Concept
Abolitionism in the United States
Overview
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end chattel slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American Chattel Slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (ratified 1865).
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 eight years prior.
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. 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 1863 and was fully achieved in 1865.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The present government of the United States is not an Abolitionist government. Abolitionists, in America, mean those who do not keep within the constitution; who demand the destruction (as far as slavery is concerned) of as much of it as protects the internal legislation of each State from the control of Congress; who aim at abolishing slavery wherever it exists, by force if need be, but certainly by some other…
John Stuart Mill, The Contest in America
The author is tied to Abolitionism in the United States in the knowledge graph.
The United States had borrowed in the late civil war, by August 31, 1865, $2,845,907,626; and, to June 30, 1881, the Government had paid in interest on its bonds, “from taxes drawn from the produce of the remaining capital,” $1,270,596,784, as an income to bondholders. From this can be seen the enormous waste of wealth to the United States during the war, and consequently the less existing capital to-day in this…
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
The author is tied to Abolitionism in the United States in the knowledge graph.
This was enacted in 1824, and repealed all laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had hitherto been forbidden. The working-men obtained a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the right of free association. Secret coalitions had, it is true, previously existed, but could never achieve great results. In Glasgow, as Symonds {214} relates, a general strike of weavers…
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892
Close in meaning to Abolitionism in the United States; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Abolitionism in the United States
- Feminism
- John Stuart Mill
- Bell hooks
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Thomas Paine
- Walt Whitman
- Henry David Thoreau
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Lysander Spooner
- Amos Bronson Alcott
- The Age of Reason
- John Fiske (philosopher)
Related ideas
- Feminism
- Ireland
- Individualist anarchism
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Massachusetts
- Constitutional Convention (United States)
- Southern United States
- Library of Congress
- Caribbean
- Columbia University Press
- Democracy in America
- Methodism
- Native Americans in the United States
- New Testament
- African Americans
- Carl Schurz
- John Jay
- Natural law
- Pennsylvania
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Susan B. Anthony
- Slavery
- Colonial history of the United States
- Sojourner Truth
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Timeline of Western philosophers.
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