Ch.12 Section 1

The Underground railroad

Abolitionists established a network of routes and risked their lives to help African Americans escape slavery.

The Grimke Sisters

Among the first women who out publicly against slavery were Sarah and Angelina Grimke. Born in SOuth CArolina to a wealthy slaveholding family, the sisters moved to Philadelphia in 1832. In the North, the Grimke sisters lectured and wrote against slavery. The sisters persuaded their mother to give them their share of the family inheritance. Instead of money or land they asked for several slave workers, whome they freed immediately.

Harriet Tubman

Born as a slave in Maryland, Harriet worked in plantaion fields until she was nearl 30 years old. Then she made her break for freedom, escaping to the North with the help of the Underground Railroad. Settling in Philadelphia, Tubman met many abolitionists who shared her desire to bring Southern slaves to the North. Tubman helped free over 70 people including her parents this gave her the title "Moses of her people."

Frederick Douglass

For 16 years, Douglass edited an antislavery newspaper called the North Star. Douglass won admiration as a powerful speaker and writer. In 1847 friends helped Douglass purchase his freedom from the slaveholder in MAryland from whomme he had fled.

William Loyd Garrison

Fought strongly for the right of African AMericans to be free. On one ocasion Garrison was present when Frederick Douglass spoke to to a white audience about life as a slave. Garrison shared Douglass' outrage at the notion that people could be bought and sold like objects. The spirit of reform that swept through the United States in the early 1800s was not limited to improving education and expanding the arts. It also included the efforts of abolitionists who worked to end or abolish slavery. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the delagates had reached a compromise on the difficult issues, agreeing to let each state decide whether to allow slavery.

African American Abolitioniats

In 1827 SAmuel Cornish and John Russwurm started the country's first African American newspaper, Freedoms Journal. DAvid Walker of Boston published an impassioned argument against slavery, challenging African Americans to rebel and overthrow slavery by force.

The Movement Changes

Reformers realized that the gradual approach to ending slavery had failed. The number of enslaved African Americans increased more steadily as well because of the cotton boom in the Deep South plantation owners were more slave labor dependent.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Required all citizens to help catch runaways. Anyone who aided a fugitive could be fined imprisoned. People ion the South believed the law would force Northerners to recognize the rights of Southerners. Instead, enforcement of the law led to moutning anger in the North, convicting more people of the evils of slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison cont.

Stimulated the groth of the antislavery movement. In 1829 Garrison left Massachusetts to work for the country's leading antislavery newspaper in Baltimore. Impatient with the paper's moderate position, Garrison returned to Boston in 1831 to found his own paper, The Liberator. Garrison was one of the first white abolitionists to call for the "immediate and complete emacipation [freeing]" of enslaved people. Garrison was heard. He attracted enough followers to start the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and the American Anti-Slavery Society the next year.

Resistance to the Law

The Underground Railroad, a network of free African American and whites, helped runaways make their way to freedom. Antislavery groups tried to rescue African Americans who were captured. In Boston, members of one such group followed federal agents shouting , "Slave hunter--there go the slave hunters,"

American Colonization Society

The first large-scale antislavery effort was aimed at resettling African Americans in Africa or the Caribbean. The American Colonization Society, formed in 1816 by a group of white Virginians, attempted to free enslaved workers gradually by buying them from slaveholders and sending them abroad to start new lives. The society raised enough money from private donors,Congress, and a few state legilatures to send several groups of African Americans out of the country. Some went to the west coast of Africa, where the society had aquired land for a colony. In 1822 the first African American settlers arrived in this colony called Liberia, Latin for "place of freedom." In 1847 Liberia became an independant country. American emigration to Liberia continued until he Civil war. SOme 12 to 20 thousand African Americans setled in the new country between 1822 and 1865. The american Colonization Society did not halt te growth of slavery. The number of enslaved people continued to increade at a steady pace, and the society could only resettle a small number of African Americans.

New Abolitionists

The issue of SLavery became the most pressing social issue for reformers, Begining in the 1830s

Sojourner Truth

was an African American who escaped slavery in New York and gained freedom within a years time.