abolition

n.

1. The act of doing away with or the state of being done away with; annulment.
2. Abolishment of slavery.

[Latin abolitiō, abolitiōn-, from abolitus, past participle of abolēre, to abolish. See abolish.]

abolitionary ab'o·li'tion·ar'y (-lĭsh'ə-nĕr'ē) adj.

noun

An often formal act of putting an end to: abolishment, abrogation, annihilation, annulment, cancellation, defeasance, invalidation, negation, nullification, voidance. Law avoidance, extinguishment. See continue/stop/pause.

n

Definition: annulling, formal act of putting an end to
Antonyms: confirmation, creation, establishment, institution, legalization, promotion, retention

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Origin: 1787

In the late eighteenth century, as slavery and the slave trade grew, so did the number of voices arguing against them. In the very year that the United States Constitution was drafted, with its euphemistic acceptance of slavery (slaves are designated as "all other persons" and counted in the census as three-fifths of a free person), a church synod in New York and Pennsylvania was calling for "the abolition of slavery." Before long the word abolition by itself came to mean the movement to end slavery. As arguments over slavery in the United States heated up in the early 1800s, so did the use and significance of abolition. In his 1845 autobiography, the escaped slave and renowned orator Frederick Douglass tells of the potency of the word for a twelve-year-old slave in Baltimore:

With the abolition of American slavery in 1865, this use of the word became just a historical footnote. Abolition could then have been taken up by the movement to abolish the sale of alcoholic beverages, but temperance was already doing that job.

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n.the action or an act of abolishing a system, practice, or institution: the abolition of slavery.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

From the 1830s until 1870, the abolitionist movement attempted to achieve immediate emancipation of all slaves and the ending of racial segregation and discrimination. Their propounding of these goals distinguished abolitionists from the broad-based political opposition to slavery's westward expansion that took form in the North after 1840 and raised issues leading to the Civil War. Yet these two expressions of hostility to slavery--abolitionism and Free-Soilism--were often closely related not only in their beliefs and their interaction but also in the minds of southern slaveholders who finally came to regard the North as united against them in favor of black emancipation.

Although abolitionist feelings had been strong during the American Revolution and in the Upper South during the 1820s, the abolitionist movement did not coalesce into a militant crusade until the 1830s. In the previous decade, as much of the North underwent the social disruption associated with the spread of manufacturing and commerce, powerful evangelical religious movements arose to impart spiritual direction to society. By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person's responsibility to uphold God's will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism as well as to such other reforming crusades as temperance, pacifism, and women's rights. By the early 1830s, Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually nourished by revivalism, had taken up the cause of "immediate emancipation."

In early 1831, Garrison, in Boston, began publishing his famous newspaper, the Liberator, supported largely by free African-Americans, who always played a major role in the movement. In December 1833, the Tappans, Garrison, and sixty other delegates of both races and genders met in Philadelphia to found the American Anti-Slavery Society, which denounced slavery as a sin that must be abolished immediately, endorsed nonviolence, and condemned racial prejudice. By 1835, the society had received substantial moral and financial support from African-American communities in the North and had established hundreds of branches throughout the free states, flooding the North with antislavery literature, agents, and petitions demanding that Congress end all federal support for slavery. The society, which attracted significant participation by women, also denounced the American Colonization Society's program of voluntary gradual emancipation and black emigration.

All these activities provoked widespread hostile responses from North and South, most notably violent mobs, the burning of mailbags containing abolitionist literature, and the passage in the U.S. House of Representatives of a "gag rule" that banned consideration of antislavery petitions. These developments, and especially the 1837 murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, led many northerners, fearful for their own civil liberties, to vote for antislavery politicians and brought important converts such as Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and Edmund Quincy to the cause.

But as antislavery sentiment began to appear in politics, abolitionists also began disagreeing among themselves. By 1840 Garrison and his followers were convinced that since slavery's influence had corrupted all of society, a revolutionary change in America's spiritual values was required to achieve emancipation. To this demand for "moral suasion," Garrison added an insistence on equal rights for women within the movement and a studious avoidance of "corrupt" political parties and churches. To Garrison's opponents, such ideas seemed wholly at odds with Christian values and the imperative to influence the political and ecclesiastical systems by nominating and voting for candidates committed to abolitionism. Disputes over these matters split the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, leaving Garrison and his supporters in command of that body; his opponents, led by the Tappans, founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Meanwhile, still other foes of Garrison launched the Liberty party with James G. Birney as its presidential candidate in the elections of 1840 and 1844.

Although historians debate the extent of the abolitionists' influence on the nation's political life after 1840, their impact on northern culture and society is undeniable. As speakers, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Lucy Stone in particular became extremely well known. In popular literature the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell circulated widely, as did the autobiographies of fugitive slaves such as Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and Solomon Northrup. Abolitionists exercised a particularly strong influence on religious life, contributing heavily to schisms that separated the Methodists (1844) and Baptists (1845), while founding numerous independent antislavery "free churches." In higher education abolitionists founded Oberlin College, the nation's first experiment in racially integrated coeducation, the Oneida Institute, which graduated an impressive group of African-American leaders, and Illinois's Knox College, a western center of abolitionism.

Within the Garrisonian wing of the movement, female abolitionists became leaders of the nation's first independent feminist movement, instrumental in organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Although African-American activists often complained with reason of the racist and patronizing behavior of white abolitionists, the whites did support independently conducted crusades by African-Americans to outlaw segregation and improve education during the 1840s and 1850s. Especially after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, white abolitionists also protected African-Americans threatened with capture as escapees from bondage, although blacks themselves largely managed the Underground Railroad.

By the later 1850s, organized abolitionism in politics had been subsumed by the larger sectional crisis over slavery prompted by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Most abolitionists reluctantly supported the Republican party, stood by the Union in the secession crisis, and became militant champions of military emancipation during the Civil War. The movement again split in 1865, when Garrison and his supporters asserted that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery made continuation of the American Anti-Slavery Society unnecessary. But a larger group led by Wendell Phillips, insisting that only the achievement of complete political equality for all black males could guarantee the freedom of the former slaves, successfully prevented Garrison from dissolving the society. It continued until 1870 to demand land, the ballot, and education for the freedman. Only when the Fifteenth Amendment extending male suffrage to African-Americans was passed did the society declare its mission completed. Traditions of racial egalitarianism begun by abolitionists lived on, however, to inspire the subsequent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

Bibliography:

Blanche Glassman Hirsh, The Feminist Abolitionists (1978); Benjamin Quarles, The Black Abolitionists (1970); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1986).

Author:

James Brewer Stewart

See also American Colonization Society; Civil War; Dred Scott Case; Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment; Free-Soil Party; Fugitive Slave Law; Gag Rule; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Liberty Party; Quakers; Radicalism; Republican Party; Second Great Awakening; Slavery; Underground Railroad; and entries for individual abolitionists.

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The destruction, annihilation, abrogation, or extinguishment of anything, but especially things of a permanent nature — such as institutions, usages, or customs, as in the abolition of slavery.

In U.S. legal history, the concept of abolition generally refers to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement to abolish the slavery of African Americans. As a significant political force in the pre-Civil War United States, the abolitionists had a great effect on the U.S. legal and political landscape. Their consistent efforts to end the institution of slavery culminated in 1865 with the ratification of the Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. The abolitionist ranks encompassed many different factions and people of different backgrounds and viewpoints, including European and African Americans, radicals and moderates. The motives of the abolitionists ran a broad spectrum, from those who opposed slavery as unjust and inhumane, to those whose objections were purely economic, focused on the effects that an unpaid Southern workforce had on wages and prices in the North.

Efforts to abolish slavery in America began well before the Revolutionary War and were influenced by similar movements in Great Britain and France. By the 1770s and 1780s, many antislavery societies, largely dominated by Quakers, had sprung up in the North. Early American leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Thomas Paine made known their opposition to slavery.

The early abolitionists played an important role in outlawing slavery in Northern states by the early nineteenth century. Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777, and Massachusetts declared it inconsistent with its new state constitution, ratified in 1780. Over the next three decades, other Northern states, including Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, passed gradual emancipation laws that freed all future children of slaves. By 1804, every Northern state had enacted some form of emancipation law.

In the South, where slavery played a far greater role in the economy, emancipation moved at a much slower pace. By 1800, all Southern states except Georgia and South Carolina had passed laws that eased the practice of private manumission — or the freeing of slaves by individual slaveholders. Abolitionists won a further victory in the early 1800s when the United States outlawed international trade in slaves. However, widespread smuggling of slaves continued.

During the first three decades of the 1800s, abolitionists continued to focus largely on gradual emancipation. As the nation expanded westward, they also opposed the introduction of slavery into the western territories. Although abolitionists had won an early victory on this front in 1787, when they succeeded in prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory, their efforts in the 1800s were not as completely successful. Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (3 Stat. 545), for example, it was agreed that slavery would be prohibited only in areas of the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri's southern boundary, except for Missouri itself, which would be admitted to the Union as a slave state. Slavery in the territories remained one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Beginning in the 1830s, evangelical Christian groups, particularly in New England, brought a new radicalism to the cause of abolition. They focused on the sinfulness of slavery and sought to end its practice by appealing to the consciences of European Americans who supported slavery. Rather than endorsing a gradual emancipation, these new abolitionists called for the immediate and complete emancipation of slaves without compensation to slaveowners. Leaders of this movement included William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator; Frederick Douglass, a noted African American writer and orator; the sisters Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké, lecturers for the American Anti-Slavery Society and pioneers for women's rights; Theodore Dwight Weld, author of an influential antislavery book, American Slavery As It Is (1839); and later, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was another important abolitionist tract.

In 1833, this new generation of abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). The organization grew quickly, particularly in the North, and by 1840 had reached a height of 1,650 chapters and an estimated 130,000 to 170,000 members. Nevertheless, abolitionism remained an unpopular cause even in the North, and few mainstream politicians openly endorsed it.

To achieve its goals, the AAS undertook a number of large projects, many of which were frustrated by Southern opposition. For example, the organization initiated a massive postal campaign designed to appeal to the moral scruples of Southern slaveowners and voters. The campaign flooded the South with antislavery tracts sent through the mails. Although a law that would have excluded antislavery literature from the mails was narrowly defeated in Congress in 1836, pro-slavery forces, with the help of President Andrew Jackson's administration and local postmasters, effectively ended the dissemination of abolitionist literature in the South. The AAS was similarly frustrated when it petitioned Congress on a variety of subjects related to slavery. Congressional gag rules rendered the many abolitionist petitions impotent. These rules of legislative procedure allowed Congress to table and effectively ignore the antislavery petitions.

By the 1840s, the evangelical abolitionist movement had begun to break up into different factions. These factions differed on the issue of gradual versus radical change and on the inclusion of other causes, including women's rights, in their agendas. Some abolitionists decided to form a political party. The Liberty party, as they named it, nominated James G. Birney for U.S. president in 1840 and 1844. When differences later led to the dissolution of the Liberty party, many of its members created the Free Soil party, which took as its main cause opposition to slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico. They were joined by defecting Democrats who were disgruntled with the increasing domination of Southern interests in their party. In 1848, the Free Soil party nominated as its candidate for U.S. president Martin Van Buren, who had served as the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841, but Van Buren did not win. (Zachary Taylor won the election.)

After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (9 Stat. 462), which required Northern states to return escaped slaves and imposed penalties on people who aided such runaways, abolitionists became actively involved in the Underground Railroad, a secretive network that provided food, shelter, and direction to escaped slaves seeking freedom in the North. This network was largely maintained by free African Americans and is estimated to have helped fifty thousand to one hundred thousand slaves to freedom. Harriet Tubman, an African American and ardent abolitionist, was one organizer of the Underground Railroad. During the 1850s, she bravely traveled into Southern states to help other African Americans escape from slavery, just as she had escaped herself.

Whereas the vast majority of abolitionists eschewed violence, John Brown actively participated in it. In response to attacks led by pro-slavery forces against the town of Lawrence, Kansas, Brown, the leader of a Free Soil militia, led a reprisal attack that killed five pro-slavery settlers in 1856. Three years later, he undertook an operation that he hoped would inspire a massive slave rebellion. Brown and twenty-one followers began by capturing the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Federal forces under Robert E. Lee promptly recaptured the arsenal, and Brown was hanged shortly thereafter, becoming a martyr for the cause.

In 1854, abolitionists and Free Soilers joined with a variety of other interests to form the Republican party, which successfully stood Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860. Although the party took a strong stand against the introduction of slavery into the territories, it did not propose the more radical option of immediate emancipation. In fact, slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. Not a true abolitionist at the start of his presidency, Lincoln became increasingly receptive to antislavery opinion. In 1863, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in areas still engaged in revolt against the Union. The proclamation served as an important symbol of the Union's new commitment to ending slavery. Lincoln later supported the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished slavery in the United States.

After the war, former abolitionists, including radical Republicans such as Senator Charles Sumner (R-Mass.), continued to lobby for constitutional amendments that would protect the rights of the newly freed slaves, including the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. This amendment guaranteed citizenship to former slaves and declared that no state could "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws." Former abolitionists also lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully, for land redistribution that would have given ex-slaves a share of their former owners' land.

See: Compromise of 1850; Dred Scott v. Sandford; Emancipation Proclamation; Fourteenth Amendment; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Missouri Compromise of 1820; Prigg v. Pennsylvania; Slavery; Thirteenth Amendment.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - afskaffelse, ophævelse, nedlæggelse

Nederlands (Dutch)
afschaffing

Français (French)
n. - abolition

Deutsch (German)
n. - Abschaffung, Beseitigung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κατάργηση, ακύρωση, διαγραφή

Italiano (Italian)
abolizione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - abolição (f)

Русский (Russian)
отмена, аннулирование

Español (Spanish)
n. - supresión, abolición

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - upphävande, slopande

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
废除, 消灭, 废止, 黑奴制度的废除

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 廢除, 消滅, 廢止, 黑奴制度的廢除

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 폐지, 노예 제도 폐지

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 廃止, 全廃, 奴隷制度廃止, 撤廃

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) إبطال, إلغاء‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ביטול, חיסול‬

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