Which leader was not a part of the abolitionist movement

Solomon Northup was an African American farmer and musician who was taken hostage and sold into slavery in His story is told in the film '12 Years a Slave. William Lloyd Garrison was an American journalistic crusader who helped lead the successful abolitionist campaign against slavery in the United States. In , African American abolitionist David Walker wrote an incendiary pamphlet that argued for the end of slavery and discrimination in the United States.

American essayist, poet and practical philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was a New England Transcendentalist and author of the book 'Walden. Benjamin Rush is best known for his political activities during the American Revolution, including signing the Declaration of Independence.

Lucretia Mott was a leading social reformer of her time and helped to form the Free Religious Association. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford denied citizenship to anyone of African blood and held the Missouri Compromise of to be unconstitutional.

Abraham Lincoln revived his personal political career, coming out of a self-imposed semi-retirement to speak out against the Dred Scott decision. The year saw two events that were milestones in the history of slavery and abolition in America.

The ship Clotilde landed in Mobile, Alabama. Though the importation of slaves had been illegal in America since , Clotilde carried to African slaves. The last slave ship ever to land in the United States, it clearly demonstrated how lax the enforcement of the anti-importation laws was.

Nearly 1, miles northeast of Mobile, on the night of October 16, , John Brown—the radical abolitionist who had killed proslavery settlers in Kansas—led 21 men in a raid to capture the U.

He and his followers, 16 white men and five black ones, holed up in the arsenal after they were discovered, and were captured there by a group of U. Marines commanded by an Army lieutenant colonel, Robert E.

Convicted of treason against Virginia, Brown was hanged December 2. Initial reaction in the South was that this was the work of a small group of fanatics, but when Northern newspapers, authors and legislators began praising him as a martyr—a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier eulogizing Brown was published in the New York Herald Tribune less than a month after the execution—their actions were taken as further proof that Northern abolitionists wished to carry out genocide of white Southerners.

The flames were fanned higher as information came out that Brown had talked other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, about his plans and received financial assistance from some of them. But he adamantly opposed its expansion into territories where it did not exist, and slave owners were determined that they had to be free to take their human property with them if they chose to move into those territories.

Less than two years into the civil war that began over Southern secession, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It freed all slaves residing in areas of the nation currently in rebellion. It also effectively prohibited European nations that had long since renounced slavery from entering the war on the side of the South.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, declared ratified on December 18, , ended slavery in the United States—at least in name. Abolitionism, the reform movment to end slavery, always remained small and on the fringes of antebellum American society, and most people in the North and South saw abolitionists as extremists.

But this vocal minority managed to keep racial issues in the foreground until at least some of their views were accepted by mainstream Northern society. Southerners, on the other hand, always saw them as a direct threat to their way of life.

Efforts to end slavery had been present since the Colonial era, when Quakers were the primary torchbearers of the movement. Even though they were disappointed when the U. Constitution of did not end slavery but only the overseas importation of slaves in , their efforts, combined with the more diverse economy of the Northern states, succeeded in outlawing the practice above the Mason-Dixon Line by the first decade of the 19th century. A diligent member of the colonization movement was William Lloyd Garrison, who had been born into a working-class family in Massachusetts.

Increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of abolition, Garrison would forever radicalize the movement in the s by forming the American Anti-Slavery Society. Through its publication The Liberator, he called for immediate and universal emancipation.

That view shocked the nation, as both Northerners and Southerners dreaded the wholesale freeing of slaves. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Slavery was a deeply rooted institution in North America that remained legal in the United States until It took the abolition movement, a civil war, and the ratification of the 13th amendment to end slavery.

Though it did not end racism and descendants of these people are still struggling with discrimination today. Use these resources to teach more about significant figures in the abolition movement, the causes of the Civil War, and how slavery sustained the agricultural economy in the United States for centuries.

From the laboratory to the classroom, from outer space to the ballot box, women around the world have been making history since before ancient times. Explore the stories of American abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, learn how women around the world have fought for their right to vote, and join in the research of modern female explorers like Hayat Sindi and Asha de Vos as they help us understand our weird and wonderful world. Help students celebrate Women's History Month with this curated collection of resources.

The agricultural-based plantation economy of Southern colonies like Virginia and the Carolinas required a large labor force, which was met via enslaving people of African descent. In the New England states, many Americans viewed slavery as a shameful legacy with no place in modern society. The abolitionist movement emerged in states like New York and Massachusetts. The leaders of the movement copied some of their strategies from British activists who had turned public opinion against the slave trade and slavery.

It came under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston journalist and social reformer. From the early s until the end of the Civil War in , Garrison was the abolitionists' most dedicated campaigner. His newspaper, the Liberator, was notorious. It was limited in circulation but was still the focus of intense public debate. Its pages featured firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the South and exposed, for many, the inhumane treatment of enslaved people on U.

Garrison was a close ally of Frederick Douglass , who escaped his enslavement and whose autobiography became a bestseller. Abolitionists were a divided group. On one side were advocates like Garrison, who called for an immediate end to slavery. If that were impossible, it was thought, then the North and South should part ways. Moderates believed that slavery should be phased out gradually, in order to ensure the economy of the Southern states would not collapse.

On the more extreme side were figures like John Brown, who believed an armed rebellion of enslaved people in the South was the quickest route to end human bondage in the United States. Harriet Tubman was like Douglass, she too had escaped enslavement and became a prominent abolitionist. She was active in the Underground Railroad , the clandestine network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped escapees reach freedom in the North.

In the late s, she assisted Brown in his planning for the disastrous raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

The threat of an armed revolt alarmed Americans on both sides of the debate over slavery.