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Newsela | Primary Sources: Olaudah Equiano describes the Middle Passage, 1780s

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Taken from his country, robbed of his culture, and separated from his family

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Newsela | Time Machine (1846): A slave auction in New Orleans

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Newsela | Time Machine (1853): "Twelve Years a Slave," the case of Solomon Northup

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Newsela | Primary Sources: Excerpts from Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative, Part One

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Newsela | Primary Sources: A Free Man's Letter to a Former Slaveowner, 1865

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Freed slave sends letter to former "master" in 1865.

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Newsela | African-American and Native American Resistance in 1800

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Despite the colonists' fight for freedom during the American Revolution, they continued to enslave African-Americans and force Native Americans from their homes.

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Newsela | Expansion & Reform: The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War

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The role of the Underground Railroad in the Civil War

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Newsela | Primary Sources: Conductor on the Underground Railroad Part One

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Abolitionist John P. Parker helped more than 300 slaves gain freedom

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela | Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"

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Newsela | The Abolitionists: Frederick Douglass

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Famous intellectual who advocated for women's rights and the opposition of slavery

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Newsela | Famous Speeches: Frederick Douglass' "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery"

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Newsela | Civil Rights Activists: Harriet Tubman

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Newsela | Civil Rights Activists: Harriet Tubman

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Newsela | Expansion & Reform: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery

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How black women helped to shape black freedom.

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Newsela | The Amistad Case: A Quest for Freedom

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Nat Turner was an early leader of the abolitionist movement to end slavery.

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Nat Turner was an early leader of the abolitionist movement to end slavery.

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Radical abolitionist who believed in using violence to overthrow slavery

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Radical abolitionist who believed in using violence to overthrow slavery

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Newsela | Slavery and Imperialism Reach Terrible New Heights in Africa

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Sub-Saharan Africa in the Era of Global Unification

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Newsela | Civil War: A Defining Moment in U.S. History

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Newsela | Black Soldiers in the Civil War

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Newsela | Presidential and Radical Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War

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Three new changes to the Constitution gave African-Americans more rights after the Civil War: the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

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Newsela | Military Leaders: Robert E. Lee

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Newsela | As the U.S. Grew, the North-South Dispute over Slavery Led to Civil War

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The issue of slavery did not divide the United States at first. But the number of slaves grew rapidly, and the country began to expand. Would western territories have slaves? Tensions mounted.

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Newsela | Laws from Civil War stopped 6.1 million from voting

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Out-of-date laws that prevented U.S. citizens from voting in the 2016 election.

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Underground Railroad
History >> Civil War

The Underground Railroad was a term used for a network of people, homes, and hideouts that slaves in the southern United States used to escape to freedom in the Northern United States and Canada.

Was it a railroad?

The Underground Railroad wasn't really a railroad. It was a name given to the way that people escaped. No one is sure where it originally got its name, but the "underground" part of the name comes from its secrecy and the "railroad" part of the name comes from the way it was used to transport people.

Conductors and Stations

The Underground Railroad used railroad terms in its organization. People who led the slaves along the route were called conductors. Hideouts and homes where slaves hid along the way were called stations or depots. Even people who helped by giving money and food were sometimes called stockholders.

Levi Coffin House
from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources

Who worked on the railroad?

Many people from various backgrounds worked as conductors and provided safe places for the slaves to stay along the route. Some of the conductors were former slaves such asHarriet Tubman who escaped using the Underground Railroad and then returned to help more slaves escape. Many white people who felt that slavery was wrong also helped, including Quakers from the north. They often provided hideouts in their homes as well as food and other supplies.

Harriet Tubman
by H. B. Lindsley

If it wasn't a railroad, how did the people actually travel?

Traveling on the Underground Railroad was difficult and dangerous. Slaves would often travel by foot at night. They would sneak from one station to the next, hoping not to get caught. Stations were usually around 10 to 20 miles apart. Sometimes they would have to wait at one station for a while until they knew the next station was safe and ready for them.

Was it dangerous?

Yes, it was very dangerous. Not only for the slaves who were trying to escape, but also for those trying to help them. It was against the law to help escaped slaves and, in many southern states, conductors could be put to death by hanging.

When did the Underground Railroad run?

The Underground Railroad ran from around 1810 to the 1860s. It was at its peak right before the Civil War in the 1850s.

A Ride for Liberty - The Fugitive Slaves
by Eastman Johnson

How many people escaped?

Since the slaves escaped and lived in secrecy, no one is quite sure how many escaped. There are estimates that say over 100,000 slaves escaped over the history of the railroad, including 30,000 that escaped during the peak years before the Civil War.

Fugitive Slave Act

In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in the United States. This made it a law that runaway slaves found in free states had to be returned to their owners in the south. This made it even more difficult for the Underground Railroad. Now slaves needed to be transported all the way to Canada in order to be safe from being captured again.

Abolitionists

Abolitionists were people who thought slavery should be made illegal and all current slaves should be set free. The abolitionist movement started with the Quakers in the 17th century who felt that slavery was un-Christian. The state of Pennsylvania was the first state to abolish slavery in 1780.

Lewis Hayden House by Ducksters
The Lewis Hayden House served as a stop
on the Underground Railroad.

Interesting Facts about the Underground Railroad

Slave owners really wanted Harriet Tubman, a famous conductor for the railroad, arrested. They offered a reward of $40,000 for her capture. That was a LOT of money back then.

One hero of the Underground Railroad was Levi Coffin, a Quaker who is said to have helped around 3,000 slaves gain their freedom.

The most common route for people to escape was north into the northern United States or Canada, but some slaves in the deep south escaped to Mexico or Florida.

Canada was often called the "Promised Land" by slaves. The Mississippi River was called the "River Jordan" from the Bible.

In keeping with the railroad terminology, escaping slaves were often referred to as passengers or cargo.

Activities

Overview Major Events Civil War Life

People Battles

Works Cited

History >> Civil War

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Underground Railroad History >> Civil War The Underground Railroad was a term used for a network of people, homes, and hideouts that slaves in the southern United States used to escape to freedom in the Northern United States and Canada. Was it a railroad? The Underground Railroad wasn't really a railroad.

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Kids learn about the history of the American Civil War including causes, timeline, generals, battles, daily life, Abraham Lincoln, the North vs. South, border states, and slavery. Educational articles for students, schools, and teachers.

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slavery, historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States. Since the 20th cent., the term slavery has been more broadly understood as including forced labor generally.

History

Although it is commonly held that slavery was rare among primitive pastoral peoples and that it appeared in full form only with the development of an agricultural economy, there are numerous instances that contradict this belief. Domestic slavery and sometimes concubine slavery appeared among the nomadic Arabs, among Native Americans primarily devoted to hunting, and among the seafaring Vikings. Some ascribe the beginnings of slavery to war and the consequent subjection of one group by another. Slavery as a result of debt, however, existed in very early times, and some African peoples have had the custom of putting up wives and children as hostages for an obligation; if the obligation was unfulfilled, the hostages became permanent slaves.

Slavery in the Ancient World

The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. References to it appear in the ancient Babylonian code of Hammurabi. Its form and nature varied greatly in ancient society. It seems to have been common in the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations and in ancient Persia. It may not have been common in ancient Egypt until the New Kingdom or later, and the belief that slaves built the pyramids is probably incorrect. The institution was familiar to the ancient Hebrews, according to passages in the Bible.

Slavery was an established institution in the Greece of Homer's time, and a large portion of the population of the Greek city-states in later days were of the servile class. There were domestic slaves, agricultural slaves, and artisans and workers. In Greece, although not quite as commonly as in Asia Minor, there were also public slaves, for example, those belonging to the temples. In general it is thought that slaves in the Greek city-states were relatively well treated, and there were laws protecting them against excessive cruelty or abuse. However, the slaves were regarded as property and had no rights in courts of law. Slaves could obtain their freedom by buying it, by being granted it in the owner's will, or as a reward for outstanding service.

Slavery in early Roman history seems to have been of the same type as in Greece, but by the 1st cent. BC, as the Roman Empire continued to expand, a form of agricultural slavery called estate slavery was introduced on a wide scale; in this form agriculture was pursued by large numbers of slaves in an impersonal relationship with the landowner, who had practically absolute power over them. The increasing wealth of Rome led to an expansion in domestic slaves, and the servile class grew to great numbers. They were employed in the theater, in gladiatorial combats, and, to some extent, in prostitution. Most of the slaves were foreign, and some were highly educated and were employed as instructors. Having a large retinue of slaves became one of the prime marks of luxury, and exotic, especially Asian, slaves were in great demand. As the number of conquered provinces grew, so did the slave supply. Consequently, manumission (emancipation from slavery) was common, and freedmen became a significant factor in the Roman social system. The slave had almost no legal status, although custom mitigated against extreme brutality; the slave could testify against his or her master only in a very limited number of serious crimes (adultery, incest, and, later, lese majesty). As the Roman expansion abated, conditions of slavery improved somewhat.

Slavery after the Fall of the Roman Empire

The introduction of Christianity toward the end of the Roman Empire had no effect on the abolition of slavery, since the church at that time did not oppose the institution. However, a change in economic life set in and resulted in the gradual disappearance of the agricultural slaves, who became, for all practical purposes, one with the coloni (tenant farmers who were technically free but were in fact bound to the land by debts). This process helped prepare the way for an economy in which the agricultural slave became the serf.

The semifreedom of serfdom was the dominant theme in the Middle Ages, although domestic slavery (and, to some extent, other forms) did not disappear. The church began to encourage manumission, while ignoring the fact that many slaves were attached to church officials and church property. Sale into slavery continued to be an extreme punishment for serious crimes.

Slavery flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and the pirates of the Mediterranean continued their custom of enslaving the victims of their raids. Islam, like Christianity, accepted slavery, and it became a standard institution in Muslim lands, where most slaves were African in origin. In Islamic life, keeping slaves was largely a sign of wealth, with slaves used as soldiers, concubines, cooks, and entertainers and to perform a variety of other functions. Another form of Muslim slavery was in the eunuch guardians of the harems; eunuchs had been widely known in Greek, Roman, and especially Byzantine times, but it was among the Muslims and in East Asia that they were to survive longest. In Muslim countries, slavery and freedom had a much more fluid boundary than in the West, with some slaves and former slaves reaching positions of great power and prestige.

In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages, although it still remained in such manifestations as the use of slaves on galleys. In Russia slavery persisted longer than in Western Europe, and indeed the serfs were pushed into the classification of slavery by Peter the Great.

Modern Slavery

A revolution in the institution of slavery came in the 15th and 16th cent. The explorations of the African coast by Portuguese navigators resulted in the exploitation of the African as a slave, and for nearly five centuries the predations of slave raiders along the coasts of Africa were to be a lucrative and important business conducted with appalling brutality. The British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese all engaged in the African slave trade. Although Africans were, as early as 1440, brought back to Portugal, and although subsequent importations were large enough to change distinctly the ethnography of that country, it was not in Europe that African slavery was to be most profitable and widespread, but in the Americas, where European exploitation began at the end of the 15th cent.

The first people to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese in the West Indies and Latin America were the Native Americans, but, because the majority of Native American slaves either revolted or escaped, other forms of forced labor, akin to serfdom, were introduced (see repartimiento and encomienda). The resistance of the Native Americans to slavery only increased the demand for Africans to replace them. Africans proved to be profitable laborers in the Caribbean islands and the lowlands of the South American mainland. In the colder highlands Native American slavery or quasi-slavery continued; long after the introduction of the first Africans the Paulistas (inhabitants of the city and state of São Paulo, Brazil) continued their slave raids against the Native Americans of the Brazilian hinterlands. But African slavery gradually became dominant.

The first Africans arrived in the British settlements on the Atlantic coast when they were traded or sold for supplies by a Dutch ship at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They may have been indentured servants, but by the 1640s lifetime servitude existed in Virginia, and slavery was acknowledged in the laws of Massachusetts. The raising of staple crops-coffee, tobacco, sugar, rice, and, much later, cotton-and the rise of the plantation economy made the importation of slaves from Africa particularly valuable in the Southern colonies of North America. The slave trade moved in a triangle; setting out from British ports, ships would transport various goods to the western coast of Africa, where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the West Indies or to the colonies of North or South America, where they were traded for agricultural staples for the return voyage back to England. Later, New England ports were included in this last leg. The number of slaves in the colonies increased until in some (notably French Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti) they constituted a majority of the population. In America by the date of the Declaration of Independence (1776) about one fifth of the population was enslaved.

The Antislavery Movement

The growth of humanitarian feeling during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th cent., the spread of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and others, and the increase of democratic sentiment led to a growing attack on the slave trade. The French Revolution had a great effect not only in the spread of agitation for human rights but more directly in the uprisings in Saint-Domingue and the establishment of Haitian independence. The movement for the abolition of slavery progressed slowly in the United States during the 18th and the first half of the 19th cent. Each of the Northern states gradually abolished the practice, but the prohibition of foreign slave trade promised in the Constitution (ratified in 1789) was not realized until 1808.

In Great Britain

British humanitarians who had incorporated the abolition of slavery into their conception of Christianity labored successfully to outlaw (1807) the British slave trade. These same men, especially William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, and Lord Brougham (Henry Peter Brougham), continued to work for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, which was finally effected with the Abolition Act of 1833. However, according to some writers, the British, in abolishing slavery, were primarily motivated by economic, not humanitarian, interests. These critics argued that, while the institution produced great wealth under the mercantilist system, it became unprofitable with the rise of industrial capitalism, which displaced mercantilism early in the 19th cent. At any rate, the abolition legislation of 1833 was followed by the gradual abolition of slavery in all lands under British control, principally by the device of invalidating the legality of slavery and removing its legal safeguards, usually by recompensing the owners.

In the United States

Slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early 19th cent. had disappeared. Its abolition had been hastened by the work of the Quakers, who, as in Great Britain, were staunchly opposed to the institution. In the South, however, where African slaves arrived in the tens of thousands from the late 17th through the early 18th cent., slavery came to be an integral part of the plantation system (especially after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793). From the late 18th cent. to the eve of the Civil War, more than a million slaves were moved from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, where many labored in the sugar and cotton fields and where, as pressures for profits increased, treatment of slaves was particularly brutal. The vast internal slave trade, which often tore slave families apart, was the South's second largest enterprise; only the plantation system itself surpassed it in size.

In the Northern United States, humanitarian principles led to the appearance of the abolitionists. They knew little of the actual conditions in the South and were fighting not for economic reform but for idealistic principles. The abolitionists in general tended to regard slavery as an unmitigated evil. The small Northern farmer also feared slavery as a system of cheap labor against which it was difficult to compete.

The South, eager to conserve the status quo, developed a bellicose defense of the system, which was hardened by such factors as the slave uprising led by Nat Turner, the troubles over fugitive slaves, and the very active propaganda against the South. The question, involving the very existence of Southern society as then organized, was the dominant one in U.S. history from 1830 to 1860. The political expression of the struggle was largely an attempt on the part of the South to maintain legislative guarantees of the system against the efforts of the abolitionists.

The chief question concerned the right of extension of slavery in the Western territories. This first became important in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. Many leading statesmen of the time sought an answer: Henry Clay, the great compromiser; Daniel Webster; John C. Calhoun; Stephen A. Douglas, who proposed popular sovereignty as means to decide the free or slave status of territories; and the uncompromising antislavery men, such as Charles Sumner and William H. Seward. The great compromises-the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act-were ultimately ineffective.

Sectional opposition, which involved even broader questions than slavery, including the constitutional issue of states' rights, grew more passionate as the two sections became more and more hostile. The Ostend Manifesto and the proposed annexation of Cuba, the fugitive slave laws, the operations of the Underground Railroad, the furor caused by the Dred Scott Case, the Wilmot Proviso-all heightened the tension. Sporadic armed conflict erupted in Kansas and in the Harpers Ferry raid of John Brown. The struggle became more clearly defined as the Republican party was formed with a definite antislavery platform.

In the victory of the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln (1860), the South saw a threat to Southern institutions, and the Southern states in an effort to secure those institutions resorted to secession and formed the Confederacy. The Civil War followed, and the victory of the North brought an end to slavery in the United States. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (issued in 1863, it declared all slaves in the Southern secessionist states free) was followed by other legislation, especially the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The end of the Civil War did not result in the integration of the former slaves into American life. Although there were gains toward this under Reconstruction, these were subsequently reversed by the Jim Crow laws. Generally easily identified by the color of their skin, African Americans were subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination practiced by most white Americans and legislated in many jurisdictions. This situation did not begin to be ameliorated until the civil-rights struggles of the 20th cent. (see civil rights; integration).

In the late 20th cent. the idea of compensating American blacks for their enslavement through some form of reparations won widespread support from African-American organizations and greater notice, although little support, from the broader society. The reparations movement was spurred in part by payments to Holocaust victims, to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and to some Native American tribes. Unlike these groups, however, reparations for slavery would be paid to individuals who are descendants by several generations of the victims, instead of to the victims or to a tribal people. Supporters of reparations, however, argue that contemporary African Americans continue to suffer from the vestiges of slavery and the discrimination that followed emancipation.

In Other Countries

In other countries emancipation of slaves was also a serious problem, but never to such an extent as in the United States, chiefly perhaps because the question of race prejudice was nowhere else so important. As the South American nations gained independence, they broadened their democratic principles to include absolute prohibition of slavery (Chile in 1823, Central America in 1824, Mexico in 1829, and Bolivia in 1831) or gradual emanicpation (Argentina in 1813, Colombia in 1814, and Venezuela in 1821). In Brazil the opposition of the planters to abolishing slavery was strong, and it was only after a series of rather ineffective measures that the slaves were emancipated in 1888. Opposition to that action helped to launch the revolution of 1889.

In later years the slave trade was conducted on the east coast of Africa, the market being in Muslim lands. Most antislavery efforts during the 19th cent. were directed against slave trading. Great Britain had passed antislave-trade laws in 1807 and 1811; the British attempted to enlist other nations in an effort to stop the slave trade, and several treaties for such a purpose were signed in the 1840s. However, the first important international agreement was not reached until the Berlin Conference in 1885, which bound the more important Muslim potentates to act against the slave traffic. This was supplemented by the even more significant Brussels Act of 1890, to which 18 states were signatory.

The emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was unable to prevent traffic from that land to Arabia, and a brisk trade went on over the Red Sea. International scandals occurred from time to time with regard to forced labor; three notable ones concerned the Congo, Liberia, and the Putumayo region of Peru in the 1930s (Native American servitude). The League of Nations adopted the resolutions of the International Slavery Convention of 1926, which was considered an advance over the Brussels Act of 1890; its main weakness was in not providing a permanent commission to oversee the total abolition of slavery. Slavery continued to exist in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and, despite increasingly successful efforts to abolish it, in various parts of Africa.

The United Nations has continued the efforts of the League of Nations to achieve worldwide abolition of slavery. The Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, contained a provision prohibiting slavery or trading in slaves. The Security Council in 1954 condemned systems of forced labor, particularly those employed as a means of political coercion. In 1956 a UN conference of plenipotentiaries adopted a convention on the abolition of slavery; an important aspect of the convention was the inclusion of other institutions similar to slavery as practices to be abolished. However, a report prepared for the United Nations in 1966 charged that slavery still existed in parts of Africa and Asia.

Although efforts to end involuntary servitude continued throughout the last half of the 20th cent., by the beginning of the 21st cent. forms of slavery, forced, or bonded labor still persisted in a number of countries, e.g., Mauritania, Niger, and Sudan in Africa, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, and parts of the Persian Gulf region in Asia, and the Amazon region of Brazil. More isolated instances have been occasionally revealed elsewhere, e.g., involving Asian immigrants in the United States. In many cases of forced labor, workers have been deceptively recruited in their home countries and then deprived of their passports and forced to work under altered contractual terms once they have arrived in a foreign country.

Bibliography

See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896, repr. 1970); A. H. Abel, The Slaveholding Indians (3 vol., 1915-25; repr. 1970); R. H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (1928, repr. 1968); U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929, repr. 1963); W. L. Westermann, Upon Slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt (1929); W. L. Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823-1838 (1926, repr. 1967), Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839-1865 (1929, repr. 1967), and British Slave Emancipation, 1838-1849 (1932, repr. 1967); E. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (4 vol., 1930-35; repr. 1965); G. MacMann, Slavery through the Ages (1938); R. Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856-1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (1939, repr. 1968); I. E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery (1942); E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944, repr. 1964); Fisk Univ., Social Science Institute, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves (1945, repr. 1970); G. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (tr. 1946; 2d ed. 1956, repr. 1963); I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (1949); K. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); C. W. W. Greenidge, Slavery (1958); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (1960, repr. 1968); S. O'Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today (1962); D. P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (with M. Cowley, 1962); J. Williamson, After Slavery (1965); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); A. Zilversmidt, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); S. M. Elkins, Slavery (2d ed. 1968); A. Weinstein, ed., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader (1968); L. Foner and E. D. Genovese, ed., Slavery in the New World (1969); D. L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (1970); R. S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970); J. Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle (1971); A. J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery (1971); R. W. Winks, Slavery: A Comparative Perspective (1972); R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); E. D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974); J. A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981); E. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); C. B. Dew, Bond of Iron (1994); H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (1997); P. D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998); K. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999); J. H. Franklin and L. Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (1999); R. L. Paquette and L. A. Ferleger, ed., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (2000); R. Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2001); I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003); A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005); S. Deyle, Carry Me Back (2005); E. Fox-Genovese and E. D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005); S. Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006); D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008); Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009); S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009); G. W. Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010); D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010); H. Zinn, The Other Civil War: Slavery and Struggle in Civil War America (2011); J. Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (2012); W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013); E. E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); R. S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (2014); G. Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (2014).

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slavery, historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
slavery, historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States. Since the 20th cent., the term slavery has been more broadly understood as including forced labor generally.

History

Although it is commonly held that slavery was rare among primitive pastoral peoples and that it appeared in full form only with the development of an agricultural economy, there are numerous instances that contradict this belief. Domestic slavery and sometimes concubine slavery appeared among the nomadic Arabs, among Native Americans primarily devoted to hunting, and among the seafaring Vikings. Some ascribe the beginnings of slavery to war and the consequent subjection of one group by another. Slavery as a result of debt, however, existed in very early times, and some African peoples have had the custom of putting up wives and children as hostages for an obligation; if the obligation was unfulfilled, the hostages became permanent slaves.

Slavery in the Ancient World

The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. References to it appear in the ancient Babylonian code of Hammurabi. Its form and nature varied greatly in ancient society. It seems to have been common in the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations and in ancient Persia. It may not have been common in ancient Egypt until the New Kingdom or later, and the belief that slaves built the pyramids is probably incorrect. The institution was familiar to the ancient Hebrews, according to passages in the Bible.

Slavery was an established institution in the Greece of Homer's time, and a large portion of the population of the Greek city-states in later days were of the servile class. There were domestic slaves, agricultural slaves, and artisans and workers. In Greece, although not quite as commonly as in Asia Minor, there were also public slaves, for example, those belonging to the temples. In general it is thought that slaves in the Greek city-states were relatively well treated, and there were laws protecting them against excessive cruelty or abuse. However, the slaves were regarded as property and had no rights in courts of law. Slaves could obtain their freedom by buying it, by being granted it in the owner's will, or as a reward for outstanding service.

Slavery in early Roman history seems to have been of the same type as in Greece, but by the 1st cent. BC, as the Roman Empire continued to expand, a form of agricultural slavery called estate slavery was introduced on a wide scale; in this form agriculture was pursued by large numbers of slaves in an impersonal relationship with the landowner, who had practically absolute power over them. The increasing wealth of Rome led to an expansion in domestic slaves, and the servile class grew to great numbers. They were employed in the theater, in gladiatorial combats, and, to some extent, in prostitution. Most of the slaves were foreign, and some were highly educated and were employed as instructors. Having a large retinue of slaves became one of the prime marks of luxury, and exotic, especially Asian, slaves were in great demand. As the number of conquered provinces grew, so did the slave supply. Consequently, manumission (emancipation from slavery) was common, and freedmen became a significant factor in the Roman social system. The slave had almost no legal status, although custom mitigated against extreme brutality; the slave could testify against his or her master only in a very limited number of serious crimes (adultery, incest, and, later, lese majesty). As the Roman expansion abated, conditions of slavery improved somewhat.

Slavery after the Fall of the Roman Empire

The introduction of Christianity toward the end of the Roman Empire had no effect on the abolition of slavery, since the church at that time did not oppose the institution. However, a change in economic life set in and resulted in the gradual disappearance of the agricultural slaves, who became, for all practical purposes, one with the coloni (tenant farmers who were technically free but were in fact bound to the land by debts). This process helped prepare the way for an economy in which the agricultural slave became the serf.

The semifreedom of serfdom was the dominant theme in the Middle Ages, although domestic slavery (and, to some extent, other forms) did not disappear. The church began to encourage manumission, while ignoring the fact that many slaves were attached to church officials and church property. Sale into slavery continued to be an extreme punishment for serious crimes.

Slavery flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and the pirates of the Mediterranean continued their custom of enslaving the victims of their raids. Islam, like Christianity, accepted slavery, and it became a standard institution in Muslim lands, where most slaves were African in origin. In Islamic life, keeping slaves was largely a sign of wealth, with slaves used as soldiers, concubines, cooks, and entertainers and to perform a variety of other functions. Another form of Muslim slavery was in the eunuch guardians of the harems; eunuchs had been widely known in Greek, Roman, and especially Byzantine times, but it was among the Muslims and in East Asia that they were to survive longest. In Muslim countries, slavery and freedom had a much more fluid boundary than in the West, with some slaves and former slaves reaching positions of great power and prestige.

In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages, although it still remained in such manifestations as the use of slaves on galleys. In Russia slavery persisted longer than in Western Europe, and indeed the serfs were pushed into the classification of slavery by Peter the Great.

Modern Slavery

A revolution in the institution of slavery came in the 15th and 16th cent. The explorations of the African coast by Portuguese navigators resulted in the exploitation of the African as a slave, and for nearly five centuries the predations of slave raiders along the coasts of Africa were to be a lucrative and important business conducted with appalling brutality. The British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese all engaged in the African slave trade. Although Africans were, as early as 1440, brought back to Portugal, and although subsequent importations were large enough to change distinctly the ethnography of that country, it was not in Europe that African slavery was to be most profitable and widespread, but in the Americas, where European exploitation began at the end of the 15th cent.

The first people to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese in the West Indies and Latin America were the Native Americans, but, because the majority of Native American slaves either revolted or escaped, other forms of forced labor, akin to serfdom, were introduced (see repartimiento and encomienda). The resistance of the Native Americans to slavery only increased the demand for Africans to replace them. Africans proved to be profitable laborers in the Caribbean islands and the lowlands of the South American mainland. In the colder highlands Native American slavery or quasi-slavery continued; long after the introduction of the first Africans the Paulistas (inhabitants of the city and state of São Paulo, Brazil) continued their slave raids against the Native Americans of the Brazilian hinterlands. But African slavery gradually became dominant.

The first Africans arrived in the British settlements on the Atlantic coast when they were traded or sold for supplies by a Dutch ship at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They may have been indentured servants, but by the 1640s lifetime servitude existed in Virginia, and slavery was acknowledged in the laws of Massachusetts. The raising of staple crops-coffee, tobacco, sugar, rice, and, much later, cotton-and the rise of the plantation economy made the importation of slaves from Africa particularly valuable in the Southern colonies of North America. The slave trade moved in a triangle; setting out from British ports, ships would transport various goods to the western coast of Africa, where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the West Indies or to the colonies of North or South America, where they were traded for agricultural staples for the return voyage back to England. Later, New England ports were included in this last leg. The number of slaves in the colonies increased until in some (notably French Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti) they constituted a majority of the population. In America by the date of the Declaration of Independence (1776) about one fifth of the population was enslaved.

The Antislavery Movement

The growth of humanitarian feeling during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th cent., the spread of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and others, and the increase of democratic sentiment led to a growing attack on the slave trade. The French Revolution had a great effect not only in the spread of agitation for human rights but more directly in the uprisings in Saint-Domingue and the establishment of Haitian independence. The movement for the abolition of slavery progressed slowly in the United States during the 18th and the first half of the 19th cent. Each of the Northern states gradually abolished the practice, but the prohibition of foreign slave trade promised in the Constitution (ratified in 1789) was not realized until 1808.

In Great Britain

British humanitarians who had incorporated the abolition of slavery into their conception of Christianity labored successfully to outlaw (1807) the British slave trade. These same men, especially William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, and Lord Brougham (Henry Peter Brougham), continued to work for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, which was finally effected with the Abolition Act of 1833. However, according to some writers, the British, in abolishing slavery, were primarily motivated by economic, not humanitarian, interests. These critics argued that, while the institution produced great wealth under the mercantilist system, it became unprofitable with the rise of industrial capitalism, which displaced mercantilism early in the 19th cent. At any rate, the abolition legislation of 1833 was followed by the gradual abolition of slavery in all lands under British control, principally by the device of invalidating the legality of slavery and removing its legal safeguards, usually by recompensing the owners.

In the United States

Slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early 19th cent. had disappeared. Its abolition had been hastened by the work of the Quakers, who, as in Great Britain, were staunchly opposed to the institution. In the South, however, where African slaves arrived in the tens of thousands from the late 17th through the early 18th cent., slavery came to be an integral part of the plantation system (especially after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793). From the late 18th cent. to the eve of the Civil War, more than a million slaves were moved from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, where many labored in the sugar and cotton fields and where, as pressures for profits increased, treatment of slaves was particularly brutal. The vast internal slave trade, which often tore slave families apart, was the South's second largest enterprise; only the plantation system itself surpassed it in size.

In the Northern United States, humanitarian principles led to the appearance of the abolitionists. They knew little of the actual conditions in the South and were fighting not for economic reform but for idealistic principles. The abolitionists in general tended to regard slavery as an unmitigated evil. The small Northern farmer also feared slavery as a system of cheap labor against which it was difficult to compete.

The South, eager to conserve the status quo, developed a bellicose defense of the system, which was hardened by such factors as the slave uprising led by Nat Turner, the troubles over fugitive slaves, and the very active propaganda against the South. The question, involving the very existence of Southern society as then organized, was the dominant one in U.S. history from 1830 to 1860. The political expression of the struggle was largely an attempt on the part of the South to maintain legislative guarantees of the system against the efforts of the abolitionists.

The chief question concerned the right of extension of slavery in the Western territories. This first became important in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. Many leading statesmen of the time sought an answer: Henry Clay, the great compromiser; Daniel Webster; John C. Calhoun; Stephen A. Douglas, who proposed popular sovereignty as means to decide the free or slave status of territories; and the uncompromising antislavery men, such as Charles Sumner and William H. Seward. The great compromises-the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act-were ultimately ineffective.

Sectional opposition, which involved even broader questions than slavery, including the constitutional issue of states' rights, grew more passionate as the two sections became more and more hostile. The Ostend Manifesto and the proposed annexation of Cuba, the fugitive slave laws, the operations of the Underground Railroad, the furor caused by the Dred Scott Case, the Wilmot Proviso-all heightened the tension. Sporadic armed conflict erupted in Kansas and in the Harpers Ferry raid of John Brown. The struggle became more clearly defined as the Republican party was formed with a definite antislavery platform.

In the victory of the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln (1860), the South saw a threat to Southern institutions, and the Southern states in an effort to secure those institutions resorted to secession and formed the Confederacy. The Civil War followed, and the victory of the North brought an end to slavery in the United States. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (issued in 1863, it declared all slaves in the Southern secessionist states free) was followed by other legislation, especially the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The end of the Civil War did not result in the integration of the former slaves into American life. Although there were gains toward this under Reconstruction, these were subsequently reversed by the Jim Crow laws. Generally easily identified by the color of their skin, African Americans were subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination practiced by most white Americans and legislated in many jurisdictions. This situation did not begin to be ameliorated until the civil-rights struggles of the 20th cent. (see civil rights; integration).

In the late 20th cent. the idea of compensating American blacks for their enslavement through some form of reparations won widespread support from African-American organizations and greater notice, although little support, from the broader society. The reparations movement was spurred in part by payments to Holocaust victims, to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and to some Native American tribes. Unlike these groups, however, reparations for slavery would be paid to individuals who are descendants by several generations of the victims, instead of to the victims or to a tribal people. Supporters of reparations, however, argue that contemporary African Americans continue to suffer from the vestiges of slavery and the discrimination that followed emancipation.

In Other Countries

In other countries emancipation of slaves was also a serious problem, but never to such an extent as in the United States, chiefly perhaps because the question of race prejudice was nowhere else so important. As the South American nations gained independence, they broadened their democratic principles to include absolute prohibition of slavery (Chile in 1823, Central America in 1824, Mexico in 1829, and Bolivia in 1831) or gradual emanicpation (Argentina in 1813, Colombia in 1814, and Venezuela in 1821). In Brazil the opposition of the planters to abolishing slavery was strong, and it was only after a series of rather ineffective measures that the slaves were emancipated in 1888. Opposition to that action helped to launch the revolution of 1889.

In later years the slave trade was conducted on the east coast of Africa, the market being in Muslim lands. Most antislavery efforts during the 19th cent. were directed against slave trading. Great Britain had passed antislave-trade laws in 1807 and 1811; the British attempted to enlist other nations in an effort to stop the slave trade, and several treaties for such a purpose were signed in the 1840s. However, the first important international agreement was not reached until the Berlin Conference in 1885, which bound the more important Muslim potentates to act against the slave traffic. This was supplemented by the even more significant Brussels Act of 1890, to which 18 states were signatory.

The emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was unable to prevent traffic from that land to Arabia, and a brisk trade went on over the Red Sea. International scandals occurred from time to time with regard to forced labor; three notable ones concerned the Congo, Liberia, and the Putumayo region of Peru in the 1930s (Native American servitude). The League of Nations adopted the resolutions of the International Slavery Convention of 1926, which was considered an advance over the Brussels Act of 1890; its main weakness was in not providing a permanent commission to oversee the total abolition of slavery. Slavery continued to exist in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and, despite increasingly successful efforts to abolish it, in various parts of Africa.

The United Nations has continued the efforts of the League of Nations to achieve worldwide abolition of slavery. The Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, contained a provision prohibiting slavery or trading in slaves. The Security Council in 1954 condemned systems of forced labor, particularly those employed as a means of political coercion. In 1956 a UN conference of plenipotentiaries adopted a convention on the abolition of slavery; an important aspect of the convention was the inclusion of other institutions similar to slavery as practices to be abolished. However, a report prepared for the United Nations in 1966 charged that slavery still existed in parts of Africa and Asia.

Although efforts to end involuntary servitude continued throughout the last half of the 20th cent., by the beginning of the 21st cent. forms of slavery, forced, or bonded labor still persisted in a number of countries, e.g., Mauritania, Niger, and Sudan in Africa, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, and parts of the Persian Gulf region in Asia, and the Amazon region of Brazil. More isolated instances have been occasionally revealed elsewhere, e.g., involving Asian immigrants in the United States. In many cases of forced labor, workers have been deceptively recruited in their home countries and then deprived of their passports and forced to work under altered contractual terms once they have arrived in a foreign country.

Bibliography

See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896, repr. 1970); A. H. Abel, The Slaveholding Indians (3 vol., 1915-25; repr. 1970); R. H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (1928, repr. 1968); U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929, repr. 1963); W. L. Westermann, Upon Slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt (1929); W. L. Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823-1838 (1926, repr. 1967), Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839-1865 (1929, repr. 1967), and British Slave Emancipation, 1838-1849 (1932, repr. 1967); E. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (4 vol., 1930-35; repr. 1965); G. MacMann, Slavery through the Ages (1938); R. Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856-1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (1939, repr. 1968); I. E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery (1942); E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944, repr. 1964); Fisk Univ., Social Science Institute, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves (1945, repr. 1970); G. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (tr. 1946; 2d ed. 1956, repr. 1963); I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (1949); K. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); C. W. W. Greenidge, Slavery (1958); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (1960, repr. 1968); S. O'Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today (1962); D. P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (with M. Cowley, 1962); J. Williamson, After Slavery (1965); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); A. Zilversmidt, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); S. M. Elkins, Slavery (2d ed. 1968); A. Weinstein, ed., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader (1968); L. Foner and E. D. Genovese, ed., Slavery in the New World (1969); D. L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (1970); R. S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970); J. Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle (1971); A. J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery (1971); R. W. Winks, Slavery: A Comparative Perspective (1972); R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); E. D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974); J. A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981); E. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); C. B. Dew, Bond of Iron (1994); H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (1997); P. D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998); K. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999); J. H. Franklin and L. Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (1999); R. L. Paquette and L. A. Ferleger, ed., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (2000); R. Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2001); I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003); A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005); S. Deyle, Carry Me Back (2005); E. Fox-Genovese and E. D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005); S. Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006); D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008); Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009); S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009); G. W. Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010); D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010); H. Zinn, The Other Civil War: Slavery and Struggle in Civil War America (2011); J. Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (2012); W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013); E. E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); R. S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (2014); G. Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (2014).

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slavery, historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States.

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The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.

Quaker Abolitionists

The Quakers are considered the first organized group to actively help escaped enslaved people. George Washington complained in 1786 that Quakers had attempted to "liberate" one of his enslaved workers.

In the early 1800s, Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper set up a network in Philadelphia that helped enslaved people on the run. At the same time, Quakers in North Carolina established abolitionist groups that laid the groundwork for routes and shelters for escapees.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1816, was another proactive religious group helping fugitive enslaved people.

What Was the Underground Railroad?

The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831 when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an "underground railroad" for helping Davids to freedom.

In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an "underground railroad to Boston."

Vigilance Committees-created to protect escaped enslaved people from bounty hunters in New York in 1835 and Philadelphia in 1838-soon expanded their activities to guide enslaved people on the run. By the 1840s, the term Underground Railroad was part of the American vernacular.
READ MORE: 6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad
How the Underground Railroad Worked

Most of the enslaved people helped by the Underground Railroad escaped border states such as Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland.

In the deep South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 made capturing escaped enslaved people a lucrative business, and there were fewer hiding places for them. Fugitive enslaved people were typically on their own until they got to certain points farther north.

People known as "conductors" guided the fugitive enslaved people. Hiding places included private homes, churches and schoolhouses. These were called "stations," "safe houses," and "depots." The people operating them were called "stationmasters."

There were many well-used routes stretching west through Ohio to Indiana and Iowa. Others headed north through Pennsylvania and into New England or through Detroit on their way to Canada.
READ MORE: The Little-Known Underground Railroad That Ran South to Mexico
Fugitive Slave Acts

The reason many escapees headed for Canada was the Fugitive Slave Acts. The first act, passed in 1793, allowed local governments to apprehend and extradite escaped enslaved people from within the borders of free states back to their point of origin, and to punish anyone helping the fugitives. Some Northern states tried to combat this with Personal Liberty Laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1842.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was designed to strengthen the previous law, which was felt by southern states to be inadequately enforced. This update created harsher penalties and set up a system of commissioners that promoted favoritism towards owners of enslaved people and led to some formerly enslaved people being recaptured. For an escaped person, the northern states were still considered a risk.

Meanwhile, Canada offered Black people the freedom to live where they wanted, sit on juries, run for public office and more, and efforts at extradition had largely failed. Some Underground Railroad operators based themselves in Canada and worked to help the arriving fugitives settle in.

Harriet Tubman

Library of Congress

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor for the Underground Railroad.

Born an enslaved woman named Araminta Ross, she took the name Harriet (Tubman was her married name) when, in 1849, she escaped a plantation in Maryland with two of her brothers. They returned a couple of weeks later, but Tubman left again on her own shortly after, making her way to Pennsylvania.

Tubman later returned to the plantation on several occasions to rescue family members and others. On her third trip, she tried to rescue her husband, but he had remarried and refused to leave.

Distraught, Tubman reported a vision of God, after which she joined the Underground Railroad and began guiding other escaped slaves to Maryland. Tubman regularly took groups of escapees to Canada, distrusting the United States to treat them well.

Frederick Douglass

Formerly enslaved person and famed writer Frederick Douglass hid fugitives in his home in Rochester, New York, helping 400 escapees make their way to Canada. Former fugitive Reverend Jermain Loguen, who lived in neighboring Syracuse, helped 1,500 escapees go north.

Robert Purvis, an escaped enslaved person turned Philadelphia merchant, formed the Vigilance Committee there in 1838. Former enslaved person and railroad operator Josiah Henson created the Dawn Institute in 1842 in Ontario to help escapees who made their way to Canada learn needed work skills.

New York City-based escapee Louis Napoleon's occupation as listed on his death certificate was "Underground R.R. Agent." He was a key figure guiding fugitives he found at the docks and train stations.

John Parker was a free Black man in Ohio, a foundry owner who took a rowboat across the Ohio River to help fugitives cross. He was also known to make his way into Kentucky and enter plantations to help enslaved people escape.

William Still was a prominent Philadelphia citizen who had been born to fugitive enslaved parents in New Jersey. An associate of Tubman's, Still also kept a record of his activities in the Underground Railroad and was able to keep it safely hidden until after the Civil War, when he published them, offering one of the clearest accounts of Underground Railroad activity at the time.

Who Ran the Underground Railroad?

Most Underground Railroad operators were ordinary people, farmers and business owners, as well as ministers. Some wealthy people were involved, such as Gerrit Smith, a millionaire who twice ran for president. In 1841, Smith purchased an entire family of enslaved people from Kentucky and set them free.

One of the earliest known people to help fugitive enslaved people was Levi Coffin, a Quaker from North Carolina. He started around 1813 when he was 15 years old.

Coffin said that he learned their hiding places and sought them out to help them move along. Eventually, they began to find their way to him. Coffin later moved to Indiana and then Ohio, and continued to help escaped enslaved people wherever he lived.

John Brown

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Abolitionist John Brown was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, during which time he established the League of Gileadites, devoted to helping fugitive enslaved people get to Canada.

Brown would play many roles in the abolition movement, most famously leading a raid on Harper's Ferry to create an armed force to make its way into the deep south and free enslaved people by gunpoint. Brown's men were defeated, and Brown hanged for treason in 1859.

By 1837 Reverend Calvin Fairbank was helping enslaved people escape from Kentucky into Ohio. In 1844 he partnered with Vermont schoolteacher Delia Webster and was arrested for helping an escaped enslaved woman and her child. He was pardoned in 1849, but was arrested again and spent another 12 years in jail.

Charles Torrey was sent to prison for six years in Maryland for helping an enslaved family escape through Virginia. He operated out of Washington, D.C., and had previously worked as an abolitionist newspaper editor in Albany, New York.

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker was arrested in 1844 after he was caught with a boatload of escaped enslaved people that he was trying to help get north. Walker was fined and jailed for a year, and branded on his right hand the letters "SS" for Slave Stealer.

John Fairfield of Virginia rejected his slave-holding family to help rescue the left-behind families of enslaved people who made it north. Fairfield's method was to travel in the south posing as a slave trader. He broke out of jail twice. He died in 1860 in Tennessee during a rebellion.

End of the Line

The Underground Railroad ceased operations about 1863, during the Civil War. In reality, its work moved aboveground as part of the Union effort against the Confederacy.

Harriet Tubman once again played a significant part by leading intelligence operations and fulfilling a command role in Union Army operations to rescue the emancipated enslaved people.
READ MORE: After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid
Sources

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad. Fergus Bordewich.
Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom. Catherine Clinton.
Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad? Henry Louis Gates.
The Little Known History of the Underground Railroad in New York. Smithsonian Magazine.
The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The New Yorker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.

Quaker Abolitionists

The Quakers are considered the first organized group to actively help escaped enslaved people. George Washington complained in 1786 that Quakers had attempted to "liberate" one of his enslaved workers.

In the early 1800s, Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper set up a network in Philadelphia that helped enslaved people on the run. At the same time, Quakers in North Carolina established abolitionist groups that laid the groundwork for routes and shelters for escapees.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1816, was another proactive religious group helping fugitive enslaved people.

What Was the Underground Railroad?

The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831 when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an "underground railroad" for helping Davids to freedom.

In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an "underground railroad to Boston."

Vigilance Committees-created to protect escaped enslaved people from bounty hunters in New York in 1835 and Philadelphia in 1838-soon expanded their activities to guide enslaved people on the run. By the 1840s, the term Underground Railroad was part of the American vernacular.
READ MORE: 6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad
How the Underground Railroad Worked

Most of the enslaved people helped by the Underground Railroad escaped border states such as Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland.

In the deep South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 made capturing escaped enslaved people a lucrative business, and there were fewer hiding places for them. Fugitive enslaved people were typically on their own until they got to certain points farther north.

People known as "conductors" guided the fugitive enslaved people. Hiding places included private homes, churches and schoolhouses. These were called "stations," "safe houses," and "depots." The people operating them were called "stationmasters."

There were many well-used routes stretching west through Ohio to Indiana and Iowa. Others headed north through Pennsylvania and into New England or through Detroit on their way to Canada.
READ MORE: The Little-Known Underground Railroad That Ran South to Mexico
Fugitive Slave Acts

The reason many escapees headed for Canada was the Fugitive Slave Acts. The first act, passed in 1793, allowed local governments to apprehend and extradite escaped enslaved people from within the borders of free states back to their point of origin, and to punish anyone helping the fugitives. Some Northern states tried to combat this with Personal Liberty Laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1842.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was designed to strengthen the previous law, which was felt by southern states to be inadequately enforced. This update created harsher penalties and set up a system of commissioners that promoted favoritism towards owners of enslaved people and led to some formerly enslaved people being recaptured. For an escaped person, the northern states were still considered a risk.

Meanwhile, Canada offered Black people the freedom to live where they wanted, sit on juries, run for public office and more, and efforts at extradition had largely failed. Some Underground Railroad operators based themselves in Canada and worked to help the arriving fugitives settle in.

Harriet Tubman

Library of Congress

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor for the Underground Railroad.

Born an enslaved woman named Araminta Ross, she took the name Harriet (Tubman was her married name) when, in 1849, she escaped a plantation in Maryland with two of her brothers. They returned a couple of weeks later, but Tubman left again on her own shortly after, making her way to Pennsylvania.

Tubman later returned to the plantation on several occasions to rescue family members and others. On her third trip, she tried to rescue her husband, but he had remarried and refused to leave.

Distraught, Tubman reported a vision of God, after which she joined the Underground Railroad and began guiding other escaped slaves to Maryland. Tubman regularly took groups of escapees to Canada, distrusting the United States to treat them well.

Frederick Douglass

Formerly enslaved person and famed writer Frederick Douglass hid fugitives in his home in Rochester, New York, helping 400 escapees make their way to Canada. Former fugitive Reverend Jermain Loguen, who lived in neighboring Syracuse, helped 1,500 escapees go north.

Robert Purvis, an escaped enslaved person turned Philadelphia merchant, formed the Vigilance Committee there in 1838. Former enslaved person and railroad operator Josiah Henson created the Dawn Institute in 1842 in Ontario to help escapees who made their way to Canada learn needed work skills.

New York City-based escapee Louis Napoleon's occupation as listed on his death certificate was "Underground R.R. Agent." He was a key figure guiding fugitives he found at the docks and train stations.

John Parker was a free Black man in Ohio, a foundry owner who took a rowboat across the Ohio River to help fugitives cross. He was also known to make his way into Kentucky and enter plantations to help enslaved people escape.

William Still was a prominent Philadelphia citizen who had been born to fugitive enslaved parents in New Jersey. An associate of Tubman's, Still also kept a record of his activities in the Underground Railroad and was able to keep it safely hidden until after the Civil War, when he published them, offering one of the clearest accounts of Underground Railroad activity at the time.

Who Ran the Underground Railroad?

Most Underground Railroad operators were ordinary people, farmers and business owners, as well as ministers. Some wealthy people were involved, such as Gerrit Smith, a millionaire who twice ran for president. In 1841, Smith purchased an entire family of enslaved people from Kentucky and set them free.

One of the earliest known people to help fugitive enslaved people was Levi Coffin, a Quaker from North Carolina. He started around 1813 when he was 15 years old.

Coffin said that he learned their hiding places and sought them out to help them move along. Eventually, they began to find their way to him. Coffin later moved to Indiana and then Ohio, and continued to help escaped enslaved people wherever he lived.

John Brown

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Abolitionist John Brown was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, during which time he established the League of Gileadites, devoted to helping fugitive enslaved people get to Canada.

Brown would play many roles in the abolition movement, most famously leading a raid on Harper's Ferry to create an armed force to make its way into the deep south and free enslaved people by gunpoint. Brown's men were defeated, and Brown hanged for treason in 1859.

By 1837 Reverend Calvin Fairbank was helping enslaved people escape from Kentucky into Ohio. In 1844 he partnered with Vermont schoolteacher Delia Webster and was arrested for helping an escaped enslaved woman and her child. He was pardoned in 1849, but was arrested again and spent another 12 years in jail.

Charles Torrey was sent to prison for six years in Maryland for helping an enslaved family escape through Virginia. He operated out of Washington, D.C., and had previously worked as an abolitionist newspaper editor in Albany, New York.

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker was arrested in 1844 after he was caught with a boatload of escaped enslaved people that he was trying to help get north. Walker was fined and jailed for a year, and branded on his right hand the letters "SS" for Slave Stealer.

John Fairfield of Virginia rejected his slave-holding family to help rescue the left-behind families of enslaved people who made it north. Fairfield's method was to travel in the south posing as a slave trader. He broke out of jail twice. He died in 1860 in Tennessee during a rebellion.

End of the Line

The Underground Railroad ceased operations about 1863, during the Civil War. In reality, its work moved aboveground as part of the Union effort against the Confederacy.

Harriet Tubman once again played a significant part by leading intelligence operations and fulfilling a command role in Union Army operations to rescue the emancipated enslaved people.
READ MORE: After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid
Sources

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad. Fergus Bordewich.
Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom. Catherine Clinton.
Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad? Henry Louis Gates.
The Little Known History of the Underground Railroad in New York. Smithsonian Magazine.
The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The New Yorker.

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The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy.

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On September 22 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, in which he declared that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in states in rebellion against the Union "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." To commemorate the occasion, we invite you to consider some surprising facts about Lincoln's views on slavery, and the complex process that led him to issue the document he later called "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the 19th century."

Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist.

Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution. The nation's founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did not explicitly write the word "slavery" in the Constitution, but they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count slaves for the purposes of representation in the federal government. In a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854, Lincoln presented more clearly than ever his moral, legal and economic opposition to slavery-and then admitted he didn't know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system.

Abolitionists, by contrast, knew exactly what should be done about it: Slavery should be immediately abolished, and freed slaves should be incorporated as equal members of society. They didn't care about working within the existing political system, or under the Constitution, which they saw as unjustly protecting slavery and slave owners. Leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell," and went so far as to burn a copy at a Massachusetts rally in 1854. Though Lincoln saw himself as working alongside the abolitionists on behalf of a common anti-slavery cause, he did not count himself among them. Only with emancipation, and with his support of the eventual 13th Amendment, would Lincoln finally win over the most committed abolitionists.

Lincoln didn't believe blacks should have the same rights as whites.

Though Lincoln argued that the founding fathers' phrase "All men are created equal" applied to blacks and whites alike, this did not mean he thought they should have the same social and political rights. His views became clear during an 1858 series of debates with his opponent in the Illinois race for U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, who had accused him of supporting "negro equality." In their fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," he began, going on to say that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites. What he did believe was that, like all men, blacks had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust.

Like his views on emancipation, Lincoln's position on social and political equality for African-Americans would evolve over the course of his presidency. In the last speech of his life, delivered on April 11, 1865, he argued for limited black suffrage, saying that any black man who had served the Union during the Civil War should have the right to vote.

Lincoln thought colonization could resolve the issue of slavery.

For much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization-or the idea that a majority of the African-American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America-was the best way to confront the problem of slavery. His two great political heroes, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization; both were slave owners who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that blacks and whites could live together peaceably. Lincoln first publicly advocated for colonization in 1852, and in 1854 said that his first instinct would be "to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia" (the African state founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821).

Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed slaves at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Given the "differences" between the two races and the hostile attitudes of whites towards blacks, Lincoln argued, it would be "better for us both, therefore, to be separated." Lincoln's support of colonization provoked great anger among black leaders and abolitionists, who argued that African-Americans were as much natives of the country as whites, and thus deserved the same rights. After he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never again publicly mentioned colonization, and a mention of it in an earlier draft was deleted by the time the final proclamation was issued in January 1863.

Emancipation was a military policy.

As much as he hated the institution of slavery, Lincoln didn't see the Civil War as a struggle to free the nation's 4 million slaves from bondage. Emancipation, when it came, would have to be gradual, and the important thing to do was to prevent the Southern rebellion from severing the Union permanently in two. But as the Civil War entered its second summer in 1862, thousands of slaves had fled Southern plantations to Union lines, and the federal government didn't have a clear policy on how to deal with them. Emancipation, Lincoln saw, would further undermine the Confederacy while providing the Union with a new source of manpower to crush the rebellion.

In July 1862 the president presented his draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Secretary of State William Seward urged him to wait until things were going better for the Union on the field of battle, or emancipation might look like the last gasp of a nation on the brink of defeat. Lincoln agreed and returned to edit the draft over the summer. On September 17 the bloody Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the opportunity he needed. He issued the preliminary proclamation to his cabinet on September 22, and it was published the following day. As a cheering crowd gathered at the White House, Lincoln addressed them from a balcony: "I can only trust in God I have made no mistake ... It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it."

The Emancipation Proclamation didn't actually free all of the slaves.

Since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military measure, it didn't apply to border slave states like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, all of which had remained loyal to the Union. Lincoln also exempted selected areas of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control in hopes of gaining the loyalty of whites in those states. In practice, then, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't immediately free a single slave, as the only places it applied were places where the federal government had no control-the Southern states currently fighting against the Union.

Despite its limitations, Lincoln's proclamation marked a crucial turning point in the evolution of Lincoln's views of slavery, as well as a turning point in the Civil War itself. By war's end, some 200,000 black men would serve in the Union Army and Navy, striking a mortal blow against the institution of slavery and paving the way for its eventual abolition by the 13th Amendment.
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5 Things You May Not Know About Lincoln, Slavery and Emancipation

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On September 22 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, in which he declared that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in states in rebellion against the Union "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

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The first organized immigration of freed slaves to Africa from the United States departs New York harbor on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, a U.S. organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return freed American slaves to Africa. However, the expedition was also partially funded by the U.S. Congress, which in 1819 had appropriated $100,000 to be used in returning displaced Africans, illegally brought to the United States after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1808, to Africa.

The program was modeled after British's efforts to resettle freed slaves in Africa following England's abolishment of the slave trade in 1772. In 1787, the British government settled 300 former slaves and 70 white prostitutes on the Sierra Leone peninsula in West Africa. Within two years, most members of this settlement had died from disease or warfare with the local Temne people. However, in 1792, a second attempt was made when 1,100 freed slaves, mostly individuals who had supported Britain during the American Revolution and were unhappy with their postwar resettlement in Canada, established Freetown under the leadership of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

During the next few decades, thousands of freed slaves came from Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of West Africa to the Sierra Leone Colony, and in 1820 the first freed slaves from the United States arrived at Sierra Leone. In 1821, the American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia south of Sierra Leone as a homeland for freed U.S. slaves outside of British jurisdiction.

Most Americans of African descent were not enthusiastic to abandon their homes in the United States for the West African coast. The American Colonization Society also came under attack from American abolitionists, who charged that the removal of freed slaves from the United States strengthened the institution of slavery. However, between 1822 and the American Civil War, some 15,000 African Americans settled in Liberia, which was granted independence by the United States in 1847 under pressure from Great Britain. Liberia was granted official U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1862. It was the first independent democratic republic in African history.

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Freed U.S. slaves depart on journey to Africa - Feb 06, 1820 - HISTORY.com

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The first organized immigration of freed slaves to Africa from the United States departs New York harbor on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, a U.S. organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return freed American slaves to Africa.

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Life after slavery for African Americans

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Read and learn for free about the following article: Life after slavery for African Americans

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Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own," Downs told the Observer.

Downs's book is full of terrible vignettes about the individual experiences of slave families who embraced their freedom from the brutal plantations on which they had been born or sold to. Many ended up in encampments called "contraband camps" that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.

Treatment by union soldiers could also be brutal. Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller's young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead. For Downs such tales are heartbreaking. "So many of these people are dying of starvation and that is such a slow death," he said.

Downs has collected numerous shocking accounts of the lives of freed slaves. He came across accounts of deplorable conditions in hospitals and refugee camps, where doctors often had racist theories about how black Americans reacted to disease. Things were so bad that one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: "dying by scores - that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench".

So bad were the health problems suffered by freed slaves, and so high the death rates, that some observers of the time even wondered if they would all die out. One white religious leader in 1863 expected black Americans to vanish. "Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us," the man wrote.

Such racial attitudes among northerners seem shocking, but Downs says they were common. Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation.

Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism.

"This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost," Downs said.

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How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book. The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own," Downs told the Observer.

Downs's book is full of terrible vignettes about the individual experiences of slave families who embraced their freedom from the brutal plantations on which they had been born or sold to. Many ended up in encampments called "contraband camps" that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.

Treatment by union soldiers could also be brutal. Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller's young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead. For Downs such tales are heartbreaking. "So many of these people are dying of starvation and that is such a slow death," he said.

Downs has collected numerous shocking accounts of the lives of freed slaves. He came across accounts of deplorable conditions in hospitals and refugee camps, where doctors often had racist theories about how black Americans reacted to disease. Things were so bad that one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: "dying by scores - that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench".

So bad were the health problems suffered by freed slaves, and so high the death rates, that some observers of the time even wondered if they would all die out. One white religious leader in 1863 expected black Americans to vanish. "Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us," the man wrote.

Such racial attitudes among northerners seem shocking, but Downs says they were common. Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation.

Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism.

"This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost," Downs said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book. The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

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Newsela | African-American Pioneers Played a Big Role in Settling the West

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"Go west young man" was a call many 18th and 19th century African-Americans heard and followed.

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Newsela | The lesser-known history of African-American cowboys

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One in four cowboys was black. So why aren't they more present in popular culture?

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Jane Beck has spent most of her 74 years telling other people's stories. The founder of the Vermont Folklife Center has recorded the oral histories of local quarry workers, quilters, farmers, legislators and apple-doll makers. "Our understanding of history in Vermont is much richer because of all these stories that have been collected," said Paul Bruhn, executive director of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, of her work.

No Vermonter has captivated Beck as thoroughly as Daisy Turner, the daughter of a slave who lived in the Green Mountains until her death in 1988. Now that interest has borne fruit in a definitive scholarly work. The renowned folklorist packed more than three decades of research into her new book from University of Illinois Press, Daisy Turner's Kin: An African American Family Saga, for which she traveled to Virginia, Maine, England and West Africa.

The journey started in Grafton, where Beck first met Turner, then 100, in 1983. For the next several years, the scholar chatted up the cantankerous centenarian, poured her ginger ale, ran her errands and recorded her stories. Beck subsequently brought the Turner family saga to life in audio, film and museum projects. Others shared it in children's books, documentaries and history classes.

Like her father, Turner was a brilliant raconteur - up until the day she died, at the age of 104 - but she also believed in the written word. She was convinced that a book was the best way to commit her family's story to history. She urged Beck to write the tome, advising, "All these things ought not to be lost."

Those words could serve as a guiding motto for Beck, whose work has helped legitimize folklore, lending credibility and respect to a field of scholarship once dismissed as less important than anthropology or history. "She has been very significant on a national level," said Greg Sharrow, Beck's longtime colleague and friend, who stepped up at the Vermont Folklife Center after she resigned as executive director in 2007.

Folklore is basically "cultural heritage," Beck explained - "important to understand because it feeds into who we all are."

Ask who she is, though, and Beck immediately clams up. "I hate it," she said of being the subject of inquiry. "Do we have to get into all of this?" The woman who spent years extracting, verifying and archiving the lives of others doesn't have the slightest interest in talking about her own.

Secondary sources provide some insight into Jane Choate Beck, who grew up in a prominent family on Long Island. Her late father, Thomas Hyde Choate, worked as an investment banker. Her mother, Jane Harte Choate, still appears from time to time on the society pages for her work with the New York Botanical Garden and various charitable organizations.

click to enlarge

When Beck reached her teens, in the 1950s, her parents shipped her off to an all-girls school in Maryland. St. Timothy's School is also the alma mater of Shelburne philanthropist Lisa Steele, who attended about eight years after Beck.

"It was very much like being locked up in jail," Steele said of the place, describing it as a strict, old-fashioned boarding school that was rigorous in every sense of the word. "But we both got through it and, I think, are probably stronger because of it."

Beck graduated near the top of her class at St. Timothy's; her parents wanted her to go to Radcliffe College, but "luckily I didn't get in," she recalled. She happily enrolled at Middlebury College, where she majored in American literature and met her future husband. Professor Horace Beck was two decades older and, like her, an independent sort who chose a simple, rural life over the well-heeled society in which he'd grown up.

"Unpretentious" is the word Steele used to describe Jane, who shared that quality with her husband. Born in Newport, R.I., Horace studied the folklore of the West Indies, and in recognition of his seafaring side, liked to refer to himself as "Swamp Yankee."

Jane graduated from Middlebury College in 1963 and started her graduate studies in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. She married Horace in 1965. An avid sportsman, he took his new wife duck hunting for their honeymoon. Jane shuttled back and forth between Vermont and Philadelphia to earn her doctorate as they started a family on a farm in Ripton. (Horace Beck would die in 2003.)

Daughter Rowan Beck, a Charlotte resident and public relations director at Bitybean baby carriers, has vivid memories of their family life: a year on a sailboat; lambs in the kitchen; her parents' collaboration on a National Geographic story - Horace wrote the article and Jane took the pictures, earning more money than her husband. "That was a long-standing joke in our house," Rowan recalled. "A picture really is worth more than 1,000 words."

Rowan also remembered her mom chauffeuring children to hockey and skiing and making family dinners - including venison stew - as she built her career. Vermont's first "state folklorist" walked the talk. "It was always very important that we could talk to anybody. My mom is not a showy, glitzy person," said Rowan. "She's very down-to-earth, and she has real, hard-core values. She's more of a Vermonter than she is a New Yorker, and if you're from New York, please don't take offense."

Beck was state folklorist - working for the Vermont Arts Council - when she first heard about Turner. Beck's usual ice-breaking tactic when approaching new research subjects was to get an introduction from a third party; with Turner, that wasn't an option. After writing and calling repeatedly to try to arrange a meeting, she finally got Turner on the telephone, only to be asked sternly, "Are you a prejudiced woman?"

When Beck stammered no, she didn't think so, Turner responded breezily, "Well, come any time."

Beck did, and she was immediately riveted by Turner's stories. Yet even on their second meeting, she was unsure how she would be received. She earned Turner's trust by simply showing up, again and again, refusing to be offended by the old woman's gruff exterior.

Trim, fair-complected Beck has a no-nonsense air. Perhaps her unfussy demeanor appealed to Turner, who lived at the time of their first meeting in a cluttered old house down the hill from the family farm. She was known for ambling around town with a shotgun on her hip.

Beck also brought significant reportorial skills to the table, including persuasion. As Sharrow put it: "It took almost an act of seduction to get Daisy to agree to having Jane visit her."

"She's able to take her time and let people be who they are," Steele observed.

Predictably, Beck's explanation of the "good relationship" they forged is more understated: "I think in the long run, she trusted me as much as she could trust anybody."

Beck went to see Turner at least several times a month for about three years. She learned to make herself useful. As Turner talked, Beck would help her organize papers and fetch things around the house. She steadied Turner into a chair when her legs became weak. And when Turner's health took a bad turn, Beck visited her at the nursing home where she spent her final days.

The hours with Turner contributed to Beck's nuanced understanding of memories and their role in the folklorist's trade. Even when personal recollections aren't factually reliable, she said, they are significant. "It's personal. It's based in emotion," Beck said.

Years after Turner's death, however, translating those recollections into a work of nonfiction proved to be a fact-checking challenge. Beck's book traces the Turner family history from West Africa, where Daisy's grandfather, Alessi, was probably born around 1810, to his enslavement on a plantation in Virginia, where his son Alec was born in 1845. Alec subsequently escaped, served in the Civil War with Union troops and eventually migrated to Vermont, where he raised 13 children.

The creaky home of long-dead plantation owner Jack Gouldin still stands along the Rappahannock River, surrounded by the same spreading fields, according to Beck, who was surprised to find the property remarkably undeveloped. "Alec Turner would recognize it," she said.

Beck also visited West Africa and England to research Daisy Turner's account of Alessi's early years. According to Daisy, her grandfather was the son of an English lady who was shipwrecked and a chief's son who saved her in the surf off the coast of Africa. This would have taken place around 1800.

It sounds more like a romance novel than Roots, but Beck maintains that Turner's recollection is plausible.

Beck spent long hours in England researching shipping company records, passenger and crew logs and accounts of wrecks off West Africa. At one point, she thought she came close to identifying an Englishwoman who could have been the shipwrecked great-grandmother. But the dates and details ultimately failed to match up, and, to her great frustration, Beck was unable to document the identity of either great-grandparent.

She had better luck researching the slave ship that carried the kidnapped young Alessi, later known as Robert Berkeley, most likely to Louisiana. Based on her study of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and other sources, Beck believes with "99.9 percent" certainty that the ship was the Fenix, a Spanish schooner that transported slaves from Calabar, Nigeria, and environs to New Orleans. Many captives died on the voyage, and the conditions on the ship matched Turner's narrative, passed down from her grandfather to her father, in which it was described as "one of the worst sights that any human being had ever seen - that slave ship."

Throughout Daisy Turner's Kin: An African American Family Saga, Beck points out aspects of Daisy's narratives about the family that she believes to be wrong, half-wrong or impossible to verify. She also documents many parts of the story as Daisy told them and carefully constructs the historical context in fascinating and sometimes grim detail.

The book is not just about facts, though, but about bigger themes and attitudes - from racism to respect to neighborliness. Indeed, part of folklore's appeal for Beck is that it opens a window onto people's views of the world, and "that we understand, that we listen to these attitudes and values and stories. If you can relate to their stories, there's a meeting, a bridging," she said.

Turner's Grafton farm, known as Journey's End, is now owned by the State of Vermont. The Windham Foundation and the Preservation Trust of Vermont are partnering to restore the only remaining structure on the property, a 1911 hunting camp, and to make it a visitor's site.

All the history that farm represents would likely have been lost without Beck, who had the patience and perseverance to draw Turner out. Her work "makes what's left of Journey's End a very special African American site," said the Preservation Trust's Bruhn.

While Alec Turner faced discrimination at times in Vermont, he was accepted and respected by most of his neighbors, and his story in Vermont is a powerful account of the African American experience after slavery. The Turner saga "tells the story of a former slave, a freed man, who came to Vermont by way of Maine and became a hill farmer and, just like lots of white families, struggled in the hills," Bruhn said, summing up Beck's work. "It's really the story of the next step of history of African American families in the United States ... It's a big story."

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Folklorist Jane Beck Wrote the Book on Freed Slaves in Vermont

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click to enlarge Jane Beck has spent most of her 74 years telling other people's stories. The founder of the Vermont Folklife Center has recorded the oral histories of local quarry workers, quilters, farmers, legislators and apple-doll makers.

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Historical Significance

Daisy Turner was born in Grafton, Vermont, one of thirteen children born to parents who were former slaves. She was a famous for her oral recordings of her family's history, which can be traced back three generations to Africa.

Turner's great-grandmother was shipwrecked while traveling from England to Africa on her honeymoon during the early 19th century. She was saved by an African chieftain's son, and had a child with him (Daisy's grandfather, Alexander). Alexander was captured by a slave trader and taken to New Orleans, where he was bought by John Gouldin and taken to Gouldin's plantation in Port Royal, Virginia. There, Daisy's father, Alec, was born a slave. Alec was taught to read by the master's granddaughter, and later escaped, joining the Union Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, the Turner family moved north, where her father worked in a saw mill and raised enough money to purchase a 100 acres in Grafton, Vermont and build Journey's End Farm.

Daisy Turner was proud of her family heritage, and was a strong, outspoken woman from childhood to her death at the age of 104.

Daisy Turner is remembered as a gifted storyteller and family historian. She is the subject of the Vermont Folklife Center's Peabody Award-winning audio documentary, "Journey's End: The Memories and Traditions of Daisy Turner". Stories from her life have also been the subject of two Vermont Folklife Center books, "Alec's Primer" and "Daisy and the Doll".

Daisy Turner maintained Journey's End after her parents' deaths. The Turner family homestead is located on the "Daisy Turner Loop", a biking trail near Grafton Pond.

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The Vermont Historical Society is the only organization in Vermont that collects artifacts, books, and documents that reflect the entire history of the state, including every geographical area and every chronological period. We preserve the history that makes Vermont a special place to live, work, and visit.

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To help you use this online activity in your classroom, see the:

Curriculum connections for this online activity include:
American History:
Slavery, Underground Railroad, Abolitionists and Harriet Tubman, Civil War
Language Arts:
Critical reading, Writing historical fiction, Decoding/Word identification,
Geography:
Map skills

For a wealth of student activities and resources about the Underground Railroad, see:

Slideshows
Slideshows of important themes in American history with images and audio.

Activities
Activities, online and offline, that investigate the people, places, and events of the 1800s.

Primary Sources
Primary sources like interviews, photographs, and posters to help understand this historic time.

Try these great Harriet Tubman printables,
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The Underground Railroad: Escape From Slavery Student Activity | Scholastic.com

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To help you use this online activity in your classroom, see the: Curriculum connections for this online activity include: American History: Slavery, Underground Railroad, Abolitionists and Harriet Tubman, Civil War Language Arts: Critical reading, Writing historical fiction, Decoding/Word identification, Geography: Map skills For a wealth of student activities and resources about the Underground Railroad, see: Slideshows Slideshows of important themes in American history with images and audio.

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To help you use this online activity in your classroom, see the:

Curriculum connections for this online activity include:
American History:
Slavery, Underground Railroad, Abolitionists and Harriet Tubman, Civil War
Language Arts:
Critical reading, Writing historical fiction, Decoding/Word identification,
Geography:
Map skills

For a wealth of student activities and resources about the Underground Railroad, see:

Slideshows
Slideshows of important themes in American history with images and audio.

Activities
Activities, online and offline, that investigate the people, places, and events of the 1800s.

Primary Sources
Primary sources like interviews, photographs, and posters to help understand this historic time.

Try these great Harriet Tubman printables,
for FREE

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The Underground Railroad: Escape From Slavery Student Activity | Scholastic.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To help you use this online activity in your classroom, see the: Curriculum connections for this online activity include: American History: Slavery, Underground Railroad, Abolitionists and Harriet Tubman, Civil War Language Arts: Critical reading, Writing historical fiction, Decoding/Word identification, Geography: Map skills For a wealth of student activities and resources about the Underground Railroad, see: Slideshows Slideshows of important themes in American history with images and audio.

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"Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women," wrote escaped slave Harriet Jacobs (1818-1896) in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under the name Linda Brent. At age 15, Jacobs began resisting the sexual advances of her master, Dr. Flint. Even when Jacobs had two children with another man, Flint pursued her.

Unable to find safe passage north, Jacobs fled to the house of her grandmother, a freed slave who lived nearby and took care of Jacobs' children. Hidden from everyone - even her children, Ellen and Benny, who had been bought out of slavery - Jacobs spent seven years hidden in a cramped attic at her grandmother's home.

Finally reaching the North in 1851, Jacobs published an account of her ordeal with the help of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. For both women, the book was a political effort to help "sisters in bondage." They hoped it would stop Northerners from sending escaped slaves back South to what Jacobs said was a "loathsome den of corruption and cruelty." What follows is an excerpt from her autobiography.

"Coming Up for Air," by Harriet Jacobs

A small shed had been added to my grandmother's house years ago. Some boards were laid across the supports at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small attic, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. The attic was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest point was three feet high. There was no admission for either light or air. My uncle Phillip, who was a carpenter, had very skillfully made a concealed trap door, which communicated with a storeroom.

To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness, total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary and I slept such sleep as the wretched may, when a tempest has passed over them.

I knew morning only by the noises I heard. In my small den, day and night were all the same. I suffered for air even more than for light. But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children. There was joy, and there was sadness in the sound. It made my tears flow. How I longed to speak to them! I was eager to look on their faces; but there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep.
The Lesser of Evils
This continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position day after day. Yet I would have chosen this, rather than my lot as a slave. I was never cruelly overworked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. But though my life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to lead such a life!

My food was passed to me through the trapdoor my uncle had contrived. My grandmother, uncle, and aunt would seize such opportunities as they could to chat with me at the opening. But of course this was not safe in the daytime. It must all be done in darkness.
Taking a Breath
It was impossible for me to move in an erect position, so I crawled about my den for exercise. One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a small tool for drilling. My uncle had left it sticking there when he made the trapdoor. I said to myself, "Now I will have some light. Now I will see my children." I bored one hole about an inch long and an inch broad. I sat by it till late into the night to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in. In the morning I heard the merry laugh of children, and presently two faces were looking up at me, as though they knew I was there. I longed to tell them I was there!

The heat of my den was intense, for nothing but thin shingles protected me from the scorching summer's sun. But I had my consolations. Aunt Nancy brought me all the news she could hear at Dr. Flint's. From her I learned that the doctor had written to New York to a colored woman, who had been born and raised in our neighborhood. He offered her a reward if she could find out anything out about me. He soon after started for New York in haste, saying to his family that he had important business.
Too Close for Comfort
Autumn came, with a pleasant abatement of heat. My eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, and by holding my book or work in a certain position near the opening I managed to read and sew. That was a great relief to the tedious monotony of my life. But when winter came, the cold penetrated through the thin shingle roof, and I was dreadfully chilled. The kind grandmother brought me bedclothes and warm drinks. Often I was obliged to lie in bed all day to keep comfortable; but with all my precautions, my shoulders and feet were frostbitten. Oh, those long, gloomy days, with no object for my eye to rest upon, and no thoughts to occupy my mind, except the dreary past and the uncertain future!

I was thankful when there came a day sufficiently mild for me to wrap myself up and sit at the loophole to watch the passersby. Southerners have the habit of stopping and talking in the streets, and I heard many conversations not intended to meet my ears. Several times I heard allusions to Dr. Flint, myself, and the history of my children. The opinion was often expressed that I was in the Free States. Very rarely did anyone suggest that I might be in the vicinity. Had the least suspicion rested on my grandmother's house, it would have been burned to the ground. But it was the last place they thought of.
Seven Years of Solitude
Dr. Flint and his family repeatedly tried to coax and bribe my children to tell something they had heard about me. One day the doctor took them into a shop, and offered them some bright little silver pieces and gay handkerchiefs if they would tell where their mother was. Ellen shrank away from him, and would not speak; but Benny said, "Dr. Flint, I don't know where my mother is. I guess she's in New York. When you go there again, I wish you'd ask her to come home, for I want to see her, but if you put her in jail, or tell her you'll cut her head off, I'll tell her to go right back."

I lived in that dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. My body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul.

Countless were the nights that I sat at the loophole scarcely large enough to give me a glimpse of one twinkling star. There, I heard the patrols and slave-hunters conferring together about the capture of runaways, knowing how rejoiced they would be to catch me.

Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children's faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, "Your mother is here." Sometimes it appeared to me as if ages had rolled away since I entered upon that gloomy, monotonous existence. At times I was stupefied and listless; at other times I became very impatient to know when these dark years would end and I should again be allowed to feel the sunshine and breathe the air.

My restlessness increased. I had lived too long in bodily pain and anguish of spirit. Always I was in dread that slavery would succeed in snatching my children from me. This thought drove me nearly frantic. At last Providence opened an unexpected way for me escape. My friend Peter came one evening and asked to speak with me. "Your day has come, Linda," said he. "I have found a chance for you to go to the Free States."
Free at Last
The anticipation of being a free woman provided almost too much for my weak frame. I made busy preparations for my journey, and for my children to follow me. Grandmother stole up to me as often as possible to whisper words of counsel. She insisted upon my writing to Dr. Flint as soon as I arrived in the Free States and asking him to sell me to her. She said she would sacrifice her house, and all she had in the world, for the sake of having me safe with my children in any part of the world. I resolved that not another cent of her hard earnings should be spent to pay rapacious slaveholders for what they called their property.

I was to escape in a vessel; but I forbear to mention any particulars.

On the day of my departure I made arrangements to go on board at dusk. The intervening time I resolved to spend with my son. I had not spoken to him for seven years, through I had been under the same roof and seen him every day. It was an agitating interview for both of us.
Mother and Child Reunion
After we had talked and wept together for a little while, he said, "Mother, I'm glad you're going away. I wish I could go with you. I knew you were here, and I have been so afraid they would come and catch you!"

I was greatly surprised and asked him if he ever mentioned his suspicions to his sister. He said he never did, but he had kept a close lookout for Dr. Flint, and if he saw him speak to a constable, or a patrol, he always told Grandmother. I now recollected that I had seen Benny manifest uneasiness when people were on my side of the house. Such prudence may seem extraordinary in a boy of 12 years, but slaves, being surrounded by mysteries, deceptions, and dangers, early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and prematurely cautious and cunning.

I told Benny I was now really going to the Free Sates, and if he was a good, honest boy, and a loving child to his dear old grandmother, the Lord would bless him and bring him to me, and we and Ellen would live together.

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"Coming Up For Air": A Fugitive Slave's Own Words | Scholastic

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"Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women," wrote escaped slave Harriet Jacobs (1818-1896) in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under the name Linda Brent. At age 15, Jacobs began resisting the sexual advances of her master, Dr. Flint.

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Introduction

Slave rebellions were a continuous source of fear in the American South, especially since black slaves accounted for more than one-third of the region's population in the 18th century. Laws dictating when, where and how slaves could congregate were enacted to prevent insurrection and quell white paranoia. It's estimated there were at least 250 slave rebellions in America before slavery was abolished in 1865.

SLAVE REVOLTS BEGIN

The first recorded slave revolt in the United States happened in Gloucester, Virginia, in 1663, an event involving white indentured servants as well as black slaves.

In 1672, there were reports of fugitive slaves forming groups to harass plantation owners. The first recorded all-black slave revolt occurred in Virginia in 1687.

Virginia was the host of several thwarted uprisings, including one in Richmond in 1800 and Spotsylvania County in 1815, but the state was also the scene of the most notorious slave rebellion in American history: Nat Turner's Revolt.

NAT TURNER

Slave Nat Turner was self-educated and prone to religious visions, which fueled his belief that a Day of Judgment was coming. In 1831, he enlisted the help of several other men to rebel.

In the morning hours of August 22, Nat Turner and his group murdered their master and his family. After swelling in size to about 60 slaves by afternoon, with more killing and a face-off with a white posse, the group scattered, and Virginia prepared for war. In the aftermath, about 60 slaves were executed.

Turner hid in a hole for a month and a half before discovery. Brought to trial, he was hanged a week later. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 was inspired in part by Nat Turner's rebellion.

STONO REBELLION

One of the bloodiest slave rebellions, known as the Stono Rebellion or Cato's Conspiracy, started in South Carolina in 1739, at the Stono River Bridge near Charleston.

One September morning, 20 slaves broke into a store, stole weapons and supplies and headed for the refuge of Spanish-ruled Florida, leaving 23 murder victims in their path.

Growing into a group of 100 upon arriving in Florida, the rebels stopped in an open field and made a ruckus in hopes other slaves would hear them and join. A local militia confronted the group, with most of the escaped slaves caught and executed.

Charleston had 19 years earlier been the center of a plotted revolt by 14 slaves planning to destroy plantations and attack Charleston. Betrayed, they fled, attempted to convince Creek Indians to join their uprising and were captured in Savannah, Georgia. All were executed upon return to Charleston.

In 1816 in Camden, slaves planned to set fire to the town and kill the white population. Seventeen slaves were arrested and seven executed. In 1829, a more successful attempt saw 85 buildings torched and razed to the ground.

NEW YORK SLAVE REVOLTS

In the 18th century, slaves comprised 20 percent of the population in New York City, and 1712 saw the city as host to a significant revolt centering on enslaved warriors from Africa's Gold Coast.

Earlier in the year, some slaves planned an uprising in April with local Indians. Armed with guns, swords, knives, and axes, 23 men gathered in an orchard at the northern tip of the city before setting fire to a slave owner's home.

A group of white men arrived to put out the fire and were ambushed-nine of them were killed. Soldiers were dispatched, and the rebels had fled to the forest, where they were eventually captured, though six committed suicide. After trials, 27 slaves were convicted, with 21 of them killed in public executions.

In 1708, a slave uprising in Long Island resulted in the death of seven whites and the execution of four slaves.

In 1741 in New York City, after a robbery in February and several arsons over the next few months, police believed a revolt was brewing and rounded up black men, both slaves and free. A series of trials followed with resulting executions and deportations, though the alleged conspiracy is now considered a fabrication by the judge and some witnesses, fueled by hysteria.

Albany was also the scene of several alleged plots that were foiled, including one in 1793 in which a group of slaves burned down several buildings.

GERMAN COAST UPRISING

The 1811 German Coast uprising was the largest slave revolt in American history, given the numbers of people involved.

Taking place along the Mississippi River north of New Orleans, in an area known as the German Coast, the ultimate plan was to destroy sugar cane plantations, free every slave in the state and take control of New Orleans.

On January 8 about 30 slaves entered their owner's mansion, killing the master's son while the master fled to warn other plantation owners, which sent mobs of frantic whites fleeing to New Orleans.

The rebels armed themselves and left to destroy the nearest plantation, joined by other slaves and eventually numbering more than 100 people. Abandoning their march to New Orleans, they slipped away from soldiers and retraced their steps north.

A group of nearly 100 planters confronted the slaves, who had taken refuge in a plantation. About 40 slaves were killed. Some were captured and forced to watch injured rebels get tortured. Others escaped into the swamp, only to be tracked down and killed.

The majority of the German Coast slaves put on trial for rebellion were found guilty and executed, with their mutilated corpses put on public display for other slaves to see.

AMISTAD SHIP REVOLT

Shipboard slave revolts weren't uncommon in the 18th century. In 1764 the slave ship Hope erupted in rebellion, with men in the hold forcing their way on deck twice and killing nine crew members before eventually being seized by Spanish forces.

The most famous revolt at sea took place on the Spanish slave ship in 1839, involving Africans being shipped out of Cuba. The 53 men seized control of the vessel and spared the lives of two Cubans who promised to maneuver the boat back to Africa.

After wandering the seas for two months, the ship docked in Long Island, where the Africans were taken into custody and endured a two-year-long court battle for their freedom. In January 1842, they were able to return to West Africa.

The only successful slave revolt on an American ship happened in November 1841 when the Creole left Richmond for New Orleans to sell a cargo of tobacco and 135 slaves.

A fight between guards and slaves turned into a full rampage onboard. Once the slaves seized control, they set course for the Bahamas, where all 135 slaves were given their freedom.

CIVIL WAR-ERA SLAVE REVOLTS

Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, there were numerous attempted insurgencies. In 1859, on the plantation of former President James K. Polk in Mississippi, his widow watched as armed slaves barricaded themselves in protest.

Additional uprisings were reported in West Virginia, Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and North Carolina that year.

In 1860, 14 cities in north Texas faced arson via a plot between slaves and white co-conspirators. There were multiple repeated eruptions in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and other Southern states.

In 1861, heartened by the attack on Fort Sumter, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, tried to time an uprising with the arrival of Union troops. Word got out about the plot through a child, which resulted in the execution of as many as 40 slaves. This scenario also involved several white co-conspirators.

Throughout the Civil War, there were reports of conspiracies and unrest among slaves all over the South, coming to an end only with the defeat of the Confederate States of America and finally, in 1865, emancipation.

SOURCES

Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Junius P. Rodriguez, ed.
American Negro Slave Revolts. Hebert Aptheker.
Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors.
American Slave Revolts and Conspiracies. Kerry Walters.

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Slave Rebellions - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Slave rebellions were a continuous source of fear in the American South, especially since black slaves accounted for more than one-third of the region's population in the 18th century. Laws dictating when, where and how slaves could congregate were enacted to prevent insurrection and quell white paranoia.

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Though exact totals will never be known, the transatlantic slave trade is believed to have forcibly displaced some 12.5 million Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries; some 10.6 million survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Though descendants of these enslaved Africans now make up considerable segments of the population in the United States, Brazil and many Caribbean islands, written records of their ancestors' origins are difficult-if not impossible-to find. Through extensive research, however, scholars have been able to make educated guesses about where many of the slaves brought to the New World originated.

Explore the Mapping Slave Voyages interactive to find out more about the 350-year history of the transatlantic trade.

Slaves brought to the United States represented about 3.6 percent of the total number of Africans transported to the New World, or around 388,000 people-considerably less than the number transported to colonies in the Caribbean (including more than 1.2 million to Jamaica alone) or to Brazil (4.8 million). Of those Africans who arrived in the United States, nearly half came from two regions: Senegambia, the area comprising the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and the land between them, or today's Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali; and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. The Gambia River, running from the Atlantic into Africa, was a key waterway for the slave trade; at its height, about one out of every six West African slaves came from this area.

In addition to the nearly 50 percent of the total number of enslaved Africans in the United States from these two regions, a considerable number of slaves had their origins on the so-called Gold Coast or "Slave Coast," which is now the West African nation of Ghana, as well as neighboring parts of the Windward Coast, now Ivory Coast. Others originated in the Bight of Biafra (including parts of present-day eastern Nigeria and Cameroon), an inlet of the Atlantic on Africa's western coast that was a hub of extensive slave-dealing operations.

Watch the groundbreaking series reimagined. Watch ROOTS now on HISTORY.

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What part of Africa did most slaves come from?

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Though exact totals will never be known, the transatlantic slave trade is believed to have forcibly displaced some 12.5 million Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries; some 10.6 million survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic.

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This monument, along the "Road of the Slaves" in the West-African country of Benin, commemorates the countless Africans who were kidnapped and sold as slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries.

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point-of-no-return-monument-on-the-route-des-esclaves - Slave Trade Pictures - Slavery in America - HISTORY.com

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This monument, along the "Road of the Slaves" in the West-African country of Benin, commemorates the countless Africans who were kidnapped and sold as slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries.

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transatlantic slave trade, segment of the global slave trade that transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century. It was the second of three stages of the so-called triangular trade, in which arms, textiles, and wine were shipped from Europe to Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, and sugar and coffee from the Americas to Europe.

Origins of the transatlantic trade of enslaved people

By the 1480s Portuguese ships were already transporting Africans for use as enslaved labourers on the sugar plantations in the Cape Verde and Madeira islands in the eastern Atlantic. Spanish conquistadors took enslaved Africans to the Caribbean after 1502, but Portuguese merchants continued to dominate the transatlantic slave trade for another century and a half, operating from their bases in the Congo-Angola area along the west coast of Africa. The Dutch became the foremost traders of enslaved people during parts of the 1600s, and in the following century English and French merchants controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade, taking a large percentage of their human cargo from the region of West Africa between the Sénégal and Niger rivers. In 1713 an agreement between Spain and Britain granted the British a monopoly on the trade of enslaved people with the Spanish colonies. Under the Asiento de negros, Britain was entitled to supply those colonies with 4,800 enslaved Africans per year for 30 years. The contract for this supply was assigned to the South Sea Company, of which British Queen Anne held some 22.5 percent of the stock.

Study the history of the African slave trade and its economic effect on western Africa, where coastal states became rich and powerful while savanna states were destabilized as their people were taken captive

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Probably no more than a few hundred thousand Africans were taken to the Americas before 1600. In the 17th century, however, demand for enslaved labour rose sharply with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region in North America. The largest numbers of enslaved people were taken to the Americas during the 18th century, when, according to historians' estimates, nearly three-fifths of the total volume of the transatlantic slave trade took place.

The slave trade had devastating effects in Africa. Economic incentives for warlords and tribes to engage in the trade of enslaved people promoted an atmosphere of lawlessness and violence. Depopulation and a continuing fear of captivity made economic and agricultural development almost impossible throughout much of western Africa. A large percentage of the people taken captive were women in their childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families. The European enslavers usually left behind persons who were elderly, disabled, or otherwise dependent-groups who were least able to contribute to the economic health of their societies.

Historians have debated the nature and extent of European and African agency in the actual capture of those who were enslaved. During the early years of the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese generally purchased Africans who had been enslaved during tribal wars. As the demand for enslaved people grew, the Portuguese began to enter the interior of Africa to forcibly take captives; as other Europeans became involved in the slave trade, generally they remained on the coast and purchased captives from Africans who had transported them from the interior. Following capture, the abducted Africans were marched to the coast, a journey that could be as many as 300 miles (485 km). Typically, two captives were chained together at the ankle, and columns of captives were tied together by ropes around their necks. An estimated 10 to 15 percent of the captives died on their way to the coast.

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Transatlantic slave trade | History & Facts

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Transatlantic slave trade, part of the global slave trade that took 10-12 million enslaved Africans to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century. In the 'triangular trade,' arms and textiles went from Europe to Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, and sugar and coffee from the Americas to Europe.

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Africans in America | Part 1 | Narrative | The African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage

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European traders such as Nicolas Owen waited at these forts for slaves; African traders transported slaves from the interior of Africa. Equiano and others found themselves sold and traded more than once, often in slave markets. African merchants, the poor, royalty -- anyone -- could be abducted in the raids and wars that were undertaken by Africans to secure slaves that they could trade.

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the African Connection, ca 1788

The labor-intensive agriculture of the New World demanded a large workforce. Crops such as sugar cane, tobacco and cotton required an unlimited and inexpensive supply of strong backs to assure timely production for the European market. Slaves from Africa offered the solution. The slave trade between Western Africa and the America's reached its peak in the mid-18th century when it is estimated that over 80,000 Africans annually crossed the Atlantic to spend the rest of their lives in chains. Of those who survived the voyage, the final destination of approximately 40% was the Caribbean Islands. Thirty-eight percent ended up in Brazil, 17% in Spanish America and 6% in the United States.

It was a lucrative business. A slave purchased on the African coast for the equivalent of 14 English pounds in bartered goods in 1760 could sell for 45 pounds in the American market.
A slave's journey to a life of servitude often began in the interior of Africa with his or her capture as a prize of war, as tribute given by a weak tribal state to a more powerful one, or by outright kidnapping by local traders. European slave traders rarely ventured beyond Africa's coastal regions. The African interior was riddled with disease, the natives were often hostile and the land uncharted. The Europeans preferred to stay in the coastal region and have the natives bring the slaves to them.

Dr. Alexander Falconbridge served as the surgeon aboard a number of slave ships that plied their trade between the West African coast and the Caribbean in the late 1700s. He described his experiences in a popular book published in 1788. He became active in the Anti-Slavery Society and was appointed Governor of a colony established for freed slaves on the coast of modern-day Sierra Leone. His service was brief as he died in 1788 shortly after his appointment. We join his story as he describes the process through which the native African looses his freedom:

"There is great reason to believe, that most of the Negroes shipped off from the coast of Africa, are kidnapped. But the extreme care taken by the black traders to prevent the Europeans from gaining any intelligence of their modes of proceeding; the great distance inland from whence the Negroes are brought; and our ignorance of their language (with which, very frequently, the black traders themselves are equally unacquainted), prevent our obtaining such information on this head as we could wish. I have, however, by means of occasional inquiries, made through interpreters, procured some intelligence relative to the point. . . . From these I shall select the following striking instances: While I was in employ on board one of the slave ships, a Negro informed me that being one evening invited to drink with some of the black traders, upon his going away, they attempted to seize him. As he was very active, he evaded their design, and got out of their hands. He was, however, prevented from effecting his escape by a large dog, which laid hold of him, and compelled him to submit. These creatures are kept by many of the traders for that purpose; and being trained to the inhuman sport, they appear to be much pleased with it.

I was likewise told by a Negro woman that as she was on her return home, one evening, from some neighbors, to whom she had been making a visit by invitation, she was kidnapped; and, notwithstanding she was big with child, sold for a slave. This transaction happened a considerable way up the country, and she had passed through the hands of several purchasers before she reached the ship.

A man and his son, according to their own information, were seized by professed kidnappers, while they were planting yams, and sold for slaves. This likewise happened in the interior parts of the country, and after passing through several hands, they were purchased for the ship to which I belonged. It frequently happens that those who kidnap others are themselves, in their turns, seized and sold.

. . . During my stay on the coast of Africa, I was an eye-witness of the following transaction: a black trader invited a Negro, who resided a little way up the country, to come and see him. After the entertainment was over, the trader proposed to his guest, to treat him with a sight of one of the ships lying in the river. The unsuspicious countryman readily consented, and accompanied the trader in a canoe to the side of the ship, which he viewed with pleasure and astonishment. While he was thus employed, some black traders on board, who appeared to be in the secret, leaped into the canoe, seized the unfortunate man, and dragging him into the ship, immediately sold him.

The preparations made at Bonny by the black traders, upon setting out for the fairs which are held up the country, are very considerable. From twenty to thirty canoes, capable of containing thirty or forty Negroes each, are assembled for this purpose; and such goods put on board them as they expect will be wanted for the purchase of the number of slaves they intend to buy.

When their loading is completed, they commence their voyage, with colors flying, and music playing; and in about ten or eleven days, they generally return to Bonny with full cargoes. As soon as the canoes arrive at the trader's landing place, the purchased Negroes are cleaned, and oiled with palm-oil; and on the following day they are exposed for sale to the captains.

When the Negroes, whom the black traders have to dispose of, are shown to the European purchasers, they first examine them relative to their age. They then minutely inspect their persons, and inquire into the state of their health, if they are afflicted with any infirmity, or are deformed, or have bad eyes or teeth; if they are lame, or weak in their joints, or distorted in the back, or of a slender make, or are narrow in the chest; in short, if they have been, or are afflicted in any manner, so as to render them incapable of much labor; if any of the foregoing defects are discovered in them, they are rejected. But if approved of, they are generally taken on board the ship the same evening. The purchaser has liberty to return on the following morning, but not afterwards, such as upon re-examination are found exceptionable.

The traders frequently beat those Negroes which are objected to by the captains, and use them with great severity. It matters not whether they are refused on account of age, illness, deformity, or for any other reason. At New Calabar, in particular . . . the traders, when any of their Negroes have been objected to, have dropped their canoes under the stern of the vessel, and instantly be headed them, in sight of the captain.

As soon as the wretched Africans, purchased at the fairs, fall into the hands of the black traders, they experience an earnest of those dreadful sufferings which they are doomed in future to undergo. . . . They are brought from the places where they are purchased to Bonny, etc. in canoes; at the bottom of which they lie, having their hands tied with a kind of willow twigs, and a strict watch is kept over them. Their usage in other respects, during the time of the passage, which generally lasts several days, is equally cruel. Their allowance of food is so scanty, that it is barely sufficient to support nature. They are, besides, much exposed to the violent rains which frequently fall here, being covered only with mats that afford but a slight defense; and as there is usually water at the bottom of the canoes, from their leaking, they are scarcely ever dry."

References:
This eyewitness account appears in Falconbridge, Alexander, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (1788); Curtin, Phillip D. Atlantic Slave Trade (1969); Matheson, William Law, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839-1865 (1967).

How To Cite This Article:
"Slave Trade: the African Connection, ca 1788" EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2007).

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Eyewitness account of the African slave trade

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The fight to end slavery is usually associated with mid-19th century figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, but the first stirrings of the abolitionist movement began more than a century earlier among a group of former slaves, religious activists and political leaders. Below, meet six early pioneers of the antislavery cause, including an eccentric Quaker and a former slave trader turned abolitionist.

Benjamin Lay

Even though he stood just 4 foot, 7 inches tall and had a hunched back, Benjamin Lay loomed large among 18th century abolitionists. The Quaker dwarf first developed a hatred for slavery in the 1720s while working as a merchant alongside sugar plantations in Barbados. Upon moving to Philadelphia a few years later, he launched a crusade to convince his fellow Quakers that the "peculiar institution" was incompatible with their faith. He interrupted Quaker gatherings to lecture on abolitionism, refused to eat food or wear clothes made by slave labor and published a 278-page screed titled "All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates."

Lay was best known for staging bizarre pieces of antislavery theater. For one stunt, he stood outside with one bare foot in the snow to show the suffering of slaves "who go all winter half-clad"; for another, he briefly kidnapped a slaveholding Quaker's child to illustrate the injustice of separating Africans from their families. In 1738, Lay took the floor at annual Quaker meeting, drew a sword and stabbed a hollowed-out Bible filled with red-colored juice, spraying some of it on the crowd. "Thus shall God shed the blood of those who have enslaved their fellow creatures," he proclaimed. Lay's radicalism made him an outcast for much of his life, but he eventually achieved a small success in 1758, when the Quakers voted to exclude slaveholders from their business meetings. Upon hearing the news, the elderly dwarf supposedly rose from his chair and said, "I can now die in peace."

Olaudah Equiano

Born in 1745 in present-day Nigeria, Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped from his village as an adolescent and sold into slavery. He endured the horrors of the Middle Passage aboard a slave ship, and later passed between several masters including a British Royal Navy officer, who used him as a servant during voyages between Europe and North America. After purchasing his freedom in 1766, Equiano moved to England and became active in the abolitionist movement. He penned editorials in newspapers, helped organize a group of black Londoners known as the Sons of Africa and petitioned the British crown to take action against slavery. He also became one of history's earliest proponents for interracial marriage, which he argued would eliminate color barriers and inspire racial harmony.

Equiano's biggest contribution to abolitionism came in 1789, when he published "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano," an autobiography now considered one of the first slave narratives. The book was a bestseller, and he spent the next several years touring the British Isles and using his life story to illustrate the evils of slavery. Equiano died in 1797-a decade before Britain finally abolished the slave trade-but his "Interesting Narrative" later became an influential text among American abolitionists.

Anthony Benezet

During the mid-18th century, Philadelphia schoolteacher Anthony Benezet laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic abolitionist movement. The kindhearted Quaker first took up the cause in 1754, when he joined with fellow activist John Woolman in writing a text titled "An Epistle of Caution and Advice, Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves." Over the next 25 years, Benezet published countless other antislavery tracts that drew on enlightenment philosophy, religious doctrine and economics to make a case for emancipation. Having taught many African children in his school, he also espoused the then-provocative idea that blacks possessed the same intellectual capacity as whites.

Benezet's writings were widely distributed across both the United States and Europe, and he corresponded with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Methodism founder John Wesley. In 1775, he helped found The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, America's first abolitionist group. He also lobbied the Quakers to denounce slavery and open a school for blacks, and was instrumental in winning passage of a law that gradually abolished slavery in Pennsylvania. When Benezet died in 1784, some 400 black Philadelphians turned out to march in his funeral procession.

Elizabeth Freeman (Bett)

In 1781, as the American Revolution raged, a Massachusetts slave named Bett approached abolitionist lawyer Theodore Sedgwick and asked him to help her sue for her freedom. Bett had endured mistreatment at the hands of her master's wife-including a blow from a hot kitchen shovel that left her with a burn on her arm-and she was determined to never return to their house again. To back up her case for emancipation, she cited a surprising source: Massachusetts' newly inked constitution, which included a passage stating that all the state's residents were "born free and equal."

Sedgwick took the case, and later argued in county court that Massachusetts' constitution nullified any previous laws supporting slavery. In a landmark decision, the jury agreed and awarded Bett her freedom as well as 30 shillings in damages. It was one of the first times that a slave successfully won emancipation in court, and along with another case involving a man named Quok Walker, it helped set a precedent that saw Massachusetts abolish slavery in 1783. Having struck a major blow for the abolitionist cause, Bett went on to work as a paid domestic servant in Sedgwick's home. She also adopted a name that reflected her new status as a free citizen: Elizabeth Freeman.

Benjamin Rush

The most prominent American physician of the late-18th century, Dr. Benjamin Rush was also a patriot leader who signed the Declaration of Independence and served as surgeon general of the Continental Army. His interest in abolitionism began in the early 1770s, when fellow Philadelphian Anthony Benezet inspired him to pen a critique of slavery titled, "An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping." Approaching the subject with a scientist's eye, Rush stressed that blacks had the same natural intelligence as their white counterparts and that education and emancipation were needed to undue the damage done by slavery.

When the American Revolution ended, Rush was among the many patriots who believed the principles of the new republic left no room for slavery. "It would be useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us," he once wrote, "while we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different." He joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the 1780s, serving first as its secretary and then its president, and later made arrangements to free his lone slave. Rush also took steps to lift up Philadelphia's free black community, including raising money for African churches and enlisting the help of black nurses during a 1793 yellow fever epidemic.

Moses Brown

Many former slave owners took up the abolitionist cause during the 1700s, but few made as radical a conversion as Moses Brown. The Rhode Island native and Brown University co-founder came from a prominent family whose commercial interests included slave trading. Brown owned several slaves himself, but he began to question the practice in the late-1760s after a disastrous voyage saw the family's slave ship lose more than half its 200-person human cargo to disease, suicide and a failed insurrection. The tragedy weighed heavily on Brown's conscience, and by 1774, he had converted to Quakerism and renounced slavery. "I saw my slaves with my spiritual eyes as plainly as I see you now," he later recalled, "and it was given to me as clearly to understand that the sacrifice that was called for of my hand was to give them liberty."

After manumitting his slaves, Brown cut ties with the family slaving business and became an ardent abolitionist. He assisted in court cases involving blacks unfairly held in bondage, distributed pamphlets against slavery, donated land for black schools and campaigned tirelessly for the abolition of the African slave trade on both the state and federal level. Even after Rhode Island banned the slave trade in 1787, he founded the Providence Society for the Abolition of Slavery to help prosecute those who violated the new law. Before his death in 1836, Brown had a personal meeting with famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who deemed the reformed slave trader "an extraordinary man" with "interest in all the great philanthropic movements of the age."

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The fight to end slavery is usually associated with mid-19th century figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, but the first stirrings of the abolitionist movement began more than a century earlier among a group of former slaves, religious activists and political leaders.

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Narrator: As the daughter of one of South Carolina's first families, Angelina Grimké lived in almost unimaginable luxury. In the 1820s, Charleston's aristocracy was one of the wealthiest societies on earth. But Angelina found it almost unbearable -- an empire of sin.

Carol Berkin, Historian: The story goes that each of them in the family had their own personal slave behind them when they ate dinner. And if the salt and pepper were next to the person sitting next to you, you didn't ask them to pass it. Your slave got it from his slave and gave it to you. There was nothing that you had to do that there wasn't a slave who took care of it for you.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): Did you hear last night?

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Hear what?

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): Really?

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Angelina, what are you talking about?

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): You know! Henry! He whipped John again!

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): I've told you before, dear -- that's Henry's business.

Carol Berkin, Historian: Angelina attacked slavery not in the beginning because she cared about the slaves.

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): ... It is Henry's business.

Carol Berkin, Historian: She was really concerned about the fate of their white masters.

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): I ask you to leave him alone.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): He's my brother!

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Yes. I know.

Carol Berkin, Historian: She believed slavery was a sin and that God would punish people who had slaves.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): Mother, it is my duty to bear testimony against ...

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Angelina, mind your own business. Can you do that?

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): It is my business! And it's your business too! How can you stand in church every week...

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): You must let it be!

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): I can't let it be! Have you no Christian feelings?

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Yes, Angelina, I have Christian feelings, and you are putting them to the test right now. My soul will be judged by the Lord, and not by you or anyone else.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): It is my duty...

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): It is not your duty, Angelina! I am glad -- I suppose -- that you are so diligent about your faith. But leave my soul to me, and Henry's to Henry.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): I speak the truth in love.

Mrs. Grimké (Crystal Cupp): Enough!

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): Mother? Mother. Mother, listen to me! Mother!

Julie Roy Jeffrey, Historian: Angelina's religious search was tortured, tortured, tortured. She was more or less on her own as she struggled with very deep and troubling issues about herself and her relationship to God.

Narrator: In the fall of 1829, Grimké resolved to leave Charleston and the pollutions of slavery, for an uncertain future in the North.

Lois Brown, Historian: There's a kind of fearlessness about Angelina Grimké. Women did not strike out, white women did not strike out on their own in this way, and Southern white women certainly did not. This is disobedience to proper society, to the South, to the church.

Narrator: Frederick Douglass was alone in a terrifying new world. A few weeks earlier, the six-year-old had been delivered to his master's home on Maryland's eastern shore, to begin his life as a slave. His first experience of slavery would haunt him to his grave.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Aunt Hester went out one night, and happened to be absent when the master desired her presence.

Overseer (Scott Carter): Bitch!

Aunt Hester (Ingrid Alli): Oh please, please ...

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): No words, no tears, no prayers, seemed to move his iron heart. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped -- and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip to make her scream, and whip to make her hush. I dared not venture out till long after it was over. It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery.

Manisha Sinha, Historian: It's actually quite astounding how deeply entrenched it was in the nation's political and economic life. What is seen as this sort of idiosyncratic, peculiar Southern institution actually had an enormous economic significance in the national economy of the United States.

David W. Blight, Historian: Slaves were the single largest financial asset in the entire American economy, worth more than all manufacturing, all railroad, steamship lines, and other transportation systems, put together. The only thing in the American economy worth more as simply a financial asset was the land itself, and no one really quite knows how to value North America.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: William Lloyd Garrison's religious background was not just a background, it was at the core of who he was. It was an indwelling spirit inside of him that constantly thought about making God's will come into being on this earth.

Choir (Actors): ... to mansions in the skies, / I bid farewell to every fear, / And wipe my weeping eyes. / Should earth against my soul engage ...

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Garrison went to Baltimore and there boarded with free blacks. Had to share the table with them, had to break bread with them, had to sleep in the same quarters with them. And suddenly he had an idea that he had a much expanded mission that did not simply speak to the question of slavery but spoke to the question of race.

Choir (Actors): ... and face a frowning world. / Let cares, like a wild deluge come ...

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned, and bound for advocating African rights, and I should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrunk from that duty or danger.

Narrator: By the fall of 1830, William Lloyd Garrison was back in Boston, doggedly pursuing his dream of an abolitionist newspaper. He scrounged around for printing supplies and convinced a colleague to loan him a few reams of paper. He traveled around the Northeast, gathering a handful of allies among white reformers, but not enough to support his venture.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, Historian: Garrison meets with a group of black abolitionists and he receives very positive support. In that first year, the financial help of black Bostonians was absolutely critical. He had many more black supporters than white supporters.

Lois Brown, Historian: He uses his time in African American communities and churches, in meetings, to think very deliberately about how to organize his own abolitionist campaign. There is a true partnership that can go forward. There is a kind of work that Garrison can do, precisely because he is a white man in America in the 1830s.

Narrator: On January 1st, 1831, Garrison's long-awaited day arrived. On the first page of the first issue of his newspaper, Garrison declared, "There shall be no neutrals; men shall either like or dislike me."

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): Let Southern oppressors tremble, let their Northern apologists tremble -- let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. On the subject of slavery, I do not wish to write with moderation. I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- and I WILL BE HEARD.

Narrator: For eight months, Garrison toiled away in almost complete obscurity. Then, an explosion of violence halfway across the country suddenly propelled him to national prominence. On a hot August night in 1831, a band of armed slaves rode through the Virginia countryside, killing the white occupants of one farmhouse after another. Nat Turner, the man who led the rebellion, would elude a massive search party for 68 days before he, too, was caught and executed.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Nat Turner's rebellion is a tremendous point of departure. The sudden explosion of black anger, black wrath, is so jarring that the ramifications of the rebellion go far beyond Virginia.

W. Caleb McDaniel, Historian: There's no evidence that Garrison's Liberator had any influence on Nat Turner. But very quickly in the Southern press, Garrison's name started to be associated with Nat Turner's revolt.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: The South Carolina legislature put a bounty on Garrison's head: $15,000 if you deliver his body, I think more if you delivered the whole man alive.

Narrator: Garrison welcomed the notoriety.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): The Liberator is causing extraordinary agitation among whites in the slave states. I am constantly receiving anonymous letters filled with abominable and bloody sentiments. These trouble me less than the wind. I was never so happy and confident as I am at the present time.

Male Passerby (Actor): Ladies.

Mary Dutton (Virginia Fields): He wants to be noticed!

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil): Don't they all?

Narrator: In the spring of 1833, Harriet and two friends crossed over the river into neighboring Kentucky. She had never before visited a slave state.

Slave Auctioneer (Brian Elder): We have this fine specimen here. What'll you give?

First Bidder (Actor): Twenty-five.

Slave Auctioneer (Brian Elder): Twenty-five.

Second Bidder (Actor): Fifty.

Slave Auctioneer (Brian Elder): Fifty. We've got 50 going once! Fifty going twice. Fifty! Sold to the gentleman here. How're you gentleman doing this nice, warm Kentucky day? We're gonna keep this thing going.

Slave Auction Mother (Montrece Hill): No! My baby.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: What Stowe sees there is a human thing. She sees these people, I mean they are human beings.

Slave Auctioneer (Brian Elder): What will you give for this woman? Twenty-five?

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: She's confronted with it in such an intimate way, and I think that never leaves her.

Narrator: In 1833, two years after William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator, abolitionists from all over the North gathered for the first time. They could feel the strength of their growing numbers -- the time had come to unify their far-flung groups into one national anti-slavery society.

Garrison was chosen to draw up the organization's charter. He worked through the night, producing a radical document that crystallized his own beliefs, especially his faith in the power of nonviolence.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): Our measures shall be the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption, the destruction of error by the potency of truth, the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love, and the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance.

Narrator: The American Anti-Slavery Society came to life the next day, when 63 people signed Garrison's manifesto. They vowed to spread the anti-slavery gospel to every city, town, and village, and they agreed to use what they called "moral suasion" to convert slaveholders to the cause.

David W. Blight, Historian: The heart of the evangelical Christian's worldview was this idea that the individual can be converted almost immediately. So why not the society too?

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: They had seen through their own religious culture the conversion of people from the condition of being a sinner to being sanctified. And so the original intention of the abolitionists was to tell the slaveholders to repent and that they would.

John Stauffer, Historian: Abolitionists never waver in their faith or their hope that any day, any moment, slavery can end.

Narrator: Word of the abolitionists' efforts spread, even reaching the slave Frederick Douglass. Douglass had spent much of his youth as a house slave in Baltimore. There his horizons had widened. He had lived among free blacks, had secretly learned to read, and there he had come to hope that slavery might not be eternal.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Every once in a while, I could hear my master speaking angrily about "abolitionists." I had no idea who or what these were. I soon found, however, that they were soundly hated by slaveholders. I realized with deep satisfaction that I was not alone in abhorring slavery.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: This thought makes him question, it makes him hopeful, it makes him angry, so that when there is a need for Douglass to be beaten back into submission, to erase the experiences of Baltimore, he's sent to Covey for this.

Narrator: Edward Covey was a farmer back on Maryland's eastern shore who traded on his reputation as a slave breaker.

John Stauffer, Historian: He was truly sadistic. He whipped Douglass mercilessly at least once a week for the first six months, for no reason at all.

Edward Covey (Jeffrey Wilhelm): Come on, boy. Come on, boy.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: Douglass knew that by physically assaulting a white man his life was in danger. But he's made this decision that it matters not. And he isn't punished, in part because Douglass standing up to Covey ruins, or at least jeopardizes, Covey's reputation.

Narrator: Covey never laid a hand on Douglass again.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before. I was a man now.

Lois Brown, Historian: Southerners decide we're being attacked and you need to bring these scoundrels to justice, they must be kidnapped, they must be assassinated -- I mean, it's incredible uproar.

Manisha Sinha, Historian: This is when the South sort of closes itself completely on the issue of slavery. Earlier on you were not putting your life into danger if you criticized slavery. But by that time in the South, if you did you were taking a serious risk.

Narrator: The vehemence of the reaction in the South took the abolitionists by surprise. But they were even more alarmed when the violence moved north. In some cases, abolitionists themselves were the targets, as when a New York mob burned Lewis Tappan's house to the ground. But all too often, African Americans were the victims of racist violence, from isolated beatings to the expulsion of entire black communities. The mobs shattered every abolitionist assumption: that righteousness would triumph over evil, that their fellow Americans would listen to reason, that their Northern neighbors would support the abolitionist cause. Garrison was stunned.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): When we first unfurled the banner of The Liberator, we did not anticipate that to protect Southern slavery the free states would voluntarily trample underfoot all law, order, and government.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): "Respected Friend: It seems as if I was compelled at this time to address you. I can hardly express the deep and solemn interest with which I have viewed the violent proceedings of the last few weeks ..."

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): "... The ground upon which you stand is holy ground: never, never surrender it. It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction that this is a cause worth dying for. Angelina Grimké." William, she's the daughter of one of the most famous families in South Carolina.

W. Caleb McDaniel, Historian: When Garrison receives Angelina Grimké's letter, he sees a Southern woman who is confirming everything that the abolitionists have been saying about slavery's evils. It's a Godsend.

Narrator: Garrison's publication of the letter horrified Angelina's friends and even her sister Sarah. They pleaded with her to renounce it. But Grimké refused. Instead, she committed herself to the cause. She had a weapon that no other abolitionist could claim: a pedigree among the slaveholding aristocracy. Grimké set about writing An Appeal to the Women of the South, urging them to work for the downfall of slavery.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): I know you do not make the laws but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of those who do. Let the Christian women of the South arise, and salvation is certain.

Narrator: Grimké's appeal met the same reception as Garrison's pamphlets. In Charleston, copies were publicly burned, and the mayor warned her mother that if Angelina ever dared visit Charleston again she would be thrown in jail. But Grimké had no intention of returning to the South. She had made up her mind to take up the banner of abolition.

Mob (Actors): We'll take care of them ... I'm going to lose ... You're not going to lose nothing ... I got this figured out ... I'm not afraid of you ... We're not fighting each other, we're fighting the God-damned abolitionists ... Just relax ... You back off of me ... Don't you mess with me, boy.

Narrator: By the fall of 1835, anti-abolitionist violence was closing in on Boston. A stone-throwing crowd had recently forced one of Garrison's allies to abandon a speech. Garrison himself woke one morning to find a gallows on his front lawn. He ignored the warnings. On the morning of October 21st, 1835, he made his way across town to deliver yet another anti-slavery lecture.

Mob (Actors): That was Garrison! That was Garrison! We'll get him ... Hey, we'll get him on the way back out!

Narrator: Garrison fled into a back alley, and hid away in a carpenter shop.

First Assailant (Actor): Well, well, here's our little rabbit.

Second Assailant (Actor): Oh, we've got him! He's up here!

First Assailant (Actor): You're mine.

Third Assailant (Actor): Come on, let's take him down to the others.

First Assailant (Actor): All right. We'll tar the nigger-loving son of a bitch. Get the rope.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Garrison begins to suspect that every part of American society is infected by a deep moral disease. And he starts to say, "The churches are pro-slavery -- we're coming out of all the churches. Politics are pro-slavery -- abolitionists should never vote." He becomes far more radical and far more anti-institutional.

Narrator: For years, John Brown had been trying to divine God's purpose, to make sense of his afflictions. He had once been a successful merchant and tanner, a good provider to his family. But then, suddenly, his life collapsed: a series of business disasters plunged him deep into debt.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: Brown is drifting just further and further into a very deep and dark relationship with God. He's always trying to discern what God wants for him. That's really what Calvinism is all about. You're eternally in sin. You're just constantly trying to get out of it like a drowning man.

Narrator: In November of 1837, news came that an anti-slavery printer had been murdered by a mob in Illinois. Elijah Lovejoy's death struck at something deep within John Brown, conjuring up a memory that had haunted him for years.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith, audio): When I was a child, I stayed for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord who held a slave boy near my own age. The master made a great pet of me, while the Negro boy was badly clothed, poorly fed, and beaten before my eyes with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.

Carol Berkin, Historian: Angelina thinks he walks on water. She thinks he is the most amazing man, that he is filled with a passion of abolition. He trains them, teaches them, and sends them off to give talks.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): I stand before you as a Southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash, and the piteous cry of the slave. I stand before you as a repentant slaveholder. I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave, and the deluded master, to do all that I can to overturn a system built up upon the bodies of my countrymen, and cemented by the blood and sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds.

Carol Berkin, Historian: Of course, since they're women, to speak in front of a mixed -- or as they called it, promiscuous -- audience of men and women was absolutely forbidden. The abolitionists are ardent desirers of respectability for their movement. So when men start to come to her talks, their antennae go up. And when they tell her to stop talking to men, she says, "No, I have a right."

Narrator: The Grimkés quickly found themselves at the center of a storm. Ministers condemned them, and warned of the dangers that loomed if women moved away from their assigned sphere. Many abolitionists agreed. As the arguments escalated, Angelina began linking the rights of enslaved people to the rights of women. Garrison stood by the embattled sisters, but Weld did not. "Women's rights should not be your preoccupation," he told Angelina, "at least not until the slaves are free." Grimké's pain and anger came through in her reply.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): Can't you just stand here side-by-side with us? Can you not see that women could do, and would do, a hundred times more for the slave if she were not shackled?

Narrator: By the time their six-month tour finally ended in the fall of 1837, Angelina could go no further. She collapsed with typhoid fever. As she was recovering, Angelina wrote to Theodore, saying she hadn't realized how much he disliked her.

Carol Berkin, Historian: And he writes back to her, "You're young and you have too much pride, and you're not helping the cause." And then in great big letters, three times the size of the rest of the letter, he writes, "I have loved you from the first moment I met you." And I'm sure Angelina had the same response I had in reading, "You're terrible. You're prideful. I love -- I, I what?"

Sarah Grimké (Wendy Carter): My dear, look at you. You're beautiful.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): Your letter was indeed a great surprise, my brother, and yet it was no surprise at all. I feel, my Theodore, that we are the two halves of one whole, two bodies animated by one soul, and that the Lord has given us to each other.

Narrator: In the spring of 1838, Angelina and Theodore's friends received a wedding invitation adorned with an engraving of a slave in chains. It would be a ceremony unlike any other. The couple improvised their vows, denounced a man's authority over his wife, and, to cap it all off, they had a black minister and a white minister lead the congregation in prayer.

Theodore Weld (Steve Annan): And I reject all authority, all government, save the influence which love gives us over each other.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles): May the sun continue to shine as it now does, and may our Father guide us in love through the rest of our pilgrimage.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Brothers and sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Weld have chosen to solemnize their union not by the illegitimate authority of state or church, but by your witness. On this ...

Julie Roy Jeffrey, Historian: All kinds of rumors had been flying around Philadelphia about the wedding and the guest list and the social amalgamation, or mixing, that had gone on.

Narrator: As news of the event filtered out, the city grew tense. By the time Angelina and Theodore attended an anti-slavery convention two days after the wedding, Philadelphia was seething with racial tension. The meeting was held in Pennsylvania Hall, which had been constructed as a haven for free speech.

Carol Berkin, Historian: The leaders of the movement are on the stage, and as they're speaking, as they're holding their meeting, they begin to hear noise outside, and the noise grows and grows and grows. And then they begin to see the rocks hitting the windows. And they realize that they're in danger.

Narrator: Angelina Weld kept speaking as showers of stones pelted the windows. Shattered glass cascaded to the floor.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): What is the mob? What would the breaking of every window be -- any evidence that we are wrong, or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution? What if that mob should burst in upon us and commit violence on our persons? Would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?

Narrator: The following night, a crowd broke into the empty hall and set fire to the building. Firemen stood aside and watched it burn. Soon, Philadelphia's monument to free speech lay in ruins.

Only days after the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, a shaken Angelina moved with Theodore to a rustic farm in New Jersey. There, far from the violence and upheaval of abolition's front lines, they would take up their most influential work. American Slavery As It Is was a book made up of first-hand accounts of slavery, handbills for runaway slaves, court records, and the words of slave owners themselves. A mammoth undertaking, it was an irrefutable answer to the argument that slavery was a necessary and benevolent institution. Grimké was unflinching in her own account.

Angelina Grimké (Jeanine Serralles, audio): I saw slavery in the city, among the fashionable and the honorable. There, everything cruel and revolting is carefully concealed from strangers. I have known the mistress of a family borrow servants to wait on company, because their own slaves had been so cruelly flogged, that they could not walk without limping at every step, and their putrefied flesh emitted such an intolerable smell that they were not fit to be in the presence of company.

Narrator: American Slavery As It Is became the best-selling book in the country. But with its publication, Angelina Grimké's public career was over. Her health had been severely weakened by her public ordeals, leaving her barely able to cope with the demands of motherhood. For all that, Angelina Grimké never surrendered the vision of a more perfect society in which black and white, men and women, walked together in the ways of God.

Carol Berkin, Historian: She's exhausted from fighting, and yet, she really never lets go of doing what is morally right. But she's not the same know-it-all obnoxious girl she was when she was younger. Now she's genuinely a humanist, she's genuinely a person with great empathy for people who suffer, and great sensitivity to the inequalities in society.

Narrator: By 1840, after 10 years of struggle, William Lloyd Garrison was drifting away from many of his old allies, alienating them with what they considered irrelevant heresies. Rather than backing down, Garrison upped the ante: Because the Constitution itself was corrupt, he charged, the Union was fatally flawed. Garrison insisted that abolitionists renounce their government, that they withdraw from citizenship and refuse to vote.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): The American Union was effected by a guilty compromise between the free and slave-holding states -- in other words, by incorporating the slave system into the government. In the language of scripture, it was "a covenant with death, and an agreement with Hell."

David W. Blight, Historian: The first American Republic, the one invented in the Revolution in the late 18th century, had to die. It is so deeply flawed by the fact that human beings are property, that that Republic is doomed. It must be crushed, it must be changed and reinvented.

Part Two

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): A free state around me, and the free earth under my feet! What a moment this was to me! A whole year was pressed into a single day. A new world burst upon my agitated vision.

Narrator: Douglass had planned his escape with the help of Anna Murray, a free black woman he had met in Baltimore. Anna had sewn his sailor disguise, and sold her featherbed to give him the money he needed. As soon as she joined him in New York, they were married in a safe house by a fellow runaway. There was no time to rest -- New York was crawling with bounty hunters. With five dollars to their names, Frederick and Anna headed further north.

Their destination was New Bedford, Massachusetts, a whaling town known as an abolitionist stronghold, with a large population of free blacks and runaway slaves. Frederick and Anna clawed their way out of desperate poverty, and built a life for their growing family. For three years Douglass shoveled coal, cut wood, and loaded ships, often working two shifts a day. He did make time to attend anti-slavery gatherings, and was an avid reader of the most prominent abolitionist newspaper of the day, William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): I not only liked, I loved this paper, and its editor. He seemed a match for all the opponents of emancipation. Its words were few, and full of holy fire.

Narrator: When Douglass heard that Garrison was going to address an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, he took a rare few days off and boarded a ferry for the island. As Douglass listened to the proceedings, a friend from New Bedford unexpectedly called on him to speak. "As I made my way to the stage," Douglass recalled, "I was shaking in every limb."

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): My mother was named Harriet Bailey. I can't recollect of ever seeing her by the light of day. We were separated when I was but an infant. My father was a white man -- it was whispered that my master was my father, but of this I know nothing. What I do know is that my master was a very cruel man. I was just a boy -- hushed, terrified, stunned. That is slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Mr. Douglass! I have never seen an audience so captivated. I myself was carried away, as you saw.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I was so nervous I could barely stand.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): You were wonderful. If you don't mind my asking -- how did you first realize that you were a slave?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Slowly. I was raised by my grandmother. We lived far from the slave quarters, and so I didn't know what went on there. And one day, when I was six years old, my grandmother was told to walk me to the workhouse near the master's place. She sent me over to play with the other children, and abandoned me there.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Dear Lord.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): She loved me, but -- she had no choice.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): What a horrible, horrible crime. An innocent child. Why were you raised by your grandmother -- what about your mother?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): My mother? I only saw her a few times, at night. She was taken away after I was born, to work as a field hand 12 miles away. She walked all the way back a handful of times, but even so, they never let me know her enough to really love her. That left a hole -- I can't express it.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): My mother left me too. I was five. She worked in another town for a few years. I missed her terribly. But that was nothing compared with ...

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): It is never nothing.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): My dear Mr. Douglass -- join me. I urge you. You have a gift, sir, you really do.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): You flatter me.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): No, no I don't.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Mr. Garrison, you must understand how unexpected this is. I never imagined ...

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): You have an opportunity to strike a blow for the slaves who continue to suffer as we speak. Did the Lord give you these gifts so that you could spend your life working in the shipyards?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I see now why you are such an effective advocate.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): You'll do it then?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I think I will.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Put on the whole armor of God ...

Narrator: Douglass's new life was fraught with danger. He was a fugitive. By speaking out in public, he risked capture by bounty hunter. But he understood that his personal testimony could help transform the struggle. Garrison and his followers had failed to convert the slaveholders. Now, they hoped to deprive them of their financial and political support in the North. Douglass and his fellow agents were sent out to recruit the foot soldiers for this campaign: the men and women who would organize boycotts, raise money, and petition Congress.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): ... You must not give or take any quarter. You must cleave slavery to the ground!
Thank you. Now, I would like to introduce to you a graduate from the "peculiar institution." He can bear witness to the true nature of that institution. His diploma is written on his back. Mr. Frederick Douglass.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Douglass is something really, really special.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Tell your story, Frederick.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: And Garrison can sense that this is a way to really make the abolitionist cause incarnate.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: Many of the audience members had never, ever seen a slave, let alone been to the slave South. So to have a person like Douglass gave the anti-slavery cause teeth; it gave it authenticity; it gave it a new voice.

Narrator: Over the course of a few months, Douglass traveled three and a half thousand miles. The campaign was bearing fruit. Northerners were flooding Congress with anti-slavery petitions. When the House passed a gag rule forbidding their consideration, it added to Northern suspicions that the government was operating for the benefit of slaveholders. Abolitionists had driven another wedge into the fractures of the Union. But for Douglass, that wasn't enough. He wanted to effect change directly. When he heard that a fellow runaway had been captured, he saw a chance to enlist Garrison and his followers.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Dear Friend Garrison: Slavery, our enemy, has landed in our very midst. George Latimer has been hunted down like a wild beast and imprisoned in Leverett Street jail.

Narrator: George Latimer had arrived in Boston in the fall of 1842, only to be thrown in jail at the request of a Virginia planter.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Boston has become the hunting ground of merciless man-stealers. We need not point to the sugar fields of Louisiana or to the rice swamps of Alabama for the bloody deeds of this soul-crushing system, but to the city of pilgrims.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: Southerners have a right to be outraged. Here we have proof positive that there is an utter disregard for the compromises that have been made to found this American republic, to try to keep this thing running.

Lois Brown, Historian: You see the South rising to say, "This is yet another assault on our way of life. This cannot be."

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): "Tell your story, Frederick," would whisper my friend, William Lloyd Garrison, as we stepped upon the platform. I could not always obey, for it did not satisfy me to simply narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them. Besides, I was growing, and needed room.

Narrator: That winter, Douglass decided to reach out to a vast new audience. Throwing caution to the winds, he published the story of his life.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): I was born in Tuckahoe, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters to keep their slaves thus ignorant.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: It's an exposé about, of course, the horrible treatment of slaves. It's also an example of how the institution of slavery not only degrades slaves, but it degrades the master.

Narrator: Douglass listed dates, places, and, most dangerous of all, his owner's name. One white friend read the document and advised Douglass to burn it. Should Douglass's owners want to reclaim their property, he warned, there was nothing anyone could do to protect him. Douglass would have none of it.

John Stauffer, Historian: It was truly a cultural event when he did publish it. It was an immediate and an immense bestseller. That narrative was published in 1845. By 1846 to 1847, Douglass was a household name in the United States.

Narrator: Among those who read the book was Douglass's owner, Thomas Auld. He called Douglass a liar, and vowed to track him down and send him to the cotton fields of the Deep South. Douglass fled the country for Great Britain. There, he could carry on Garrison's campaign to isolate the South, by urging Britons to cut ties with American slaveholders. The experience would change his life.

John Stauffer, Historian: Douglass's time in Britain was the first time in his life where he experienced a dearth of racism. He could walk anywhere. It was the first time where he could walk down the street and not have someone spit at him, not have someone scowl and call him a nigger. It was the first time he could walk into any public establishment and not have someone kick him out.

Narrator: As Douglass's Narrative became a bestseller, he was treated by his British hosts not just as an equal, but as a celebrity. Most important of all, for the first time in his life, Douglass was free.

John Stauffer, Historian: His British sympathizers sent Thomas Auld a note saying, "We have your slave. Let's negotiate. He's probably worth $1,500-2,000. We'll give you $800. Try to recover him." The Aulds agreed to it. So when Douglass returns to the United States he's legally free. Douglass loved England and Ireland and Scotland so much that he almost stayed there. The only reason that he decided to return to the United States is because he felt a sense of responsibility and obligation to his fellow blacks.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): My Dear Wife: I am going to try to write you a few lines with my own hand. I have lost 20 pounds, and am quite thin and weak ...

Narrator: Douglass reluctantly left Garrison in Cleveland, to finish the speaking tour on his own. His secret leaked out shortly after he left Garrison on his sickbed.

John Stauffer, Historian: Garrison has to learn that his, this man that he mentored and his close friend, is leaving him, abandoning him. And Douglass doesn't even tell him first-hand. He saw himself as responsible as anyone for Douglass's success, for Douglass's fame, for Douglass's popularity. He never forgives Douglass.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): My Dear Wife: Is it not strange that Douglass has not written a single line to me since he left me on a bed of illness? In regard to his project for establishing a paper, he never spoke a word to me on the subject, nor asked my advice in any particular whatsoever. Such conduct grieves me to the heart.

Narrator: In the fall of 1847, a few weeks after leaving Garrison, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York. Just over the border from Canada, Rochester was the last stop on the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses used by slaves fleeing north to safety. The city's vibrant abolitionist community welcomed Douglass with open arms. As soon as he arrived, Douglass set about producing his own paper, naming it after the most potent symbol of the Underground Railroad.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: Most fugitives, if they knew anything about the route to freedom, it was follow the North Star. Douglass's location allows him to be very involved in the Underground Railroad. He wrote that in the mornings he would come and find 10 or 11 fugitive slaves sitting on the doorstep waiting for him to arrive in his office so that he could help shuttle them to Canada.

Narrator: For the first few months, Douglass's newspaper hemorrhaged money. He had few subscribers, and no experience as either a printer or a businessman. He mortgaged his house to pay his debts and looked about to give up when a friend arrived from Britain to help.

Julia Griffiths' editorial skills and business savvy kept The North Star afloat. But her appearance in Rochester sparked rumors, and when she moved into Douglass's home those rumors blossomed into a full-blown scandal. Douglass brushed the talk aside. He was invigorated in his new surroundings. Far from Garrison's Boston headquarters, Douglass was free to explore the political, and even militant, anti-slavery strategies that were circulating in Rochester. As he did so, he made the acquaintance of a man whose name he had heard in whispers, failed tanner and fervent abolitionist John Brown.

Mary Brown (Denise Ellington): May I get you anything else, Mr. Douglass?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Thank you, no, Mrs. Brown. A meal like this is a rare pleasure these days.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): The pleasure is ours, Mr. Douglass. I'd hoped to meet you long before this.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I am flattered, sir.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Your speeches have been an inspiration to us. I do wonder, though, whether speeches will ever be enough.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): What do you mean, sir?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): You've been at this for years.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Freedom is a long road, Mr. Brown. I don't know any shortcuts.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): I do, Douglass. I do. Sir -- God has placed these mountains here for a reason.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): You know God's thinking?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): I know these mountains. From here, we can strike a blow against the slave masters. The mountains are full of natural fords. One good man could hold off a hundred soldiers. My plan is to take handpicked men and post them in squads of fives on a line here. They come down off the mountains, raid the plantations, bring off the slaves, offer them a chance to fight.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Sir, you have no idea -- the entire state of Virginia will rise up against you. They will fight you tooth and claw.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): The colored people must fight back. They will never respect themselves otherwise, nor will they be respected. I read your book, sir. You said yourself, you became a man when you fought Mr. Covey.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I did. But I was young and this is very different. We must follow in our Savior's footsteps. We must convert the sinner.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): This is the sin, right here! We sit here, all of us, debating this point of law, whether the Constitution says this or that, and in the meantime, day after day, year after year, the slaveholders are free to do their worst.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): But if we stoop to bloodshed, we are no better than they are.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): You can preach for all eternity and nothing will change. Mr. Douglass, how many slaveholders have you converted? How many slaves have you freed?

David W. Blight, Historian: John Brown had a very beguiling personality. He was a stunning man. His sense of moral commitment was vivid and overwhelming. He was the real thing, and to a Frederick Douglass, he was also the real thing in terms of actually believing, about as deeply as anybody Douglass had ever met, in racial equality.

Narrator: Soon after their meeting, Douglass described Brown in The North Star as someone who, "though a white gentleman, is as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery."

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Slaveholders have forfeited even the right to live. And if the slave should put every one of them to the sword tomorrow, who would say that they deserve anything less than death?

Narrator: As Douglass was meeting with John Brown, a chain of events was being set in motion that would transform the future of slavery, and of America. In the spring of 1846 the United States went to war with Mexico, hoping to gain vast territories in the Southwest. Abolitionists bitterly opposed the war as an attempt to expand slave territory, but they were swept away by a national tide of patriotic enthusiasm.

John Stauffer, Historian: The Mexican War ultimately increases the size of the United States by virtually 100 percent. It almost doubles the size. And the big question is, "What are we gonna do with all this land acquired from Mexico?" Slave owners wanted it all to be slave territory. Anti-slavery Northerners all wanted it to be free territory.

David W. Blight, Historian: The Mexican War unshucked slavery. It just took it out of its shell. All those efforts to contain this issue couldn't work any more.

Narrator: While Southerners saw the expansion of slave territory as a guarantee that the institution would continue to thrive, Northerners viewed those plans as a conspiracy to build a true slave empire.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: Northerners become convinced that Southerners are hell-bent on moving slavery to every part of the country. And now you have this political fight going on over what's gonna happen with that land. And that becomes very, very divisive very quickly.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil, audio): Yesterday, I went downtown and found all gloomy and discouraged. A universal panic seems to be drawing nearer than ever before. Hearse drivers have scarce been allowed to unharness their horses. Furniture carts and common vehicles are being employed for the removal of the dead.

Narrator: Stowe had every reason to hope that her family would be spared -- they lived far from the tenements where the poor were being decimated. She kept the children close to home, and maintained a cheerful disposition. But at the beginning of July, Charley, Stowe's beloved little boy, was taken ill.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: She called him her summer child. Harriet wrote such glowing praise of Charley that her husband was actually disturbed by it. She said she never had such an easy time with a baby, and indeed it was the first baby she was able to nurse herself.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil, audio): I could not help, nor soothe, nor do one thing to mitigate his cruel suffering -- do nothing but pray that he might die soon.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: It was a terrible disease. You lost all the fluids in your body, you were wracked by convulsions, and there was nothing that anybody could do.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil, audio): At last, it is over and our dear little one is gone from us. My Charley -- my baby, so loving and sweet, so full of life and hope and strength -- now lies shrouded, pale, and cold in the room below.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: In the Calvinist scheme of things, if God sent you suffering it was because he loved you and he wanted to teach you something. Stowe later wrote that there were circumstances of such great bitterness about the manner of his death that she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allowed her to do the some great good to others.

Narrator: For Harriet Beecher Stowe, the wound of Charley's death would never heal. Rather, she came to understand the pain of mothers she would never know.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil, audio): It was at his dying bed, and at his grave, that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: She was really fueled by the grief for her baby, but I suspect, too, perhaps, anger at a Calvinist God. The writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin would be Harriet's way of making her baby's short life mean something.

John Stauffer, Historian: Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 virtually legitimates the kidnapping of free blacks. It means that a Southerner can hunt down any black in free soil and say, "You're my slave." And most significantly, in one sense, any white can be deputized at any moment, day or night, and is required to help round up the suspected fugitive slave.

Narrator: When the Compromise was finally sealed in late September, abolitionists were horrified. Twenty years of struggle had yielded not emancipation but a million more slaves, and a political agreement to preserve the institution in the United States forever. The petitions, the campaigns, the rallies, the marches, the meetings and resolutions and fundraisers, the mobs, the beatings -- all of the sacrifices had been suddenly dealt away by a handful of men in Washington.

As a final insult, abolitionists were cast as villains who had almost torn the nation apart. The New York Globe urged that, "No public building, not even the streets, must be desecrated by such a gathering of traitors." It became dangerous once again to speak out against slavery.

David W. Blight, Historian: You've just had a huge blow to your belief that somehow you're going to end slavery in this country by appealing to the Christian soul of the country. What the country just said, from the heart of the government, is that slavery is forever. This radicalizes the anti-slavery movement, arguably more than anything that had ever happened before.

Narrator: The crisis convinced Garrison that he needed to redouble his efforts. From Boston, he directed an energetic campaign of meetings, petitions, and publicity. But for many abolitionists, Garrison's old tactics seemed hopelessly inadequate. Frederick Douglass, for one, had begun to question his own faith in a peaceful end to slavery and in American democracy itself.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Your boasted liberty is an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Your prayers and hymns are fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Historian: Douglass needs for slavery to be eradicated, and he needs it to happen as quickly as possible. In many ways he reflects this for the rest of black America, that while Garrisonian tactics were just, earnest, they simply were not options that he thought would eventually lead to the end of slavery.

Lois Brown, Historian: On the one level, you hate to reduce it to race. On the other, it's a reality. No matter how many stories Garrison hears, no matter how many coffles he sees, no matter how many mothers he can imagine and conjure up, Douglass has had that experience. Garrison is a white man in a white man's America.

Narrator: When Douglass questioned Garrison's doctrines at a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, he was branded an enemy. A volley of insults and allegations appeared in The Liberator. Douglass struck back, accusing Garrison of racism. The final blow came when Garrison published ugly insinuations about an affair between Douglass and Julia Griffiths.

Manisha Sinha, Historian: Garrison has hit Douglass below the belt. It's like a family quarrel where they're airing each other's dirty laundry, and it's not a pretty sight.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Mr. Garrison has seen fit to invade my household, and has sought to blast me in the name of my family.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil, audio): My heart breaks at the cruelty and injustice our nation inflicts on the slave. I am tormented by the thought of the slave mothers whose babes are torn from them. I pray to God to let me do a little, and to cause my cry for them to be heard.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: Leaving Cincinnati allowed Harriet to look back at those 18 years there and to process that experience of the slave riots, Charley's death, the Fugitive Slave Law, and it all came together in a vision. Instead of Christ on the cross, she saw an image of a slave being whipped and she wrote the ending of Uncle Tom's Cabin, when Uncle Tom dies. And when she read it to her family they were all crying and they said, "Mama, you've got to write the rest of the story."

Narrator: On March 20th, 1852, a publisher released a book on a difficult subject by an unknown author. By the end of the week, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about the evils of slavery had sold 10,000 copies; within two months, 50,000. Three paper mills feeding three printing presses running 24 hours a day, and still the publisher couldn't keep up. Soon, Uncle Tom's Cabin began reaching vast new audiences, including many who had never read a novel, when it was adapted as a wildly popular play.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe made millions of Americans see slavery for the first time through the eyes of its victims: the mother whose child was to be sold away, the boy watching helplessly as his sister is whipped, the runaway Eliza fleeing with her baby across the Ohio River, only one step ahead of the slave catchers.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: And it was said that when the novel was put on stage at the National Theatre in New York, there was not one dry eye when Eliza reached the other side of the river. And Harriet knew that if she could get that response from her readers, she didn't need to make arguments about slavery.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: She realizes that the way to do this was by playing on the heartstrings. You don't do it by playing on the outrage. You do it by convincing them that there are human beings in peril.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): Mrs. Stowe has walked with lighted candle through the darkest corners of the slave's soul, and had unfolded the secrets of the slave's lacerated heart. That contribution to our bleeding cause, alone, involves us in a debt of gratitude which cannot be measured.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: It is the most popular book and the most influential book in American history. There is no there is no competition for that title. It's going to convert millions of Americans, not to being for immediate abolitionism, not to being for racial equality, but for being against slavery. Now that's a huge thing. That's a sea change.

Joan D. Hedrick, Historian: You can see Stowe taking aim at the Fugitive Slave Law in incident after incident, and basically urging her readers to defy what she thought was an anti-Christian, un-democratic law.

Narrator: William Lloyd Garrison attended a performance of the play in New York, and marveled at the response of toughs in the front rows.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): Oh, it was a sight worth seeing: Those ragged, coatless men and boys in the pit -- the very material of which mobs are made -- cheering the strongest and sublimest anti-slavery sentiments!

Narrator: Uncle Tom's Cabin triggered a wave of defiance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Armed mobs broke into jails to release fugitives, and even murdered slave catchers. And in the spring of 1854 this wave of resistance came to a head, when the national battle over slavery suddenly focused on a solitary prisoner in Boston's city jail.

Anthony Burns had fled Virginia and slavery by stowing away on a ship bound for the North. He had avoided capture for months, until a letter home revealed his whereabouts. When news of the arrest filtered out, Boston erupted in anger. While one group tried to halt the proceedings through legal maneuvers, black and white activists mounted a desperate assault on the courthouse where Burns was being held. The attack was driven back by club-wielding policemen, but not before a guard was shot and killed. When the sun rose the next morning, Burns was still in jail, and the city was seething.

When news of the upheaval reached Washington, President Franklin Pierce -- an ardent Southern sympathizer -- demonstrated the government's resolve. On June 2nd, 1854, all Boston watched as hundreds of U.S. Marines, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, along with the county militia and the Boston police, marched Anthony Burns from the jail to a ship waiting in the harbor.

Lois Brown, Historian: For Garrison, the work of abolition was about trying to make people come to a moment of conscience, and act accordingly. But one has to see the Devil in order to then turn towards God. One has to see evil in order to be committed to a life of good. Slavery marches right up into Massachusetts and now Northerners get to see the face of evil.

Narrator: It seemed that the United States was committed to the preservation of slavery. Abolitionists were losing hope. They couldn't see that already they had shifted history. By refusing to disappear, to be silenced, to accommodate, they had forced millions of Americans to take a stand on slavery, one way or the other. The ties between North and South had been replaced by resentment and suspicion. Many wondered whether the Union itself could survive. Garrison, Douglass, Stowe, and their fellow abolitionists couldn't know it, but their long struggle had passed a tipping point.

Part Three

Narrator: On the evening of July 4th, 1854, an immense crowd gathered on the Boston Common to celebrate the 78th anniversary of American independence. There was almost no one left to remember the Revolution. As those years of turmoil and hardship passed from living memory into myth, the Union itself came to seem ever more precious. Meanwhile, a few miles outside the city, anti-slavery activists marked the occasion in a very different spirit.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): The government is in the hands of the party demagogues, who are the tools of the Slave Power. Corruption is general, constitutional restraints are as cobwebs. The representatives are the betrayers of the people.

Narrator: William Lloyd Garrison had been waging war against slavery for 25 years, but tonight, victory seemed inconceivable. Just a few weeks earlier, the president of the United States had sent a massive detachment of federal troops to Boston, all to return a lone runaway slave to captivity. For Garrison, it was yet more proof that the Republic itself had been corrupted at birth, its original sin implanted in a founding document written largely by slaveholders.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): This -- the Constitution of the United States of America -- is the source and parent of all the other atrocities: "a covenant with death, and an agreement with Hell." So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, "Amen."

Crowd (Actors): Amen!

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): And let all the people say, "Amen."

Crowd (Actors): Amen!

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): And let all the people say, "Amen."

Crowd (Actors): Amen.

Tony Horwitz, Author: In the summer of 1855, Kansas has really become the front line in the conflict over slavery. Pro-slavery forces really have the upper hand. They're bullying and intimidating and sometimes killing Northern settlers.

Tony Horwitz, Author: Brown is almost a battering ram of a human being. He has a moral strength and clarity that cuts through the cant about slavery. And I think this is very appealing to anti-slavery Northerners who are really giving up almost on the political system and on nonviolent resistance.

Tony Horwitz, Author: Brown is not simply evening the score in Kansas. He's really also trying to strike terror into the hearts of pro-slavery settlers.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: This is God's punishment. This is not the punishment of man. They're not gonna be hung. They're going to be murdered. They're going to be butchered, because that's Old Testament retribution.

Tony Horwitz, Author: Pottawatomie scares, but also enrages, pro-slavery forces who don't need much incitement to violence. They've already been committing it, and now it's let loose the dogs of war. It's at this point that Kansas becomes known as "Bleeding Kansas."

John Stauffer, Historian: The Dred Scott decision had the potential to legalize slavery everywhere in the United States. In effect, it turns the entire country into a slave nation.

David W. Blight, Historian: So many abolitionists after Dred Scott said, "You see? We've been telling you for decades that there's a slave power conspiracy out there of presidents, Supreme Court members, of congresspeople, of bankers, of ship owners, to not only preserve but expand this system of slavery until it dominates every aspect of American society and economy." And now here's the Supreme Court saying slavery has an eternal future in the United States.

Narrator: The decision hung like a pall over the abolitionist movement, casting Douglass, most of all, into a deep depression.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): With an earnest, aching heart, I have long looked for the realization of the hope of my people. I have sought in my humble way to see in the distance the white flags of freedom, the time at which the cruel bondage of my people should end. But of that time, I can know nothing and you can know nothing. All is uncertain.

Narrator: It was with a sense of foreboding and hopelessness that Frederick Douglass responded to an urgent summons in August of 1859 from his old friend John Brown. Together with Shields Green, a fugitive he had befriended in Rochester, Douglass quietly made his way to a stone quarry at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Mr. Douglass!

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Captain Brown -- I would never have known you, sir!

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Our time has come...

Narrator: Brown was secretly encamped at a nearby farmhouse with 22 recruits.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): I had hoped for more men, of course. But I believe we have enough to achieve our ends -- with your help.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): What end is that?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Well, sir: In one stroke we shall rouse this nation. We will deal the Slave Power such a blow, it shall never recover.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): All with 22 men?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): It takes one spark to light a fire. We are the spark that will set this country ablaze.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): But how?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): The armory at Harpers Ferry.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Good Lord, man. You can't be serious.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): A hundred thousand rifles.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): What will 22 men do with 100,000 rifles?

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): As I said, the spark -- we are but the spark. There are four million men in bondage who will fly to our banner. Not immediately, of course, but even a few thousand slaves in this vicinity will fly to our aid.

Tony Horwitz, Author: Douglass expected Brown to unveil a mission to free slaves and funnel them north along the mountains to freedom. But when he gets to the stone quarry, Brown presents a very different plan.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): I know. My friend, I have been over this a thousand times. I can assure you ...

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): And I can assure you that you'll be walking into a perfect steel trap ...

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: He's talking about invading the South and occupying the South and taking over the South, sort of building this republic out, one mile at a time, and that republic is going to be a new country.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): It will kill you. And it will serve no purpose. There will be a bloodbath ...

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sin, Douglass.

John Stauffer, Historian: Douglass spends two days trying to convince John Brown not to raid Harpers Ferry. Brown spends the same amount of time trying to convince Douglass to go to Harpers Ferry with him to be his right-hand man.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): My friend, the world will remember what we do here. How do you want the world to remember you? How do you want your children to remember you?

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I don't want them to remember me as throwing my life away for nothing. Captain, it pains me more than you will know, to leave you. Mr. Green, you've heard Mr. Brown. What will you do?

Shields Green (Thomas Coleman): I believe I'll go with the old man.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Come with me Douglass. I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): It so happened that I was speaking to a large audience in National Hall. The announcement came upon us with the startling effect of an earthquake. It was something to make the boldest hold his breath.

David W. Blight, Historian: The sensation Douglass felt at that moment is, "Oh, God, what comes now? Oh, God, they'll be after all of us. What sort of bloodbath may flow from this?" His own life was at risk now.

Narrator: At dawn the Marines stormed the engine house, capturing Brown and his surviving men. Investigators seeking a link to the abolitionists found what they needed in Brown's papers: an innocuous note signed by Frederick Douglass two years earlier, inviting Brown to dinner. It was all they needed.

John Stauffer, Historian: Douglass suddenly becomes the most wanted man in the United States. He hides out at a friend's place in Philadelphia, and in fact he finds out from the telegraph operator in Philadelphia that the president of the United States on down has put out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin. All the feds are now scouring the country for Frederick Douglass.

Narrator: Douglass hurriedly made his way north, his panic mounting as he realized that his fellow passengers were reading newspaper reports calling for his arrest. He telegraphed ahead with instructions to destroy the contents of his desk. Miraculously, Douglass made it to Rochester, where he boarded a boat to Canada. The next day, Douglass heard that federal marshals had arrived at his home, hot on his trail. But he was out of their reach.

John Stauffer, Historian: Douglass was wanted more than any of the other conspirators in John Brown's raid because Douglass was a black man.

Narrator: John Brown was almost killed when the Marines stormed the engine house. He had to be carried from his jail cell to a cot that was set up in the courtroom. Nevertheless, Brown dominated the proceedings.

Tony Horwitz, Author: He stands up without notes and gives one of the greatest speeches in American history. Brown, in simple, direct, powerful language, basically put his accusers on trial.

John Brown (T. Ryder Smith, audio): Had I interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, I submit.

Narrator: Shields Green and the other captives had already been sentenced to hang. There could be little doubt that Brown would follow them. From his jail cell, Brown kept up a stream of correspondence and interviews, which were breathlessly reported throughout the North.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: This guy's just led a raid to destroy slavery. They've killed people, and not the first people he's killed. And he's suddenly become famously depicted in art, wearing these sort of evening slippers with this long, peaceful old patriarch beard, and he's the abolitionist grandfather you wish you had.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Brown was absolutely a genius at working the press, at giving interviews, at talking to people and turning himself into as fully committed a Christian sacrificial lamb on the alter of slavery as he could possibly be.

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: You have the Northern establishment, every newspaper, saying, "This guy's a hero. He's a saint." How can Southerners look at that and say, "Oh these guys are good negotiating partners. We're gonna be able to sort this slavery problem out"?

Tony Horwitz, Author: What Brown has done, ultimately, is just to expose the depth of the divide between North and South. And after that point, that divide can never be bridged.

Narrator: On the morning of December 2nd, 1859, John Brown was driven from the jail, seated on his own coffin, to the gallows nearby. The evening of Brown's execution, 4,000 people crowded into Boston's Tremont Temple. Most of them had come to hear William Lloyd Garrison.

Lois Brown, Historian: Garrison has to resolve this tension between clearly unapologetic armed resistance and strategy and maneuver, with pacifism and moral suasion. And you can see, or we can hear in that speech that he gives, he just is truly like a boat in rough sea -- he's just rocking back and forth.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): I have labored unremittingly to effect the peaceful abolition of slavery by an appeal to the reason and conscience of the slaveholder. Yet, as a peace man -- an "ultra" peace man -- I am prepared to say, "Success to every slave insurrection at the South."

W. Caleb McDaniel, Historian: When he started his abolitionist campaign as a printer, one could still hope in the early 1830s that maybe arranging types in a case, stringing words together into sentences, publishing articles against slavery, might persuade the nation to rid itself of slavery. But as time goes by, Garrison begins to be swept along by the changing events around him.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, Historian: I think he recognized that this was a turning point. Garrison was confronting some things that suggested that the future was gonna take a very different path than the past.

Narrator: Frederick Douglass returned to the United States in the spring of 1860, after Congress decided not to pursue Brown's accomplices, for fear of creating more martyrs. When he arrived he found the country embroiled in a presidential campaign unlike any other. The old political alignments had been destroyed by the argument over slavery, and the election was tilting to the candidate of a new party, Republican Abraham Lincoln.

Manisha Sinha, Historian: Douglass recognizes the Republican Party for what it is. It's not an abolitionist party. It's a free soil party committed to the non-extension of slavery. He still sees that as an enormous triumph for the abolitionist movement.

Narrator: Douglass took hope in Lincoln's candidacy, and publicly endorsed him. Garrison was too wary of politics to get involved, but he did meet quietly with one of Lincoln's emissaries. William Herndon assured him that he and Lincoln were working to the same end. The Republican didn't want Garrison's endorsement -- in fact, any connection to the controversial printer would be political poison. But all the same, Garrison's continued radicalism would be a great help in paving the way for a moderate, anti-slavery Republican. Garrison maintained his distance, but like every abolitionist, he wondered where all this upheaval would lead.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): During the last few years, free colored people have despaired of their future in the United States. They fear that persecution and hardships are to grow more and more grievous with every year. For this reason, they are now, as never before, looking out into the world for a place of retreat, and asylum.

Narrator: In November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president without carrying a single slaveholding state. Washington immediately descended into chaos, as one Southern state after another seceded from the Union. Hoping to pacify the South, Congress hurriedly passed a Constitutional amendment protecting the status of slavery forever.

John Stauffer, Historian: Lincoln, in his inaugural address, approves and supports that amendment. Lincoln also vows to add even more teeth to the Fugitive Slave Law. And Douglass reads this and says, "I'm outta here."

Narrator: Frederick Douglass's faith in America had endured through 20 years of slavery, and 20 years of fruitless struggle. But for Douglass, Lincoln's effort to placate the slave states was one blow too many. On the morning of April 12th, 1861, Frederick Douglass was preparing to leave the United States. He and his daughter Rosetta had booked passage to Haiti, with an eye to emigrating there with his family. Their ship was due to sail in 13 days.

Franky Garrison (Jacob Washburn): Father! It's started! The war! I came as fast as I could!

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): What? What are you talking about?

Franky Garrison (Jacob Washburn): Fort Sumter. They started bombarding it this morning.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): Are you sure?

Franky Garrison (Jacob Washburn): That's what everyone's saying.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): What else did you hear?

Franky Garrison (Jacob Washburn): The fort's burning. As soon as I heard it, I came here.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff): All right now. Tell us everything you heard -- slowly.

Franky Garrison (Jacob Washburn): They said the major and his men, they can't hold out much longer. The president's gonna call on the troops now. It's war for sure, that's what everyone's saying.

John Stauffer, Historian: The role that abolitionists played in the build up to the Civil War was absolutely crucial. Without the abolitionists, the Civil War would not have occurred. Without the abolitionists, I think one could say that slave owners would have turned the entire United States into slave country. That was what they wanted.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: Once the firing happens on Fort Sumter, Garrison wraps himself in the flag. And, like practically every other abolitionist, endorses the war, for the Union, as a war to eliminate slavery. Garrison, like everybody, like Douglass, like all the people that have been in tremendous conflict with each other before the war, are in a sense reunited in the war for the Union.

Rosetta Douglass (Lynn Bandoria): Civil war has at last begun. A terrible fight is at this moment going on between Fort Sumter and the fortifications by which it is surrounded ...

Narrator: Frederick Douglass canceled his trip to Haiti.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): We shall stay here and watch the current of events, and serve the cause of freedom and humanity in any way that shall be open to us.

Narrator: With the outbreak of war, abolitionists faced a daunting new challenge: convincing the president and skeptical Northerners that the conflict was not about preserving the old Union, but ending slavery. At last, the squabbling abolitionist factions came together again, including, above all, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. "Whatever political or personal differences have divided us," Douglass wrote, "a common goal makes us forget those differences and strike at the common foe." For the first time in years, Douglass and Garrison appeared together in public, and Angelina Grimké reemerged after 20 years' absence to form a women's league. But victory, and even an anti-slavery war, turned out to be far more elusive than anyone had expected. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had warned of the evils of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, saw the war as divine retribution.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kate Lyn Sheil): It was God's will that the slave mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers, that the Free States, who refused to listen when they were told of starvation, cold, and barbarous cruelty perpetrated on the slave, should have starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous cruelty doing its work among their own sons.

Narrator: Stowe spoke from experience: her son Frederick had rushed to join the colors in the first days of the war. Like untold thousands of young men, he would never fully recover. Time and again, unimaginable slaughter was eclipsed within months by something even worse. The names were already seared in the nation's consciousness: Bull Run, Shiloh, Malvern Hill.

James Brewer Stewart, Historian: The abolitionists' argument is that all of this blood and treasure is gonna be wasted unless slavery dies. And more and more and more as the war goes on, it's a realization that many, many Northerners come to share.

Narrator: Through it all, Lincoln seemed immovable. "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union," he announced in August of 1862, "and is not either to save or destroy slavery." Many abolitionists lost hope in the president when they read reports of a meeting at the White House later that summer.

David W. Blight, Historian: Lincoln calls in these five ministers and he has this back-and-forth with them -- mostly, he gives them a speech. He says, "Without the presence of your people in this country we wouldn't even have this war." He tries to recruit these black men to lead efforts to colonize black folk out of the United States. Lincoln basically says to them, "This is a single race country. The best hope for your people is going to be outside of this country."

Narrator: For William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, it was the last straw.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): Just God! What but the meanest selfishness stimulates this scheme? President Lincoln's education with and among the "white trash" of Kentucky was most unfortunate for his moral development, so that there seems to be nothing elevated and noble in his character.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): Mr. Lincoln is a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred, and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery than for any principle of justice and humanity.

David W. Blight, Historian: That was in some ways the turning point of Frederick Douglass's life, and certainly the turning point in the historical life of African Americans. A new country, a new constitution, a new history is going to come out of this.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): I never saw enthusiasm before. I never saw joy before. Henceforth, this day shall take rank with the Fourth of July. Henceforth, it becomes the date of a new and glorious era in the history of American liberty.

Narrator: With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the war merged with the abolitionist cause. But the Union had to win, or the Proclamation would mean nothing. The Proclamation had included an unexpected clause: at last, black men could enlist in the armed services of the United States. As Douglass said, Lincoln's "paper Proclamation must now be made iron, lead, and fire." Douglass enlisted two of his sons, and even William Lloyd Garrison, the ultra peace man, allowed his first born to join the colors.

Manisha Sinha, Historian: The Civil War moved Garrison farther and farther away from that abstract devotion to peace principles and pacifism that he had held through the years. When Garrison is forced to choose, he chooses abolition over his peace principles.

John Stauffer, Historian: For Douglass, what better symbol of democracy and of racial equality is there in the United States is if the federal government arms and gives uniforms to black soldiers and tells them to kill white men.

Narrator: The one-time radicals were no longer outsiders. Garrison, Douglass, and Stowe would each meet the president at the White House. Each gave him their heartfelt support.

John Stauffer, Historian: Suddenly abolitionists are looking prophetic. They seem now to be having had anticipated all of these things that are happening. And abolitionists are accorded a newfound respect that they had never experienced before.

Narrator: But victory was nowhere in sight. The slaughter of the first two years of war was but a prelude. Hundreds of thousands of men, white and black, would be swallowed up in the abyss. Yet, for Douglass, Garrison, and Stowe, for millions of slaves and millions of their white brethren, all of the suffering finally had a new meaning. Victory meant abolition.

Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, audio): If we fail, we shall go down as we deserve to go down, as a warning to all other nations, which shall come after us. But if we succeed, our glory as a nation will be complete, our peace will flow like a river, and our foundations will be the everlasting rocks.

William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff, audio): I have been actively engaged in this work for almost 40 years, but I never expected to look you in the face, never supposed you would hear of anything I might do in your behalf. I have no language to express the feelings of my heart.

Narrator: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had freed the slaves, but it hadn't outlawed slavery itself anywhere. That could be accomplished only by amending the Constitution. In December of 1865, the United States was finally cleansed of its original sin when the 13th Amendment was added to the Constitution, banning slavery in all the states, forever.

For almost four decades, Garrison had dedicated his life to this moment. He had created a movement, had led it through every adversity without wavering. The Liberator had become not only the most influential voice of abolition, but the symbol of its tenacity. One thousand eight hundred and three issues, every one set by hand, most by Garrison's own. And this, Garrison felt, was a fitting occasion to print the last.

The post-war years would be hard. Garrison, Douglass, and their kindred spirits protested in vain as Northern and Southern whites conspired to keep the emancipated slaves in a condition almost indistinguishable from slavery. But nothing could entirely erase the change that had taken place in American life. When Garrison died in 1879 at the age of 73, Frederick Douglass was transported to the days of his youth, to the days when, as a newly escaped slave, he had first heard William Lloyd Garrison, and thought him the new Moses.

His eulogy was more than a memorial to one man. Angelina Grimké was on her deathbed, John Brown was in his heaven, Harriet Beecher Stowe had withdrawn from public life. Douglass would write a lament for the movement they had led, for their youth, for the generation that was passing from the scene. It was a tribute to fervent ideals, generosity, and love, to the bitterness and the passions that had moved men and women to bend the arc of history.

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The Abolitionists | American Experience | PBS

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Narrator: As the daughter of one of South Carolina's first families, Angelina Grimké lived in almost unimaginable luxury. In the 1820s, Charleston's aristocracy was one of the wealthiest societies on earth. But Angelina found it almost unbearable -- an empire of sin.