Who were slave abolitionist supporters?

The supporters of slave abolition were a diverse coalition of formerly enslaved people, free Black activists, white religious reformers, women's rights advocates, and political organizers who believed that slavery was morally wrong and worked through writing, speaking, organizing, sheltering escaped slaves, and eventually political action and armed resistance to end the institution.

Black abolitionists were central. Frederick Douglass, who escaped from Maryland in 1838, became the most prominent African American voice of the nineteenth century through his autobiographies, his newspaper The North Star founded December 3, 1847, and decades of speaking. Sojourner Truth, born enslaved in New York and freed in 1827, traveled the country preaching abolition and women's rights, delivering her famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech in May 1851. Harriet Tubman led approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and served as a Civil War scout, spy, and nurse. David Walker published Walker's Appeal in 1829 calling for direct resistance to slavery. Henry Highland Garnet called for slave revolt in his 1843 Address to the Slaves. Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861 documenting the sexual exploitation of enslaved women.

White religious reformers were also essential. Quakers had opposed slavery since the seventeenth century and provided much of the early infrastructure of antislavery activism. The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, founded April 14, 1775, was the first such organization in the world. William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in Boston on January 1, 1831, demanding immediate, uncompensated emancipation. The American Anti-Slavery Society founded December 4, 1833 by Garrison, the Tappan brothers Arthur and Lewis, Theodore Dwight Weld, and others coordinated the movement. The Grimke sisters Angelina and Sarah from a South Carolina slaveholding family became leading lecturers. Wendell Phillips, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, organized, and lectured. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published 1851 to 1852, sold 300,000 copies in its first year and dramatized the cruelty of slavery to millions.

Political abolitionists worked through electoral politics. The Liberty Party formed in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in 1854 carried antislavery positions into elections, although most accepted only that slavery should not expand. By the late 1850s John Brown turned to armed resistance, raiding Harpers Ferry on October 16 to 18, 1859. The Civil War era saw new abolitionist coalitions including Radical Republicans Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Salmon Chase who pushed Lincoln toward emancipation and beyond. About 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army and Navy. The Thirteenth Amendment ratified December 6, 1865 finally ended legal slavery throughout the country.