What did abolitionists want?

Abolitionists wanted the immediate end of slavery in the United States, although they differed sharply on tactics, on whether emancipation should be gradual or immediate, on whether enslaved people should be compensated or their owners, on whether free Black people should be considered full equal citizens, and on whether resistance should be peaceful or could include force.

The earliest American antislavery activism came from Quakers in the eighteenth century. The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, founded April 14, 1775, was the first such organization. Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation law on March 1, 1780, the first such statute in the world. Massachusetts effectively ended slavery through court rulings in 1781 to 1783. Congress prohibited the Atlantic slave trade effective January 1, 1808 under the constitutional clause that allowed action after that date.

Early gradual abolitionists also founded the American Colonization Society in 1816, which sought to send free Black Americans to West Africa. The Society founded Liberia in 1822, but most Black abolitionists rejected colonization as a form of expulsion.

The radical immediate abolition movement emerged in the 1830s. William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in Boston on January 1, 1831, demanding immediate, uncompensated emancipation. He helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society on December 4, 1833. The Society circulated petitions to Congress, sent lecturers across the North, and produced abolition literature.

Black abolitionists were central. David Walker published Walker's Appeal in 1829 calling for resistance. Frederick Douglass became the most famous Black abolitionist. Sojourner Truth, born enslaved in New York and freed in 1827, traveled the country preaching abolition and women's rights, delivering her famous 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech. Harriet Tubman led people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Henry Highland Garnet called for slave revolt in his 1843 Address to the Slaves.

White abolitionists varied widely. Garrison advocated nonviolent resistance and even disunion (his slogan was no union with slaveholders). The Tappan brothers Arthur and Lewis financed the movement and supported political action. Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke, and Sarah Grimke combined religious and political activism.

The Liberty Party formed in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in 1854 carried antislavery positions into electoral politics, although most accepted only that slavery should not expand into territories. By the late 1850s John Brown advocated and undertook armed resistance, raiding the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16 to 18, 1859 and being executed for treason.

Slavery ended only with the Thirteenth Amendment ratified on December 6, 1865 after the Union victory in the Civil War.