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Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14 1811 on Litchfield, Connecticut and she died un Hartford on July 1 1896. Stowe achieved national fame for her antislavery novel, « Oncle Tom’s cabin » which fanned the flames before the civil war. Oncle Tom’s cabin was published as a book and became quickly a best seller. This  Book is an antislavery novel, this novel had a profond effect on attitude toward African Americans and slavery in the united states of america and is said to have «  helped lay the groundwork for civil war. » This novel antislavery  widespread anger in the south of united states of America but in american north the novel play an important rôle a promoted the antislavery cause

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The Reverend James Ramsay was born in 1733 and he died in 1789. He was a ship's surgeon, Anglican priest, and leading abolitionist. He has written many books like « An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies » where he explains an adventure on a ship.

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John Brown was born in 1810. His slave name was Fed. He born as a slave because his parents were slaves in Virginia. He tryed to escape in England with Glasgow's help. He succeded at 40 years and rebuild his life. John wrote many books like Slave Life in Georgia in 1855. He died at 66 years in 1876 as a carpenter.

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David Walker is known for his speech " An appeal to the coulored citizens of the world"
The purpose of this document was encourage all the people to do something, have an active role, fighting against their opression.
With this, he create an union against slavery, to make people realizing how slavery is awful, as the moral and religious failure.

In addition of this, he challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He had as target some pro-colonization association, like the "American colonization society" who deport free blacks from USA to a colony in Africa. He wrote also against "published assertions of black inferiority", a text wrote by Thomas Jefferson. As Walker explained: "I say, that unless we refute mr Jefferson arguments respecting us, we will only etablish them".

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Henry David Thoreau was a historian, philosopher, poet and abolitionist. He was born in 12 July 1817 at Concord (Massachusetts) in United States where he died in 1862. Thoreau is fascinated by the natural phenomena and the forms of life, in particular the botany, and he speaks about it in his newspaper, which covers more than about twenty years. He was against slavery and he shows it in his essay « Civil Disobedience » which inspired Martin Luther King to fight against the segregation of black people. He publicly supported actions of John Brown to try to end slavery.

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John Brown was born on may 9,1800, in Torrigton, Connecticut, in a Calvinist household and would go on to a large family or his own. Facing much financial difficulty throughout his life, he was also an ardent abolitionist who worked with the Underground Railroad and the League of Gileadites, among other endeavors. He believe un using violent means to end slavery, and, with the intent of inspiring a slave insurrection, eventually led an unsucceful raid on the Harpers Ferry armory. Brown went to trial and was execute on December 2, 1859.

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Henry David Thoreau was born on the 12th July of 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts.
During his life he has been teacher, philosopher and author.
He has written the Civil Disobedience which has inspired the civil rights movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther KING Jr.

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Frederick Douglass is a famous abolitionist who was born in 1818 in Maryland as a slave and died in 1895 in Washington DC as a free man. He was an reformer, an writor, an orator and a statesman. In 1845, he wrote his first autobiography, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was a success. In 1855, he wrote Bondage and my freedom, and after the Civil War, he wrote Life and times of Frederick Douglass. He became the first African American nominated for Vice President.

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She was born in born January 29,1822
She's dead in March 10,1913 (pneumonia)
She born a slave in Dorchester Country,Maryland.
She was an American abolitionist and political activist into slavery.
She served as an armed scout and spy for the US army.
She was an activist in the struggle for woman’s suffrage.
She’s the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war.
In the raid at Combahee Ferry, she liberated more than 700 slaves.
After she died she became an icon of courage and freedom.

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William Wells Brown, born the 6 November 1814 to Lexington in Kentucky. He has born as a slave. After 20 years of enslaving he just escapes from the plantation to go to north United States. He encountered a Quaker named Wells Brown who gave him his name. After that he went to England and read a lot of book about slavery and abolitionism, then he decided to join this fight and became an abolitionist and struggled for it. He was a writer who spoke a lot of about slavery and the condition of slaves. He finally died in Chelsea the 6 November 1884.

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Born in 1800 and dead in 1859, John Brown was a white American abolitionist who believed in the violent overthrow of the slavery system. Brown and his small "army" led many attacks on pro-slavery residents. He became a hero in the eyes of Nothern extremists. During à raid which aimed to arm a slave rebellion, he was captured and later hanged, but he became an anti-slavery icon.

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When Europeans first colonized the North American continent, the land was vast, the work was harsh, and there was a severe shortage of labor. White bond servants, paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not solve the problem. Tensions between settlers and former indentured servants increased the pressure to find a new labor source. Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a solution-and yet paradoxically a new problem-to the New World. Slaves proved to be economical on large farms where labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, sugar and rice, could be grown.

By the end of the American Revolution, slavery became largely unprofitable in the North and was slowly dying out. Even in the South the institution was becoming less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop. Due to the decline of the tobacco market in the 1760s and 1770s many farmers switched from producing tobacco to wheat, which required less labor leading to surplus of slaves. However, in 1793 northerner Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; this device made it possible for textile mills to use the type of cotton most easily grown in the lower South. The invention of the cotton gin brought about a robust internal slave trade. As the lower South became more established in cotton production the region required more slave labor, which they received from upper South slaveowners looking to offload their surplus of slaves. In 1808, the United States banned the international slave trade (the importation of slaves), which only increased the demand for domestically traded slaves. In the upper South the most profitable cash crop was not was not an agricultural product but the sale of human lives. Although some southerners owned no slaves at all, by 1860 the South's "peculiar institution" was inextricably tied to the region's economy and society.

Torn between the economic benefits of slavery and the moral and constitutional issues it raised, white southerners grew more and more defensive of the institution. They argued that black people, like children, were incapable of caring for themselves and that slavery was a benevolent institution that kept them fed, clothed, and occupied, and exposed them to Christianity. Most northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery. The voices of Northern abolitionists, such as Boston editor and publisher William Lloyd Garrison, became increasingly violent. Educated blacks such as escaped-slave Frederick Douglass wrote eloquent and heartfelt attacks on the institution and spoke on abolitionist circuits about their experience enslaved.

Anti-slavery proponents organized the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape north to freedom. Although fictionalized, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 immensely popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin opened northerner's eyes to some of the horrors of slavery and refuted the southern myth that blacks were happy as slaves.

In reality, treatment of slaves ranged from mild and paternalistic to cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not unusual. In 1857 the United States Supreme Court in the decision Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that all blacks, whether free or enslaved, lacked the rights to citizenship and thus could not sue in federal court. The Supreme Court took their decision a step further by deeming that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the earlier Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Supreme Court also ruled that popular sovereignty, where new territories could vote on entering the union as a free or slave state, lacked constitutional legitimacy. Thus, slaves had no legal means of protesting their treatment. Due to the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and other earlier slave uprisings, Southerners feared servile insurrection above all else but this was rare. Instead as a form of resistance slaves would pretend illness, organize slowdowns, sabotage farm machinery, and sometimes commit arson or murder. Running away for short periods of time was common.

The outbreak of the Civil War forever changed the future of the American nation and perhaps most notably the future of Americans held in bondage. The war began as a struggle to preserve the Union, not a struggle to free the slaves but as the war dragged on it became increasingly clear to President Abraham Lincoln the best way to force the seceded states into submission was to undermine their labor supply and economic engine which was sustaining the south-slavery. Many slaves escaped to the North in the early years of the war, and several Union generals established contraband policies in the southern land that they conquered. Congress passed laws permitting the seizure of slaves from rebellious southerners as the rules of war allow for the seizure of property and the United States considered slaves property. On September 22, 1862, following the strategic Union victory at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln presented the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

This document decreed that, by the power of the United States armed forces, all slaves in states that were still in rebellion one hundred days after January 1, 1863 would be "thenceforward and forever free." Furthermore, Lincoln established an institution through which free blacks could join the U.S. Army, an unprecedented level of integration at that time. The United States Colored Troops (USCT) served on many battlefields, won numerous Medals of Honor, and ensured eventual Union victory in the war.

On December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, the United States adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed the practice of slavery.

Sources

Patricia L. Faust, ed., Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War, (Harper Perennial, 1991)

John S. Bowman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Civil War, (Dorset Press, 1992)

Bruce Catton, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, (Bonanza Books, 1982).

Further Reading

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A Brief History of Slavery in the United States

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The outbreak of the Civil War forever changed the future of the American nation and perhaps most notably the future of Americans held in bondage.

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Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was a born slave. He was separated from his mother when he was really young. At first, he worked as a domestic slave, ans then in shipyards and fields in the Maryland. He succeeded to escape when he was 20. Later, he published 3 autobiography.

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Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey also known as Frederick Douglass was born in 1817. This man was born a slave but he still managed to learn and flee. He will write during his life an autobiography dedicated to slavery: The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. He died on February 20, 1895 in Washington DC and was one of the greatest abolitionists of slavery.