Namangan davlat universiteti ingliz filologiyasi fakulteti amaliy ingliz tili kafedrasi

LESSON 10 
ABOLITIONISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 
Plan: 
1.
 
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery, whether formal or informal. 
2.
 
The first Americans who made a public protest against slavery were 
the Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania 
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery, whether formal or informal. In Western 
Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historical movement to end the African and 
Indian slave trade and set slaves free. King Charles I of Spain, following the example of the 
Swedish monarch, passed a law which would have abolished colonial slavery in 1542, although this 
law was not passed in the largest colonial states, and so was not enforced. Later, in the 17th 
century, English Quakers and evangelical religious groups condemned slavery (by then applied 
mostly to Africans) as un-Christian; in the 18th century, abolition was part of the message of 
the First Great Awakening in the Thirteen Colonies; and in the same period, rationalist thinkers of 
the Enlightenmentcriticized it for violating the rights of man. James Edward Oglethorpe was among 
the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of 
Georgia on humanist grounds, arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his 
friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause. Soon after his death in 
1785, 
they 
joined 
with William 
Wilberforce and 
others 
in 
forming 
the Clapham 
Sect. The Somersett's case in 1772, which emancipated a slave in England, helped launch the 
British movement to abolish slavery. Though anti-slavery sentiments were widespread by the late 
18th century, the colonies and emerging nations that used slave labor continued to do so: French, 
English and Portuguese territories in the West Indies; South America; and the Southern United 
States. 
After the American Revolution established the United States, northern states, beginning 
with Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation during the next two decades abolishing slavery, 
sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified aconstitution that declared all men 
equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on this principle brought an end to slavery in the 
state. In other states, such as Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts 
as not applicable to Africans. During the following decades, the abolitionist movement grew in 
northern states, and Congress regulated the expansion of slavery in new states admitted to the 
union. David Brion Davis argues that the main driving force was a new moral consciousness, with 
an intellectual assist from the Enlightenment, and a powerful impulse from religious Quakers and 
evangelicals. Christian evangelicals identified slave ownership and complicity as a grave sin – one 
that had to be purged from the world.
Abolitionism in the United States was the movement prior to the American Civil War to 
end slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United States. 
In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historical movement to end 
African slave trade and set slaves free. Later, in the 17th century, English Quakers and evangelical 
religious groups condemned slavery (by then applied mostly to Africans) as un-Christian; in the 
18th century, abolition was part of the message of the First Great Awakening in the Thirteen 
Colonies; and in the same period, rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment criticized it for violating 
the rights of man. James Edward Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment 
case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanistic grounds, arguing against 
it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to 
vigorously pursue the cause. Soon after his death in 1785, they joined with William 
Wilberforce and others in forming the Clapham Sect. Though anti-slavery sentiments were 
widespread by the late 18th century, the colonies and emerging nations that used slave labor 
continued to do so, including the South of the United States. 
After the American Revolution established the United States, northern states, beginning 
with Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation during the next two decades abolishing slavery, 
sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified aconstitution that declared all men 
equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on this principle brought an end to slavery in the 

---

state. In other states, such as Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts 
not applicable to Africans. During the following decades, the abolitionist movement grew in 
northern states, and Congress regulated the expansion of slavery in new states admitted to the 
union. 
Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807 and abolished 
slavery in the British Empire in 1833. The United States criminalized the international slave trade 
in 1808 and abolished slavery in 1865 as a result of the American Civil War. 
The historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War 
had agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of slavery in the United States." 
He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party, which 
called for the gradual ending of slavery.
Also in the postwar years, individual slaveholders, particularly in the Upper South, 
manumitted slaves, sometimes in their wills. Many noted they had been moved by the revolutionary 
ideals of the equality of men. The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population 
increased from less than one percent to nearly ten percent from 1790 to 1810 in the Upper South as 
a result of these actions. 
As President, on March 2, 1807, Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of 
Slaves and it took effect in 1808, which was the earliest allowed under the Constitution. In 1820 he 
privately supported the Missouri Compromise, believing it would help to end slavery, but his views 
on slavery were complicated, and possibly contradictory. His will freed only a small fraction of 
Monticello's slaves [8] 
In the 1850s in the fifteen states constituting the American South , slavery was legal. While 
it was fading away in the cities and border states, it remained strong in plantation areas that grew 
cash crops such as cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco or hemp. By the 1860 United States Census, the 
slave population in the United States had grown to four million. American abolitionism was based 
in the North, and white Southerners alleged it fostered slave rebellion. 
The white abolitionist movement in the North was led by social reformers, 
especially William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society; writers such 
as John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Black activists included former slaves such 
asFrederick Douglass; and free blacks such as the brothers Charles Henry Langston and John 
Mercer Langston, who helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Some abolitionists said that 
slavery was criminal and a sin; they also criticized slave owners of using black women 
as concubines and taking sexual advantage of them.
The Republican Party wanted to achieve the gradual extinction of slavery by market forces, 
for its members believed that free labor was superior to slave labor. Southern leaders said the 
Republican policy of blocking the expansion of slavery into the West made them second-class 
citizens, and challenged their autonomy. With the 1860 presidential victory of Abraham Lincoln
1
, 
seven Deep South states whose economy was based on cotton and slavery decided to secede and 
form a new nation. The American Civil War broke out in April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter 
in South Carolina. When Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion, four more slave states 
seceded. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in 
the Confederate States; all the border states (except Delaware) began their own emancipation 
programs. Thousands of slaves escaped to freedom behind Union Army lines, and in 1863 many 
men started serving as the United States Colored Troops. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. 
Constitution took effect in December 1865 and finally ended slavery throughout the United States. 
It also abolished slavery among the Indian tribes. 
The 
first 
Americans 
who 
made 
a 
public 
protest 
against 
slavery 
were 
the Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Soon after, in April 1688, Quakers in the same town 
wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker 
1
By Randall M. Miller, John David Smith. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. p.471. 

---

church, the Society of Friends. The Quaker establishment never took action. The 1688 Germantown 
Quaker Petition Against Slavery was an unusually early, clear and forceful argument against 
slavery and initiated the spirit that finally led to the end of slavery in the Society of Friends (1776) 
and in the state of Pennsylvania (1780). The Quaker Quarterly Meeting of Chester, Pennsylvania, 
made its first protest in 1711. Within a few decades the entire slave trade was under attack, being 
opposed by such leaders as William Burling,Benjamin Lay, Ralph Sandiford, William Southby, 
and John Woolman.  
Slavery was banned in the Province of Georgia soon after its founding in 1733. The colony's 
founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, fended off repeated attempts by South Carolina merchants and 
land speculators to introduce slavery to the colony. In 1739, he wrote to the Georgia 
Trustees urging them to hold firm: "If we allow slaves we act against the very principles by which 
we associated together, which was to relieve the distresses. Whereas, now we should occasion the 
misery of thousands in Africa, by setting men upon using arts to buy and bring into perpetual 
slavery the poor people who now live there free." The struggle between Georgia and South Carolina 
led to the first debates in Parliament over the issue of slavery, occurring between 1740 and 1742.
Abolitionism brought together active women and enabled them to make political and 
personal connections while honing communication and organizational skills. EvenSojourner Truth, 
commonly associated with abolitionism, delivered her first documented public speech at the 1850 
National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester. There, she argued for women's reform 
activism.

---