Abolition Movement (c. 1783-1888), in western Europe and the Americas, was chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, an estimated total of 15,000,000 Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. Abolitionist pressure first succeeded in bringing about an end to this traffic by the early decades of the 1800s, but widespread smuggling continued until 1862. Antislavery forces were triumphant when slavery proper was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in French possessions ten years later.

The situation in the United States was more complex because slavery was a domestic rather than a colonial phenomenon, being the social and economic base of the cotton-planting aristocracy of 11 southern states. Reacting to Abolitionist attacks branding its “peculiar institution” as brutal and immoral, the South had intensified its system of slave control, particularly after the Nat Turner revolt of 1831. By this time, U.S. Abolitionists realized the failure of gradualism, persuasion, and such projects as resettlement of Afro-Americans in Liberia by the American Colonization Society (q.v.), founded in 1817. Many Abolitionists were already actively involved in other social reform movements, but because of its enormity, the issue of slavery came to eclipse other causes. Probably the best-known Abolitionist was the aggressive agitator William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society (q.v.; 1833—70). Others, drawn from the ranks of the clergy, included Theodore Dwight Weld and Theodore Parker; from the world of letters, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Lydia Maria Child; and from the free black community, such articulate former slaves as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

Abolition was not a popular cause even in the North, where its adherents met with continual persecution and assault; editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a mob at Alton, Ill. (1837).

A number of factors combined to give the movement increased momentum. In addition to the question of slave versus free white labour in new Western territories, there was revulsion at the ruthlessness of slavehunters under the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the far-reaching emotional response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Jolted by the bloody raid of Abolitionist extremist John Brown on Harpers Ferry (q.v.; 1859), the South became convinced that its entire way of life, based on race supremacy, was irretrievably threatened by the election of Pres. Abraham Lincoln (November 1860). The Civil War that followed began as a sectional power struggle to preserve the Union but finally resulted in the emancipation of almost 4,000,000 human be- rigs (1863, 1865).

The failure of U.S. Abolitionist idealism lay in the absence of practical plans for restructuring a whole society. The humanitarian effort channelled into educational, economic, and civil activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865—72) created by Congress as a main arm of reconstruction, was piecemeal and ameliorative rather than substantive. Despite the efforts of certain radical Republicans in Congress, the critical needs of land redistribution and lasting political control eluded the Abolitionist remnant genuinely concerned with the welfare of the blacks, and Reconstruction drew to an end in 1877.
Under the pressure of worldwide public opinion, slavery was completely abolished throughout the Western Hemisphere by 1900.


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