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This chapter explores the work of Martha Gurney (1733–1816), a staunch Baptist and the leading woman bookseller and publisher in London in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, during the first decade of the abolitionist movement in England. The chapter examines the fourteen abolitionist pamphlets Gurney published or sold between 1787 and 1794 and their place within the abolitionist movement, with special attention to An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West-India Produce (1791) by William Fox. The Address, the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century, created widespread support for a nationwide boycott of sugar from the West Indies. Though Gurney and her pamphleteers were unable to persuade parliament to end the slave trade at that time, they laid the groundwork for the later work of Elizabeth Heyrick and the boycott movement of the 1820s.

William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson, the British abolitionist, played central roles in the fight to win freedom for slaves in the United States. For more than three decades, they struggled to hold the transatlantic abolitionist movement together, crisscrossing the Atlantic in an attempt to influence public opinion in favor of abolition. This chapter looks at Garrison's lifelong campaign to abolish slavery in America. It considers the activities of Garrison and his allies and shows how doctrines of religious perfectionism contributed to the creation of a truly effective Anglo-American abolitionist alliance. It also examines how Garrison's efforts significantly expanded the horizons of American abolitionists, convinced Britain to support the Union during the Civil War, and stimulated the internationalization of humanitarian concern. Despite the prominence of Frederick Douglass, Garrison became the preeminent figure in the transatlantic abolitionist movement.

This chapter focuses on the positions taken by African American abolitionists in response to the claims that slavery described the positions of antebellum workers and of white women. It argues that Frederick Douglass and other such abolitionists displayed considerable tactical flexibility in sorting through such claims and in considering possibilities of coalition. An attempt to survey and account for the various patterns of resistance and accommodation to the slavery metaphor by Douglass and other abolitionists is presented. The Douglass-Remond-Collins episode shows a broader tendency for Black abolitionists to criticize forcefully the extension of discourse regarding chattel slavery to other forms of economic oppression. The Black abolitionists most familiar with both systems, and the broader abolitionist movement that they profoundly shaped, could nurture some coalitions built on a rhetoric of shared “slavery,” but not one structured around the notion that white workers were literally slaves.

This chapter examines William Lloyd Garrison's role in northern politics between 1831 and 1861 as Civil War erupted in America due to sectional division. It also assesses the impact of the entire abolitionist movement, Garrisonians included, on the evolving sectional dynamics of America's two-party system and in the political crisis that led to the Civil War. It argues that throughout the 1840s, Garrison and other antipolitical abolitionists exercised significant agency in national elections involving slavery issues that were contested by the Whigs and the Democrats. But as that agency eroded during the 1850s, Garrison stood at the forefront of an increasingly militant and violence-prone abolitionist movement that fueled North-South confrontation. The chapter also discusses the complex political position of the abolitionists within the North in relation to politicized evangelicalism.

This chapter reviews China’s domestic debate over abolition of the death penalty. Instead of trying to end the death penalty practice immediately, Chinese scholars seemingly reached a consensus that abolition is a long-term goal but retention is necessary at this stage given China’s current situation.

In its maiden issue on January 1, 1831, the antislavery newspaper Liberator carried a historic and bold proclamation by its editor, William Lloyd Garrison. Only twenty-six years-old at the time, Garrison declared that he was “determined to lift up, at every hazard, the standard of emancipation...”—a pledge that also had significant implications for antebellum feminism. This chapter argues that Garrison's broad application of abolitionist principles enabled him to become a central figure in the evolution of the feminist abolitionist movement in nineteenth-century America. It examines the impact of emancipatory feminism on Garrison's politics and vice versa. Indeed, abolitionist feminist politics and strategies of engagement played a crucial role in Garrison's decades-long battle to eradicate slavery in the country. African-American women relied on abolitionism to establish and assert the new and uplifting models of American womanhood.

This chapter demonstrates how abolitionist arguments about Southerners’ disproportionate political power developed into a sophisticated analyses condemning the Whig and Democratic Parties as the Slave Power’s key auxiliaries. Abolitionists developed and increasingly emphasized these arguments especially in response to proslavery infringements on civil liberties, like the House gag rule on antislavery petitions and southern postal censorship. The chapter then shows how the Slave Power argument helped impel political abolitionists to organized political action, from the petition controversy to candidate interrogation and ultimately toward third-party politics. The election of 1840 particularly sharpened the abolitionist critique of the Second Party System and inspired the founding of the abolitionist Liberty Party.

This introduction establishes the book’s argument about the transformative influence of antislavery third-party politics, as practiced first by the abolitionist Liberty Party and then by the Free Soil Party. The introduction situates the book’s argument and research in the broader context of the historiography of both the abolitionist movement and the politics of sectional conflict. The introduction also provides important background on the history of antislavery politics in the era before the mid-1830s.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to give substance to the symbolic idea of “the Oberlin,” as British abolitionist and community booster Harriet Martineau referred to the town and school together in 1840, and fully examine the vital significance of the Oberlin community in the fight to end slavery, a story neglected for too long. Oberlin was one of the most important communities in the abolitionist movement. It quietly achieved this distinction because of the unique circumstances of its early years that gathered an unprecedented multiracial and cohesive abolitionist population in the Ohio wilderness that maintained a fever pitch of reform agitation throughout the antebellum period.

This chapter describes how the Oberlin community avoided the “schism” that emerged among abolitionists on the East Coast as their reform agendas diverged. The ideological heterogeneity that Oberlinites had encouraged and many others had adopted helped Ohio and the West grow into a fecund abolitionist stronghold to rival eastern centers. The region was much better able to accommodate the differences that disturbed eastern antislavery unity in 1837–40.

This chapter describes the Oberlin community's development of an antislavery strategy. Oberlin was a place, unlike any other in America, where free discussion and legitimately open debate were allowed and encouraged. It was a singular community where ideas that otherwise would have to be carefully stated, if discussed at all, and that were likely to be received with outrage elsewhere could be expressed and debated with complete freedom. The most distinguished abolitionists in America went out of their way to visit Oberlin, and as one alumna remembered, the community welcomed all reformers on the understanding “that their theories must stand the test of open and free discussion”.

This chapter examines the role of anticolonization ideology and activism within the abolitionist movement during the period 1830–1840. From the Mid-Atlantic to New England, African Americans aired their disapproval of the views of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and convinced white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, that the ACS and its colonization project posed a major obstacle to the cause of ending slavery and to free blacks' struggle for citizenship. This chapter considers Garrison's efforts to undermine the ACS and how his newspaper, Liberator, became an important medium for African American abolitionists to strengthen their anticolonization position by expressing their own attitudes about slavery, racial prejudice, and colonization.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book aims to clarify the distinctions between political antislavery and the social movement known as abolition. It shows how colonization as a movement relied on both of these currents in order to thrive in Pennsylvania. In making the claim that colonization was clearly an antislavery movement, it addresses a debate that arose within decades of the American Colonization Society's founding in 1817. The book also shows exactly how resettlement—the desire to transport free blacks from the United States to Africa—fit into Pennsylvania antislavery. It is the first to draw clear connections between the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), the Pennsylvania Colonization Society (PCS), and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS).

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 chapter focuses on the decade of the 1850s, a period that was both rife with possibilities for abolitionist advancement and full of crushing setbacks to their cause at the hands of the Slave Power. Despite the uncertainty of abolitionist victory, reformers in Oberlin viewed the events of the decade as progress towards emancipation. They believed that the course of truth “is ever accumulative of power” and the moral force of abolitionist gains could never be beaten into submission.

The first section, “Slavery in Cuban Costumbrismo,” traces the earliest developments of Costumbrismo in Cuba, when there was only timid incorporation of slavery issues as literary motif. Official restrictions on publication of abolitionist material determined not only the content but also the tenor of Costumbrista essays. The second section, “Humanizing Slaves in a Cuban Ingenio: Black Laborers in Costumbrista Articles by Anselmo Suárez y Romero,” examines the writer's critical position, exceptional among Costumbristas, because in these articles he dared to deal with the lives of slave fieldworkers subjected to inhumane working conditions. Some of the workers became protagonists of tragic stories. Although slaves constituted a rather large population, stringent censorship in Cuba of publications dealing with issues of slavery kept such subjects generally under control. Suárez y Romero skillfully navigated around this pressure and managed to offer portraits of rather crude scenes of life on a wealthy Cuban plantation.

Although invading armies have freed the slaves of their enemies, only one violent slave uprising has ever successfully resulted in freedom. The intractable nature of slavery throughout history highlights the remarkable accomplishments of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, which through almost exclusively nonviolent means achieved the end of legal slavery the world over. The abolitionist movement developed into multiple other progressive campaigns. The women’s movement, the peace movement, and the use of nonviolence to resist and overthrow colonial and authoritarian governments stand out among the various offshoots of abolition. The success of nonviolent movements and the frequently self-destructive or counterproductive violent revolutions suggest that liberation requires resisting not only the violence of oppressors but also the temptation to use violence for the purpose of liberation.

This chapter examines the continued expansion of slavery and the rise of an abolitionist movement in antebellum America. It looks at the emergence of state rights in the South in relation to the politics of slavery and explores how the Missouri Crisis of 1819 cast a long shadow over American politics in the antebellum period, including the presidential campaign of 1828, and intensified the rivalry between the North and South. In addition, it considers how moderates in both North and South tried to avoid slavery throughout the period, in part by resorting to cross-sectional partisan alliances. The chapter also discusses how antebellum Northerners' concerns for the cause of liberty in the world intensified the antislavery zeal rather than nationalism. Finally, it analyzes the influence of Federalism on the program and any feelings of rhetoric of antebellum abolitionists.

This chapter describes the open and successful defiance of the Oberlinites towards federal authority and the Fugitive Slave Law, and their manipulation of the rescue episode into a triumphant propaganda. In Ohio and across the North, the flagging Republican Party embraced the Oberlin Rescuers, and in the process, the resulting injection of radicalism helped rescue the party from its drift toward conservatism and directed it down the path that would ultimately lead to a national policy of emancipation.