Chapter 1
Early abolitionism: Prophets versus profits
Who was the first abolitionist? Well before an organized abolitionist movement took shape in the eighteenth century, some brave person challenged slavery. We know that because slavers themselves discussed the resistance of captives. Perhaps the first abolitionist was a slave rebel in the earliest years of the Middle Passage. Perhaps it was someone who evaded capture along the West African coast.
The first abolitionist may have been Native American. No sooner had imperial slavery taken shape in the Americas than indigenous people challenged bondage. Spain’s earliest colonial ventures in both the Caribbean and South America targeted Native people as would-be slaves, provoking fierce opposition. Their resistance struck religious dissidents like Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk who published scathing rebukes of Native enslavement in the sixteenth century. By the 1670s, Spanish monarchs issued abolition decrees in Chile and Peru undercutting Native bondage. The great Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet much admired de las Casas, modeling his activism on the monk’s efforts.
Benezet was also inspired by African battles against enslavement. As Europeans turned from Native to African labor, he and others noted, black resistance followed. Among the first documented slave rebellions was a 1522 uprising of captive Africans in the Spanish Caribbean. A century before the landing of twenty Africans in Virginia, slave resistance was already etched into the historical record.
2. Scholars estimate that revolts occurred on at least 10 percent of Atlantic slave-trading voyages. This French image, from a book on sailors’ experiences, depicts revolt as a not-so-distant reality of the Middle Passage.
Slave resistance shadowed the expansion of Atlantic slavery. Surveying records from roughly 36,000 voyages, scholars now estimate that roughly 10 percent of slave trading vessels experienced a revolt. African resistance increased the cost of slaving voyages by requiring more crew members and costlier insurance, thus cutting into profits. This reduced the overall number of transatlantic voyages and prevented the potential enslavement of several hundred thousand people. Thus, while we may never know their names, the first global abolitionists were enslaved people who struggled against a new and more intractable form of human bondage.
Slavery’s profits versus abolitionist prophets
African people inspired wider attacks on Atlantic bondage. Motivated by religious beliefs, including biblical injunctions to obey the Golden Rule and avoid “man-stealing,” these new allies of enslaved people helped put abolition on the Atlantic world’s political and cultural radar during the late 1600s and early 1700s. Soon, the first formal abolition societies appeared in London, Philadelphia, and Paris, and antislavery networks connected activists from the Caribbean to West Africa to North America.
No matter where abolitionists appeared, they had to overcome the accumulated weight of proslavery theology, economics, and politics. In a famous book, historian David Brion Davis argued that abolitionists were “up against” a system of economic and psychological mastery with ancient roots as well as modern cachet. Unfree labor systems proliferated from ancient Rome to Africa, and Christianity, Judaism, and Islam offered theological rationales for the enslavement of nonbelievers, debtors, and war captives (“just slaves”). On the philosophical front, notable thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onward had sanctioned classic slavery.
Yet abolitionists also squared off against a new type of bondage in early modern society. As European empires built New World economies based on mining wealth (including gold and silver in the Caribbean and South America) and much-desired cash crops—sugar, coffee, indigo, rice, cotton, tobacco—they created massive labor needs. Neither indentured servants from Europe nor indigenous people could keep pace. In turning to captive African labor, imperial masters transformed slavery itself into a terrible institution of near-complete human domination.
Indeed, slavery shifted drastically in size and scope. Though a pan-African slave trade had operated for centuries—with Muslim and Arab traders transferring several million people from Central and West African locales to the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe—the transatlantic slave trade created an even bigger forced population transfer. Between the 1400s and the late 1800s, approximately 12 to 15 million people of African descent endured the Middle Passage. Portuguese traders brought captive Africans into Lisbon well before Christopher Columbus’s famous voyages. After the Spanish joined the fray, transatlantic slaving ventures heralded a lucrative future for European nations. Soon British, French, Dutch, American, and even Scandinavian nations participated in the international slave trade.
New World slavery spread across a vast geographical terrain. The overwhelming majority of enslaved people went to South American and Caribbean locales; a much smaller number arrived in North America. Wherever captives went, they followed the insatiable demands of a rising international market for slave-derived commodities. Unlike traditional bondage, New World slavery was very much an economic affair.
Unlike classic bondage too, New World slavery became linked exclusively to race. Racialized slavery did not appear immediately, and there were variations among imperial regimes. Still, New World masters increasingly tagged people of African descent as slaves. During the 1660s, colonial assemblies in Virginia and Maryland linked slave status to African or black people. This racial marker allowed masters to better control servile populations. Race further redefined New World slavery by making bondage perpetual through a person’s bloodline. In classic slaving systems, bondage stopped at one’s death; now it devolved to one’s children, their children’s children, and so on until a formal legal document (known as a manumission) liberated enslaved people.
New World enslavers went to such lengths for one very simple reason: slavery was a moneymaking machine. From the colonial American South to the Caribbean, slaves produced enormous wealth for masters and investors alike. Tobacco saved the earliest Virginia settlements from disaster while rice plantations generated tremendous fortunes for South Carolina gentlemen. The French colony of Saint-Domingue was known as the “Pearl of the Antilles” for its lucrative sugar plantations. By the 1780s, the death rate skyrocketed, though French masters simply increased African imports to fuel the plantation furnace.
Slavery was not monolithic. In British North America, small proprietors utilized African labor to build colonial settlements and economies. Ben Franklin owned five slaves during his lifetime, never releasing any of them, and they all helped run either his business or his household. In Boston, Newport, New York, and Baltimore enslaved people ran households, did arduous daily chores, and aided merchants. In rural areas, enslaved people sowed crops, built barns, tended livestock, and cleared forests for settlement and development. Slavery was central to American dreams large and small.
To say that abolitionists had a nearly overwhelming task is an understatement. Whether in North America, Great Britain, France, or Greater Spain, slavery was the engine driving Atlantic development.
Before they could do anything else, then, abolitionists had to label slavery a problem. That task began with enslaved people’s challenges to bondage, which compelled new groups of allies to step forward on their behalf. These early reformers sought to ameliorate slavery’s harshest aspects. In Spain, religious authorities urged the Catholic Church to protect enslaved people from abusive masters. Some reformers went further, supporting a policy known as coartación, which allowed enslaved people to work part of the week and save money for self-purchase. As a result, free black communities grew in many Spanish colonies. By 1800, one-sixth of Spanish Cuba’s population was comprised of free blacks.
Similarly, some English reformers began urging better treatment of enslaved people. Led by the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), they argued that all human beings contained God’s “inner light.” As children of God, they argued, enslaved people should be treated more humanely and given access to the Christian gospel. This proto-abolitionist step envisioned slavery as morally wrong, helping foster further alliances between enslaved people and Quakers.
Abolitionist Friends
Unsurprisingly, Quakers issued the first formal challenge to bondage in colonial America: the Germantown Protest. Adopted in 1688 by a small band of German émigrés outside Philadelphia, it called bondage a sin and asked fellow Quakers to follow the Golden Rule: treat others as you wished to be treated. “Is there any that would [want] … to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” the document asked. Written by Daniel Pastorious and signed by just three other men, it was forwarded to Quaker meetings but not acted upon.
Nevertheless, the Germantown Protest became a model of antislavery witness for subsequent generations. As religious dissidents, Quakers had been oppressed by the Church of England and then by American Puritans—they knew social stigma. After listening to enslaved people’s complaints, some Quakers critiqued their friends and family as hypocrites. In 1737, Benjamin Lay, who saw bondage’s horrors in Barbados before moving to Pennsylvania, castigated Quaker masters in a pamphlet entitled “All Slave-keepers … Apostate.” The next year, he splashed berry juice on members of a Quaker meeting to symbolize the blood on the hands of slaveholders. Though less dramatic, New Jersey Quaker John Woolman roamed the mid-Atlantic countryside on a truth-telling mission about slavery’s sinful nature. These consciousness-raising activities led to Quaker emancipation policies: the banning of slave trading within the Society of Friends in 1759 and the banning of slaveholding itself in 1776.
Quaker activists soon expanded their outreach to mainstream society. Their efforts were well-timed. Enlightenment ideas about rationality, virtue, and noble sentiment allowed abolitionist ideas to gain cachet among learned men in politics and law. No figure became more influential than the Quaker schoolteacher Anthony Benezet. Based in Philadelphia, Benezet was a formidable activist, publicist, and networking agent who constantly worked to broaden the abolitionist cause. Viewing media as the key means of mobilizing reformers across Atlantic society, he published numerous pamphlets condemning the international slave trade, colonial slavery, and European treatment of both Native Americans and Africans. Few people came away from Benezet’s pamphlets unmoved. He also launched a school for people of color to prove that blacks had the same abilities as whites. His death in 1784 prompted one of the largest funeral processions in Philadelphia. Notably, it included African Americans.
Among Benezet’s transatlantic allies, none proved more valuable than Granville Sharp. A London shopkeeper, Sharp read Benezet’s works and agreed that slavery was both a religious sin and a social evil. Sharp also saw the British court system as an instrument of liberation for enslaved people. With the slave trade enriching British merchants, investors, and ship captains, captive blacks were shuttled in and out of London, Manchester, and Liverpool. Taking advantage of these urban settings, they ran away and sought abolitionist allies like Sharp, who began representing them in courts.
Sharp scored a major victory for abolition in 1772 when he successfully sued for the freedom of a runaway slave named James Somerset. Seeking sanctuary from his abusive Massachusetts master while in London, Somerset prevailed upon Sharp to take his case to court. Presented with evidence of slavery’s abuses, the judge, Lord Mansfield, decreed that bondage could not be tolerated on the liberty-loving English mainland. The Mansfield decision liberated as many as 15,000 enslaved people (though not those in the colonies).
The Mansfield case inspired more concerted abolitionist action in England over the next two decades. Both former slaves and white reformers coalesced into a loose network of abolitionists who sought to mobilize opposition to the slave trade. In the early 1780s, they mobilized an impressive public relations campaign against the captain of the Zong, who tossed overboard 132 captive Africans to allegedly save his crew from starvation during a stormy slave-trading voyage. After the captain claimed restitution from an insurance company, a former slave named Olaudah Equiano approached Sharp about fighting back. Equiano believed that the Zong affair might prompt a public outcry and spur the abolitionist cause in England. Sharp and Equiano shamed the captain, compelling the insurance company to deny his claim.
As both the Mansfield and Zong cases showed, Great Britain served as a key base of operations for black as well as white abolitionists. Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, and others exploited Britain’s cultural and legal resources—an open press culture, an increasingly sympathetic judiciary, and prominent allies—to fight slavery. Like Equiano, they often utilized autobiography to raise awareness about slavery’s violent realities. Equiano’s narrative, published in 1789, provided heart-rending accounts of his kidnapping, the Middle Passage, and his desire for freedom. Showing that he had the same emotions, fears, and dreams as any human being, he challenged the hypocrisy of slaveholding. “O, ye nominal Christians!” he wondered, “might not an African ask you … [why we are] torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain?” As lecturer, author, and activist, Equiano sharpened abolitionism’s moral focus and sense of purpose.
The British struggle took another step forward in 1783, when abolitionists submitted their first petition to Parliament against the slave trade. Four years later, they founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SAEST) in London. Headed by Quakers, the group included Sharp and star Cambridge student Thomas Clarkson, whose “Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species” (1785) riveted reformers for its depiction of slavery as the philosophical foil to English liberty. The crusade against the slave trade attracted other notable supporters too, including poet Hannah Moore, renowned producer of ceramics Josiah Wedgwood, and parliamentarian William Wilberforce. Wedgwood produced one of the enduring symbols of the transatlantic abolitionist movement: a medallion with a kneeling slave asking, “Am I Not a Man and A Brother?” Though British efforts against the slave trade were stymied in Parliament, that phrase became a rallying cry for generations of Anglo-American abolitionists.
Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution
The Age of Revolution vastly expanded abolition’s reach, as statesmen, philosophers, and egalitarian reformers scrutinized slavery as a violation of natural rights. Revolutionary movements stretching from the newly independent United States to France to the Caribbean pictured bondage as out of step with emerging republican institutions and made equality the watchword of Western modernity.
Enslaved people helped usher in the Age of Revolution. In Tacky’s Rebellion of 1760, perhaps as many as a thousand Jamaican slave rebels attacked British masters on hundreds of plantations. Though suppressed, the uprising was widely reported across the Atlantic world and spawned copycat rebellions against British authority. In the opening salvo of the American Revolution, colonial Americans began referring to themselves as “slaves” to the British—rebels who wanted “liberty or death,” in Patrick Henry’s famous phrase.
As the colonial crisis with Great Britain intensified, enslaved people used revolutionary rhetoric to push abolitionism into the public sphere. Deploying the language of liberty against American masters, they argued that people of color had legitimate claims to freedom and justice. In 1773, a quartet of enslaved Bostonians petitioned the colonial legislature for black liberty. In 1776, enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, boldly marched in public for their liberty. In Salem, Massachusetts, former slave Caesar Sartar published a searing newspaper article challenging Americans to live up to their revolutionary language by emancipating bondsmen and women everywhere.
During the war, African Americans compelled both American and British forces to consider broader emancipation policies. In November 1775, British general Lord Dunmore undercut the strength of American patriots by issuing the first emancipation proclamation of the age. Dunmore’s proclamation declared that any enslaved person fleeing to British lines in Virginia would be liberated. A few years later, the Philipsburg Proclamation provided freedom to enslaved people reaching British lines in the northern theater of war. Though scholarly estimates vary, between twenty thousand and sixty thousand enslaved people fled to the British and staked a bold claim to freedom.
Not to be outdone, American patriots attacked slavery as anathema to the new cause of freedom. The Declaration of Independence, authored in 1776 by America’s leading slaveholding philosopher Thomas Jefferson, imagined a world where equality was a self-evident truth and slavery a thing of the past. While some slaveholders thought Jefferson went too far, others believed that the Declaration expressed America’s highest ideals. A host of statesmen professed hatred of slavery during the Revolution. Before he signed the Declaration, Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush called for the abolition of the slave trade, while after 1776 the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine argued that slavery itself must be vanquished. Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, and many other revolutionaries saw bondage as a glaring contradiction to American ideals.
South Carolinian John Laurens proposed mobilizing black troops as a way to defeat the British and expand American liberty. The scion of a slave-trading family, he urged state and federal officials to offer enslaved people freedom in exchange for military service (masters would be compensated too). Although Laurens died before his plans took shape, other states utilized black soldiers, often with freedom as a lure. The First Rhode Island Regiment, a segregated unit comprising more than two hundred African Americans (including many enslaved people who gained their freedom by enlisting), remains the most famous example. But a tradition of interracial activism also emerged during the war, as black militiamen fought alongside whites at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Boston. Overall, roughly 5,000 African Americans served in the American military during the war.
Why did blacks support the patriot cause? James Forten, a free black teenager in Philadelphia, volunteered for the American navy after hearing the Declaration of Independence read publicly. Forten argued that the Declaration justified his claims to equality and justice. Similarly, Lemuel Haynes, a mixed-race minister from Connecticut who fought at Bunker Hill, identified with the revolutionary cause of justice. Like Forten, he saw African Americans as the new nation’s moral conscience.
No figure seemed more important in this regard than Crispus Attucks. A former slave who was killed by British troops at the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, Attucks assumed a mythical importance among whites as well as blacks for standing on the front lines of American freedom. During the nineteenth century, black writers reminded Americans that Attucks had delivered the “first blow for liberty,” as black historian William C. Nell famously put it. For Nell, the American Revolution was inherently a civil rights struggle.
Abolitionist activism after 1776
By the late eighteenth century, the abolitionist movement had matured on several fronts. In the religious sphere, Anglo-American reformers deployed a wide range of biblical arguments against bondage to counter masters’ proslavery claims. Inserted in essays, handbills, and images, and early slave narratives, they became talking points in the transatlantic movement. Abolitionists noted that Exodus 21:16 condemned both slavery and the slave trade in the harshest terms: “He that stealeth a man and sell him … shall surely be put to death.” Similarly, in Leviticus 25:10–11, masters were enjoined to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” every fifty years. Acts 17:26 heralded the equality of humans by noting that the Almighty had “made of one blood all nations of men.” Citing Exodus 10:3–4, both black and white abolitionists also warned New World slaveholders to remember that God had already destroyed Egyptian slaveholders for failing to heed Moses’ plea: “Let my people go.”
On the political and institutional front, abolitionists took a major step forward by creating organizations dedicated to the sole cause of emancipation. Inspired by the burst of civic activism spawned by the American Revolution, statesmen and reformers from across the social, religious, and political spectrum came together in abolition societies that lobbied for antislavery action in both government and society. Led by principled men who believed that slavery violated not only Christian ethics but also revolutionary doctrines of liberty, these organizations often included notable citizens, particularly in the North. John Jay and Alexander Hamilton joined the New York Manumission Society (NYMSS) while Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, became president of the Connecticut Abolition Society. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) was led by Benjamin Franklin and then Benjamin Rush—both signers of the Declaration of Independence. Abolitionist groups also took shape in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, and even Virginia. By the 1790s, so many groups existed that reformers launched a biennial national meeting: the American Convention of Abolition Societies.
No group was more important than the PAS. The world’s first antislavery society, it was founded in 1775 and then reorganized after the Revolution. In 1787, it codified abolitionism by forming a constitution and bylaws that assigned specific tasks to committees and working groups, allowing activists to work simultaneously on goals ranging from black education to abolitionist outreach in the Atlantic world. As an incorporated entity, the PAS had a legal status in the state of Pennsylvania that allowed people to give charitable donations to the antislavery cause. And it had a public listing in the Philadelphia business directory.
Like other groups, the PAS agitated for abolitionist laws in the new nation. After 1776, bondage remained legal in every American state except Vermont, whose constitution banned slavery. Abolitionists argued that slavery blemished the American character and gave lie to the nation’s Revolutionary War promises. “It is our duty,” one member of the NYMSS observed, “both as free citizens and Christians … to endeavor, by lawful ways and means, to enable [slaves] to share equally with us, in that civil and religious liberty … with which an indulgent providence has blessed these [United] States.”
Nevertheless, because they were led by men of property and standing, early abolition groups often opposed immediate emancipation. Favoring gradualism, abolitionists believed that slavery must be dismantled slowly, thus doing justice to masters as well as enslaved people. Early abolition societies in the United States did not formally admit black members, which limited their strategic outlook. Indeed, many white reformers agreed that property rights must be balanced against human rights.
The major exception to this rule was Massachusetts, whose Supreme Court declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783. The court responded to freedom suits brought by black litigants and white lawyers. Both Elizabeth Freeman (known as Mum Bett) and Quok Walker ran away from abusive masters, found abolitionist allies, and went to court for their freedom. In Freeman’s case, Theodore Sedgewick, who became a corresponding member of the PAS, argued that slavery violated the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal rights. Chief Justice William Cushing agreed, telling the jury that the Massachusetts constitution “is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.” While masters fumed, nearly two thousand enslaved people were liberated.
Elsewhere, abolitionists found that gradual emancipation appealed to non-slaveholders as well as masters, especially in states with larger populations of enslaved people. By century’s end, five northern states adopted gradual abolition schemes. Pennsylvania (with roughly seven thousand slaves) was the first, passing a law in March 1780 that liberated enslaved people born after the act at age twenty-eight. Connecticut and Rhode Island (each contained fewer than six thousand slaves) followed suit in 1784, while New York—which more than twenty thousand slaves—debated various gradualist proposals before passing one in 1799. New Jersey (with more than ten thousand slaves) became the final state to embrace gradual abolition in 1804. In each case, state abolition laws established penalties for scofflaws, pressing down on masters’ property rights. In Pennsylvania, masters who did not register slaves with justices of the peace might lose their human property. Moreover, visiting politicians and businessmen had a grace period of only six months before they had to comply with the law. Beyond gradual abolition, reformers pushed for laws against slave trading and kidnapping.
Despite its gradualist foundations, northern abolition gave rise to sectional divisions over slavery. In fact, black and white abolitionists used “free soil” principles to isolate slavery in politics and law. By prosecuting slave traders in various northern ports, suing those who kidnapped free blacks from northern cities and towns, and representing fugitive slaves in northern courts, abolitionists sought to strip away slavery’s operability above the Mason-Dixon line. The PAS, whose legal aid system helped hundreds of African Americans, made Pennsylvania a haven for people of color throughout the mid-Atlantic region. In one case from the 1790s, a Virginia mistress claimed the children of an enslaved mother who fled to Philadelphia. PAS lawyers argued that the children were born in Pennsylvania and had to be registered according to the state’s abolition law. Having failed to do that, the Virginia woman forfeited claims to them. As one PAS lawyer observed, they were “lucky to have been born in Pennsylvania.” With such decisions in mind, early abolitionists searched state and federal laws for precedents and loopholes that might hamper bondage’s operation nationally and put in on a path to destruction.
Abolition and the U.S. Constitution
Despite such hopes, early American abolitionism remained a limited movement, especially in the South. Many slaveholders refused to support even gradual abolition, no matter their moral qualms. In Virginia, respected jurist St. George Tucker failed to gain legislative approval of a gradual abolition plan despite some masters’ philosophical opposition to slavery. In South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, masters saw slavery as an economic necessity and did not apologize for it. Either way, gradual abolition threatened the white social order in states with large slave populations. Instead, private emancipation became southern blacks’ best legal route to freedom. Virginia eased restrictions on private emancipation in 1782, prompting between six thousand and ten thousand manumissions over the next several decades. Yet this paled next to slavery’s growth in the Old Dominion.
The Federal Constitution of 1787 challenged abolitionism by hewing to slaveholders’ concerns. While it created a national government and aspired to build “a more perfect union”—a potential boon to abolitionists—the Constitution also protected bondage in several ways. It guaranteed masters the right to reclaim fugitives “from service” across state lines, which allowed Congress to pass the first fugitive slave law in 1793. It prevented congressional passage of a national slave-trading ban for twenty years, which allowed South Carolina alone to import forty thousand captive people. And in its most notorious section, the Constitution counted three-fifths of a state’s enslaved population to calculate its seats in the House of Representatives. The three-fifths clause provided what scholar Paul Finkelman has called “political muscle” to the South. Without the clause, Pennsylvania would have had a higher number of House seats because its free population exceeded Virginia’s (431,000 to 404,000). Yet by counting three-fifths of Virginia’s nearly three hundred thousand slaves, the Constitution gave the Old Dominion more congressional representatives. Little wonder that southerners could successfully push for the admission of new slave states in the early 1800s and fend off efforts to repeal the three-fifths clause. Moreover, because the Electoral College was tied to congressional representation, Virginia and other southern states had additional power in presidential contests too. Unsurprisingly, Virginia sent four of the first five presidents to the White House.
3. This depiction of a slave-trading vessel illuminated the inhumane conditions of the Middle Passage. Distributed by the nation’s leading abolition society before 1800—the Pennsylvania Abolition Society—it was part of a transatlantic campaign to end the slave trade.
Beyond these provisions, the Constitution symbolized the importance of sectional compromise, further limiting abolitionist attacks on southern slavery. Where many northern states adopted manufacturing and free labor principles, most southern states remained tied to cash-crop agriculture and slavery. A nation of divergent interests required constant compromise, even northern politicians believed, to avert disunion.
Abolitionists learned this lesson when they petitioned the first federal Congress in February 1790 to “step to the very verge of the powers vested in you” to eradicate the slave trade and perhaps slavery itself. Like British reformers, the PAS sought to mobilize public sentiment against the slave trade by distributing disturbing images of the Middle Passage. In 1789, it circulated a graphic rendition of an average “African ship” that “crowded” hundreds of people below deck. As anyone could see, these conditions were simply inhumane. The group hoped that Congress would agree. Yet Deep South masters were enraged, threatening disunion if abolition guided national policy. The memorial was buried in committee. In subsequent petition campaigns, abolitionists toned down their rhetoric and focused on lesser measures (such as preventing Americans from trading slaves to foreign nations). The lesson: American abolitionists had to overcome political fears about disunion as well as proslavery arguments about bondage’s economic importance. Once again, abolitionists learned that they were up against a lot.
Abolitionism at one hundred
In the century since four antislavery Quakers had signed the Germantown Protest, abolitionism had developed into an organized movement with a coherent agenda, transnational centers of operation in London and Philadelphia, and a pantheon of recognizable reformers. Drawing strength from religious teachings, slave uprisings, international wars, black protest, and revolutionary philosophy, abolitionism put bondage on the defensive in Atlantic society—a nearly unthinkable thing a century earlier. Focusing on the rights of enslaved people and the injustice of slaveholding, abolitionists became known as change agents who were willing to agitate for emancipation in both political and social venues.
And yet, abolition’s first century also showed that slavery was a thoroughly resilient institution that would not go away easily. To end bondage, abolitionists would have to keep agitating.