As the main activist arm of the Abolition Movement (see abolitionism), the society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison. By 1840 its auxiliary societies numbered 2,000, with a total membership ranging from 150,000 to 200,000. The societies sponsored meetings, adopted resolutions, signed antislavery petitions to be sent to Congress, published journals and enlisted subscriptions, printed and distributed propaganda in vast quantities, and sent out agents and lecturers (70 in 1836 alone) to carry the antislavery message to Northern audiences.
Participants in the societies were drawn mainly from religious circles (e.g., Theodore Dwight Weld) and philanthropic backgrounds (e.g., businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan and lawyer Wendell Phillips), as well as from the free black community, with six blacks serving on the first Board of Managers. The society’s public meetings were most effective when featuring the eloquent testimony of former slaves like Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown. The society’s antislavery activities frequently met with violent public opposition, with mobs invading meetings, attacking speakers, and burning presses.
In 1839 the national organization split over basic differences of approach: Garrison and his followers were more radical than other members; they denounced the U.S. Constitution as supportive of slavery and insisted on sharing organizational responsibility with women. The less radical wing, led by the Tappan brothers, formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated moral suasion and political action and led directly to the birth of the Liberty Party in 1840. Because of this cleavage in national leadership, the bulk of the activity in the 1840s and ’50s was carried on by state and local societies. The antislavery issue entered the mainstream of American politics through the Free-Soil Party (1848–54) and subsequently the Republican Party (founded in 1854). The American Anti-Slavery Society was formally dissolved in 1870, after the Civil War and Emancipation.
Abolitionism, also called abolition movement, (c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. With the decline of Roman slavery in the 5th century, the institution waned in western Europe and by the 11th century had virtually disappeared. Portuguese exploration of the west coast of Africa beginning in 1420, however, created an interest in slavery in the recently formed colonies of North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the need for plantation labour generated an immense market for slaves. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, an estimated total of 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas.
Despite its brutality and inhumanity, the slave system aroused little protest until the 18th century, when rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment began to criticize it for its violation of the rights of man, and Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century, moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, since slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all of the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804. But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the great plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America. Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of African slaves into the British colonies and the United States. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, these forces succeeded in getting the slave trade to the British colonies abolished in 1807. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves that same year, though widespread smuggling continued until about 1862.
