer in lower Manhattan, the working-class section of New York City, during the period 1837–9. Buoyed by the Mashpee Indians' success before the Massachusetts legislature, Apess now chose the rostrum rather than the pulpit from which to sound his message about Native Americans. His frequent and ostensible topic was their history and rights. Before discussing Apess's lecturing activities in New York after he left Mashpee, this chapter provides a background on the Reverend Peter Williams Jr., an African American leader of the Episcopal Church who was also active in the American Anti-Slavery Society and played a central role in the life of the city's African Americans. It also considers Apess's disappearance from the scene, which may well have been related to the widespread social and economic dislocation caused by the Panic of 1837.

This chapter focuses on the struggle for equal rights between women and black men in America during the late nineteenth century. More specifically, it examines the dispute between Wendell Phillips and women's rights activists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, over the issues of black suffrage and woman suffrage. It also considers the controversy over funding for the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization formed by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to lobby simultaneously for black and women's rights; the Republican Party's decision to award the vote to freedmen in the South; and the alliance between AERA and Phillips's American Anti-Slavery Society. Finally, the chapter discusses AERA's loss of its funding for New York campaigning.

This chapter describes how Oberlin abolitionists, despite their involvement in politics, remained true to the principal tenet of the original Liberty Party platform and even the 1833 “Declaration of Sentiments” of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). As other abolitionists quarreled over the appropriateness of moral suasion versus political antislavery, Oberlin community embraced both and employed them to the full advantage of African Americans, North and South, free and enslaved. Their goals remained emancipation and equal rights, and the means to those ends remained whatever strategy offered the best hope of success.

This part of the book contains Moses Roper's autobiographical meditation about race in antebellum America. In it, he describes his life from his birth in North Carolina through to his travels around South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In 1834, he escaped to Boston and joined the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).