Most accounts date the birth of American abolitionism to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his radical antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. In fact, however, the abolition movement had been born with the American Republic. In the decades following the Revolution, abolitionists worked steadily to eliminate slavery and racial injustice, and their tactics and strategies constantly evolved. Tracing the development of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the 1830s, Richard Newman focuses particularly on its transformation from a conservative lobbying effort into a fiery grassroots reform cause. What began in late-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as an elite movement espousing gradual legal reform began to change in the 1820s as black activists, female reformers, and nonelite whites pushed their way into the antislavery movement. Located primarily in Massachusetts, these new reformers demanded immediate emancipation, and they revolutionized abolitionist strategies and tactics--lecturing extensively, publishing gripping accounts of life in bondage, and organizing on a grassroots level. Their attitudes and actions made the abolition movement the radical cause we view it as today.

A fresh synthesis of the abolitionist movement and ideas in the Anglo-American world.

The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States was the most powerful and effective social movement of the nineteenth century and has served as a recurring source of inspiration for every subsequent struggle against injustice. But the abolitionist story has traditionally focused on the evangelical impulses of white, male, middle-class reformers, obscuring the contributions of many African Americans, women, and others. Prophets of Protest, the first collection of writings on abolitionism in more than a generation, draws on an immense new body of research in African American studies, literature, art history, film, law, women's studies, and other disciplines. The book incorporates new thinking on such topics as the role of early black newspapers, antislavery poetry, and abolitionists in film and provides new perspectives on familiar figures such as Sojourner Truth, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. With contributions from the leading scholars in the field, Prophets of Protest is a long overdue update of one of the central reform movements in America's history.

American politics and society were transformed by the antislavery movement. But as Corey M. Brooks shows, it was the antislavery third parties not the Democrats or Whigs that had the largest and least-understood impact. Third-party abolitionists exploited opportunities to achieve outsized influence and shaping the national debate. Political abolitionists key contribution was the elaboration and dissemination of the notion of the Slave Power the claim that slaveholders wielded disproportionate political power and therefore threatened the liberties and political power of northern whites. By convincing northerners of the Slave Power menace, abolitionists paved the way for broader coalitions, and ultimately for Abraham Lincoln s Republican Party."

The abolitionist movement, which was a campaign to end the practice of slavery and the slave trade, began to take shape in the wake of the American Revolution. This book provides an exploration of this seminal movement in American history.

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. “Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States... The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.” —Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review