Abolitionism Key Facts Britannica

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. abolitionism, (c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. The intensification of slavery as a system, which followed Portuguese trafficking of enslaved Africans beginning in the 15th century, was driven by the European colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies,... Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated total of 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas.

The brutality of slavery, made increasingly visible by the scale of its practice, sparked a reaction that insisted on its abolition altogether. The abolition movement began with criticism by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment of slavery’s violation of the “rights of man.” Quaker and other, evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, because slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804. But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the massive plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America.

Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans into the British colonies and the United States. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, these forces succeeded in getting the slave trade to the British colonies abolished in 1807. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves that same year, though widespread smuggling continued until about 1862. Antislavery forces then concentrated on winning the emancipation of those populations already in slavery. They were triumphant when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in French possessions 10 years later. Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.

It gained momentum in the western world in the late 18th and 19th centuries.[1] The first country to fully outlaw slavery was France in 1315, but it was later used in its colonies. The first country to abolish and punish slavery for Indigenous people was Spain with the New Laws in 1542. Under the actions of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, chattel slavery has been abolished across Japan since 1590, though other forms of forced labour were used during World War II. The first and only country to self-liberate from slavery was a former French colony, Haiti, as a result of the Revolution of 1791–1804. The British abolitionist movement began in the late 18th century, and the 1772 Somersett case established that slavery did not exist in English law.

In 1807, the slave trade was made illegal throughout the British Empire, though existing slaves in British colonies were not liberated until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. In the United States, Pennsylvania and Vermont were the first states to abolish slavery, Vermont in 1777 and Pennsylvania in 1780 (Vermont did not join the Union until 1791). By 1804, the rest of the northern states had abolished slavery, but it remained legal in southern states. By 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of slaves and in 1865 outlawed slavery except as a punishment. In Eastern Europe, groups organized to abolish the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia between 1843 and 1855, and to emancipate the serfs in Russia in 1861. The United States would pass the 13th Amendment in December 1865 after having just fought a bloody Civil War, ending slavery "except as a punishment for crime".

In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery. As the Empire of Japan annexed Asian countries, from the late 19th century onwards, archaic institutions including slavery were abolished in those countries. During the 20th century, the League of Nations founded a number of commissions, Temporary Slavery Commission (1924–1926), Committee of Experts on Slavery (1932) and the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery (1934–1939), which conducted... Beginning in the 1780s—during the time of the American Revolution—there arose in western Europe and the United States a movement to abolish, or end, the institution of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade that... Advocates of this movement were called abolitionists. From the 16th to the 19th century, some 10 million Black Africans were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.

They were sold as laborers on the sugar and cotton plantations of South and North America and the islands of the Caribbean Sea. In the late 1600s, Quaker and Mennonite Christians in the British colonies of North America began protesting slavery on religious grounds. Nevertheless, the institution of slavery continued to expand in North America. This was especially true in the Southern colonies. By the late 1700s ideas about slavery were changing in the Western world. An intellectual movement in Europe known as the Enlightenment had made strong arguments that certain rights, including liberty, belong to all individuals.

The leaders of the American Revolution issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This document enunciated a belief in the equality of all human beings. In 1789 the French Revolution began, and its basic document was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the fundamental charters of human liberties. There was a gradual but steady increase in opposition to keeping human beings as private property. Slavery was illegal in England, but it flourished in Britain’s colonies in the Americas, as did the slave trade. The first formal organization to emerge in the abolitionist movement was the Abolition Society, founded in 1787 in England.

Its leaders were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. The society’s first success came in 1807 when Britain abolished the slave trade with its colonies. When slavery itself showed no signs of disappearing, the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Britain in 1823 under the leadership of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a member of Parliament. In 1833 Parliament finally passed a law abolishing slavery in all British colonies. In the United States abolitionists were handicapped by the fact that abolitionism threatened the harmony of the Northern and Southern states in the union. Abolitionism also ran counter to the U.S.

Constitution, which left the question of whether slavery should be legal to the individual states. The states of the North abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804, while slavery remained legal in the South. A provision in the Constitution, which was written in 1787, also prohibited Congress from abolishing the slave trade for 20 years. The slave trade was finally banned in the United States in 1807, but widespread smuggling of enslaved people continued until about 1862. The abolishment of the slave trade coincided with a reinvigorated cotton economy in the South, which depended on slave labor. From that time on, the North and the South grew more and more different, in both economy and social attitudes.

All the major chapters in the American story, from Indigenous beginnings to the present day. History from countries and communities across the globe, including the world’s major wars. From prehistory, though antiquity and into the 21st century, all of history’s biggest chapters. The stories behind the faiths, food, entertainment and holidays that shape our world. The pivotal discoveries, visionary inventors and natural phenomena that impacted history. In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition...

The anti-slavery movement originated during the Age of Enlightenment, focused on ending the transatlantic slave trade. In Colonial America, a few German Quakers issued the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, which marked the beginning of the American abolitionist movement. Before the Revolutionary War, evangelical colonists were the primary advocates for the opposition to slavery and the slave trade, doing so on the basis of humanitarian ethics. Still, others such as James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia, also retained political motivations for the removal of slavery. Prohibiting slavery through the 1735 Georgia Experiment in part to prevent Spanish partnership with Georgia's runaway slaves, Oglethorpe eventually revoked the act in 1750 after the Spanish's defeat in the Battle of Bloody Marsh... During the Revolutionary era, all states abolished the international slave trade, but South Carolina reversed its decision.

Between the Revolutionary War and 1804, laws, constitutions, or court decisions in each of the Northern states provided for the gradual or immediate abolition of slavery.[a] No Southern state adopted similar policies. In 1807, Congress made the importation of slaves a crime, effective January 1, 1808, which was as soon as Article I, section 9 of the Constitution allowed. A small but dedicated group, under leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, agitated for abolition in the mid-19th century. John Brown became an advocate and militia leader in attempting to end slavery by force of arms. In the Civil War, immediate emancipation became a war goal for the Union in 1861 and was fully achieved in 1865. American abolitionism began well before the United States was founded as a nation.

In 1652, Rhode Island made it illegal for any person, black or white, to be "bound" longer than ten years. The law, however, was widely ignored,[10] and Rhode Island became involved in the slave trade in 1700.[11] An early prominent example of resistance by enslaved people occurred during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Occurring in Virginia, the rebellion saw European indentured servants and African people (of indentured, enslaved, and free negroes) band together against William Berkeley because of his refusal to fully remove Native American tribes in... At the time, Native Americans in the region were hosting raids against lower-class settlers encroaching on their land after the Third Powhatan War (1644–1646), which left many white and black indentured servants and slaves... Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Finally and fatally there was abolitionism, the antislavery movement. Passionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity, it appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in politics. Yet by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of “race,” over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When it became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released. If the reform impulse was a common one uniting the American people in the mid-19th century, its manifestation in abolitionism finally split them apart for four bloody years

Abolition itself was a diverse phenomenon. At one end of its spectrum was William Lloyd Garrison, an “immediatist,” who denounced not only slavery but the Constitution of the United States for tolerating the evil. His newspaper, The Liberator, lived up to its promise that it would not equivocate in its war against slavery. Garrison’s uncompromising tone infuriated not only the South but many Northerners as well and was long treated as though it were typical of abolitionism in general. Actually it was not. At the other end of the abolitionist spectrum and in between stood such men and women as Theodore Weld, James Gillespie Birney, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe, Lewis Tappan, Salmon P.

Chase, and Lydia Maria Child, all of whom represented a variety of stances, all more conciliatory than Garrison’s. James Russell Lowell, whose emotional balance was cited by a biographer as proof that abolitionists need not have been unstable, urged in contrast to Garrison that “the world must be healed by degrees.” Also... Whether they were Garrisonians or not, abolitionist leaders have been scorned as cranks who were either working out their own personal maladjustments or as people using the slavery issue to restore a status that... The truth may be simpler. Few neurotics and few members of the northern socioeconomic elite became abolitionists. For all the movement’s zeal and propagandistic successes, it was bitterly resented by many Northerners, and the masses of free whites were indifferent to its message.

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