Abolitionist Movement: The Beginning of the End of Slavery

Abolitionist Movement: The Beginning of the End of Slavery 

Slavery existing in the land of the free seems to be an oxymoron, but for a little over two hundred years it existed in the United States; from the first colonists to the ratification of the constitution and beyond. Men, women, and even children of color were viewed as property. They were viewed as a way to possess a labor force that would do as commanded, for free. It was precisely because of their “dark complexion, they suffer[ed] the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, the ignominy of brutal servitude.” Because men, women, and children of color were viewed as nothing more than property, they had “no constitutional nor legal protection from licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons.” However, there were a few men who dared to challenge that thought, and set out to have slavery abolished. Their actions were catapulted forward by the Second Great Awakening.

Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening brought forth a religious revival in the United States. A revival that stressed the importance of all men being equal in the eyes of God, and the importance of the only true Master being Jesus Christ. The question of the right of white men to hold men, women, and children of color as their slaves was being questioned from a religious viewpoint, instead of the secular point of the men who owned them. Free black men, such as Frederick Douglass and David Walker, appealed to the government using Christianity as the reasoning as to why slavery was unjust, and how it conflicted with the very Declaration of Independence the United States cherished. Douglass and Walker also had the support of white men, like William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison made an impassioned address to the Anti-Slavery Society stating that by participating in slavery, refusing slaves religion, and stomping out their right to enjoy liberty was akin to usurping their mighty God, Jehovah. Garrisons bold statements amounted to accusing slave owners of thinking themselves above the will go God. The sentiments of Douglass and Walker closely echoed Garrisons.

William Lloyd Garrison

Garrison, Douglass, and Walker all pointed to the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence, and noted it as being false in its exclamations. This was one of their chief complaints about American society, and an example that all three pointed to in their arguments. The hypocrisy of claiming a nation in which all men were created equal, with unalienable rights, when the institution of slavery ensured that all men were in fact, not equal, was a thorn that they all sought to pluck from their sides. The additional hypocrisy of a nation being founded on Christian values, in which all men only had one Master, their Lord in heaven, stuck a particularly tender nerve with Douglass. He reprimanded that notion quite sternly saying, “your sounds of rejoicing are empty, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons, and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.” So too did Garrison rebuke the Christian foundings of the United States by citing scripture and stating that before God all men are free, should remain free, and that all forms of slavery, under God, are null and void. According to all three men slavery needed to be abolished because of the cruelty, immorality, and hypocrisy on which it was founded; all citing Christianity and the Declaration of Independence as evidence.

Frederick Douglass

The liberty and the pursuit of happiness was another central theme for Garrison and  Walker, while Douglass focused on liberty. Without the ability to pursue happiness, which rested on the dependence of liberty, all men argued that they would never truly be free. They viewed their place in society as equal to their white counterparts. White counterparts such as Garrison stated he also believed they should enjoy the “same privileges, and the exercise of the same prerogatives, as others; and that the paths of preferment, of wealth, and of intelligence, should be opened as widely to them as to persons of a white complexion. Walker added to Garrisons statements by reminding white citizens that while the black man holds many positions of labor such as laborer, gold-digger, cattle herder, and builder, the black man also holds positions of intelligent origin, such as lawyers, doctors, ministers, and teachers. In an additional effort to prove the equality of mind and life, Walker reminded the white citizens that the black man is also a husband, with a wife and children, who confesses to and worships the same Christian God as white men.
All men argued that black men were equal to white men in mind, capability, intelligence, faith, and family, and the only thing that separated them from the white man was the color of their skin. They desperately wanted to be treated like men, with respect, and not like animals that were less than human. Their place was beside the white man, equal in all ways, and afforded all protections and rights as given by God and the Constitution. They stated as long as the black man was able to be enslaved they would “enjoy no constitutional nor legal protection from licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons--at the caprice or pleasure of irresponsible tyrants” and the hypocrisy of slavery had to be exposed, and the crime committed through slavery had to be proclaimed and denounced.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Chicago, IL: Chicago
 Review, 2012. 188-206.

PBS. "David Walker's Appeal." Africans in America. 1995. Accessed October 25, 2017.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2931t.html.

Garrison, William Lloyd."Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention."
 Garrison's Philadelphia Declaration. Accessed October 25, 2017.
 http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abeswlgct.html.