The Abolitionist movement in the United States of America was an effort to end slavery in a nation that treasured individual freedom and believed “all men are created equal.” Over time, abolitionists grew more vociferous in their requests, and slave owners entrenched in response, promoting regional divisiveness that ultimately led to the American Civil War. Abolitionists fixated attention on slavery and made it difficult to ignore. They intensified the rift that had threatened to destroy the unity of the nation even as early as the Constitutional Convention. Antislavery politicians and abolitionists helped bring the controversial issue, slavery into the nation’s awareness which inevitably created hostile tensions between the North and South resulting in the Civil War. By 1835, the organization had received considerable moral and financial support from African-American communities in the North and had established hundreds of branches throughout the free states, flooding the North with antislavery literature, agents, and petitions challenging to Congress end all federal support for slavery.
As the nineteenth century progressed, many abolitionists combined to form numerous antislavery societies. These groups sent petitions with thousands of signatures to Congress, held abolition meetings and conferences, boycotted products made with slave labor, printed literature, and gave countless speeches for their cause. Individual abolitionists sometimes advocated violent means for bringing slavery to an end. Advocating for emancipation separated abolitionists from more moderate anti-slavery advocates, who argued for gradual emancipation, and from “Free-Soil” activists who sought to restrict slavery to existing areas and prevent its spread. Radical abolitionism was reasonably powered by the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening, which encouraged many people to support the emancipation on religious grounds. From the 1830s until 1870, the abolitionist movement struggled to achieve immediate emancipation of all slaves and the ending of racial segregation and discrimination. However, these two expressions of hostility to slavery–abolitionism and Free-Soil Party were often closely related not only in their beliefs and their interaction but also in the minds of southern slaveholders who finally came to regard the North as united against them in favor of black emancipation. Extensive hostile responses from North and South, most notably violent mobs, the burning of mailbags containing abolitionist literature, and the passage in the U.S. House of Representatives of a “gag rule” that banned consideration of antislavery petitions. These developments, and especially the 1837 murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, led many northerners, fearful for their own civil liberties, to vote for antislavery politicians and brought important converts such as Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and Edmund Quincy to the cause. White women’s increased involvement in abolitionism generated considerable controversy. In August 1837 Congregational Church leaders circulated a letter to ministers throughout New England. They were outraged by Angelina and Sarah Grimké’s lecturing on antislavery to mixed-sex audiences and condemned both them and women’s public activism generally . Abolitionists were able set their differences aside to banded together with other antislavery groups to eliminate slavery from the US.
Although many Enlightenment philosophers opposed slavery, it was Christian activists, enticed by strong religious elements, who commenced and structured an abolitionist movement. Throughout Europe and the United States, Christians, usually from 'un-institutional' Christian faith movements, not directly connected with traditional state churches, or "non-conformist" believers within established churches, were to be found at the forefront of the abolitionist movements. Freedom of speech within the Western world also helped in enabling opportunity to express their position. Elizabeth and Mary expressed their free of speech by stating that “We believe American Slavery is a sin against God—at war with the dictates of humanity, and subversive of the principles of freedom, because it regards rational beings as goods and chattel; robs them of compensation for their toil…” They believe that slavery is immoral in God’s eyes because it strips away African Americans’ humanity and freedom. These Christian women took on the moral responsibility to end slavery. In particular, the effects of the Second Great Awakening resulted in many evangelicals working to see the theoretical Christian view, that all people are essentially equal, made more of a practical reality.
The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries. “Their open-mouthed treason . . . is but the logical sequence of the teachings of Wm. H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln—the one boldly proclaiming an “irrepressible conflict” between certain states of the Union . . . and the other declaring . . . that the Union cannot continue as the fathers made it—part slave and part free states.” Lincoln explain that conflict is inevitably because of the disparities of our nations. Furthermore, the US can no longer be unified as they gain territory westward expansion. The Civil War was essentially an American Revolution centralized around African Americans. Reverend Martin stated that “I say this is not the language of rage, because I remember that our Fourth-of-July orators sanction the same thing; because I remember that Concord, and Bunker Hill, and every historic battlefield in this country, and the celebration of those events, all go to approve the means that John Brown has used; the only difference being, that in our battles, in America, means have been used for white men and that John Brown has used his means for black men.” Martin believed that the abolitionist movement was no different from the American Revolution. The only difference is that they’re fighting for the rights of black men instead white men.
The abolitionist movement proved effective with President Abraham Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The proclamation declared that all slaves are free in the states. Antislavery politicians make it apparent that slaves that are humans and entitled to same rights as white men. This movement incorporated the patriotic ideology of the American Revolution in that “all men are created equal” and are entitled to freedom and liberties.