How many people stopped slavery?

Answer 1

As with most social movements, there was no one person who stopped slavery. It was a movement that grew slowly and steadily. It was led by a number of inspiring men and women (called "Abolitionists") who believed slavery was wrong and spoke out against it all over the country. Among the best known abolitionists were William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, but there were many others. The Quaker church played an active role, and so did a number of individual educators, journalists, authors (Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a famous book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" about the horrors of life as a slave) and ordinary citizens, most of whom came from the Northern states. Gradually, the anti-slavery movement grew, and more people became convinced that they too should work to abolish slavery.

The most important person who became persuaded to end slavery was the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. He had not always held that opinion. While he was never entirely comfortable with slavery, he was willing at first to compromise and allow states that already had slaves to continue, but to discourage slavery in the new states that were joining the union. Ultimately, Lincoln reached the decision that slavery should not be practiced in the United States at all, and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. This executive order did not immediately free all the slaves, but it led to the end of slavery by the passage of a constitutional amendment in 1865.

It should also be noted that from the time of the creation of the United States, opinions about slavery were divided, even among the founding fathers and America's earliest leaders. Thomas Jefferson asserted in the 'Declaration of Independence' that "All men are created equal," but unfortunately, Jefferson was a southerner who owned slaves, and there is little evidence that he applied his belief about equality to the slaves of that time. George Washington, known to be magnanimous and a believer in tolerance, also grew up in a family that owned slaves, and while he seemed to regard them with compassion, he did not demand an end to slavery while he was president (to his credit, he eventually did free his own slaves, and historians have noted that his family treated their slaves well). As president, Washington's record was mixed-- he banned slavery in the Northwest Territories, but he also allowed slave-owners to re-capture their slaves if they tried to escape.

More outspoken on the matter was Washington's and Jefferson's contemporary, author and physician Benjamin Rush, who stated that "Slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity. . . . It is rebellion against the authority of a common Father. It is [encroaching on the authority] of the great Sovereign of the universe who has solemnly claimed an exclusive property in the souls of men."

There were also some more nuanced views, such as that of lexicographer and author Noah Webster: he was personally opposed to slavery, but felt (as Lincoln once did) that it was wrong to interfere with the south or tell others that they were sinners if they didn't speak out against slavery. Webster wrote about his own opposition to slavery, but felt the leaders of the abolitionist movement had become increasingly strident, and he disassociated himself from it. But he never stopped believing that slavery was wrong.

To sum up, while large numbers of Americans (mostly in the south, but some in the middle-Atlantic states) accepted the idea of slavery or said nothing against it, many other Americans (both famous and every-day citizens) actively spoke out, litigated, wrote, prayed, and participated in protests until finally slavery came to an end in 1865.