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History of other antislavery efforts • Quakers – Quakers played a major role in the abolition movement against slavery. Quakers were among the first whites to denounce slavery in the American colonies and Europe, and the Society of Friends became the first organization to take a collective stand against both slavery and the slave trade. By 1758 making it effectively an act of misconduct to engage in slave trading. While many individual Quakers spoke out against slavery after United States independence, local Quaker meetings were often divided on how to respond to slavery; Quakers were also prominently involved with the Underground Railroad. For example, Levi Coffin started helping runaway slaves as a child in North Carolina. Quakers have been noted and, very often, praised for their early and continued antislavery activity.
Gradualism – An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the Pennsylvanialegislature on 1 March 1780, was the first attempt by a government in the Western Hemisphere to begin an abolition of slavery. • Most northern states passed laws abolishing slavery, either immediately or gradually, by 1805. • Laws providing for "gradual" emancipation often failed to change the status of adults already enslaved before the law took effect. • Historians traditionally distinguish between moderate antislavery reformers or gradualists, who concentrated on stopping the spread of slavery, and radical abolitionists or immediatists, whose demands for unconditional emancipation often merged with a concern for black civil rights. • The abolitionist movement, calling for the immediate abolition of slavery, was supported by free black churches. • Before the Civil War, most American politicians rejected the positions of abolitionists
Colonization vs. abolitionism – The position of colonization groups was broad enough to permit either a liberal or conservative stance on slavery. Supporters of colonization could, if they wished, maintain the theory of the social, political, and intellectual inferiority of Negroes while at the same time supporting some potential improvement in the status of free Negros through transportation to colonies in Africa. • These efforts grew out of religious or philosophical principles of equality and stressed immediate an uncompensated emancipation
History of other antislavery efforts • The Anti- Slavery society split into two groups in 1839, one group lead by William Lloyd Garrison and one headed by Louis Tappan. • What were some of the reasons for the rise of this movement? • What were some of the reasons for the change within the movement?
Final Group Questions • What was abolitionism? • What social-economic-political conditions were abolitionists responding to? • How does a social movement develop and change over time? • Explain how the abolitionist movement was unique compared to other movements at the time? • Explain how the abolitionist movement was unique compared to other responses to slavery?
