Abolitionism Wikipedia

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... 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. 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. John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was an American abolitionist in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a... An evangelical Christian of strong religious convictions, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan faith of his upbringing.[1][2] He believed that he was "an instrument of God",[3] raised to strike the "death blow" to... Brown first gained national attention when he led anti-slavery volunteers and his sons during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the late 1850s, a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as...

He was dissatisfied with abolitionist pacifism, saying of pacifists, "These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!" In May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. Brown then commanded anti-slavery forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie. In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (which later became part of West Virginia), intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south; he... He seized the armory, but seven people were killed and ten or more were injured. Brown intended to arm slaves with weapons from the armory, but only a few slaves joined his revolt.

Those of Brown's men who had not fled were killed or captured by local militia and U.S. Marines, the latter led by Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty of all charges and was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.[11][12] The Harpers Ferry raid and Brown's trial, both covered extensively in national newspapers, escalated tensions that in the next year led to the South's long-threatened secession from the United States and the American Civil...

Southerners feared that others would soon follow in Brown's footsteps, encouraging and arming slave rebellions. He was a hero and icon in the North. Union soldiers marched to the new song "John Brown's Body" that portrayed him as a heroic martyr. Brown has been variously described as a heroic martyr and visionary, and as a madman and terrorist.[13][14][15] Abolitionism was a movement that wanted to end the practice of slavery in Christian countries and was active mainly during the 18th and the 19th centuries. Until the 18th century, few people criticized slavery, but thinkers of the Enlightenment started to criticize it because they viewed it as against human rights.

Communities like the Quakers thought that slavery was against Christianity. In the early 19th century, several countries abolished the Atlantic slave trade and later in the century, they abolished slavery itself. Race-based slavery was established in the Americas in the early 16th century by the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. It soon spread to the parts of British North America, New France, and New Spain that would later become the United States. By the early 18th century, enslavement of black Africans was powering the economy in those areas.[1] Most opposition to slavery was from the slaves themselves. During the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves and endentured servants who were "able and willing to take up arms" with the British.

The proclamation would give freedom to indentured servants and slaves held by the rebelling colonists but not those held by the Loyalists. Many of the former slaves would die of disease; in fact, eight times more blacks died of disease than in battle. When the American Revolutionary War ended, most of those who had decided to fight with the British were returned to slavery.[2] Some black Loyalists were taken to what is now Canada and elsewhere. The Continental Army contained many blacks, most of them coming from New England. The most significant black regiment was the 1st Rhode Island. It was created in 1778 and consisted of mostly blacks.

Upon joining the regiment, any slave was released from servitude by the commander, Colonel Christopher Greene.[3] 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.

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