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According to historians, while the import of African slaves dated back to the mid 16th century, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slaves to the British colonies. This event set the thematic tone for the nature of the black experience in America. The overriding theme of this time period was the struggle to gain basic freedom from forced servitude. Africans were taken from their shores by force and brought to this country as slaves, ironically by former indentured British servants and other outcasts that fled from Europe to gain their freedom. In 1621, William Tucker, was the first African-American child born in the American colonies. Opposition to slavery was as old as the institution itself. Before the term “Abolition” was even used, the common term for those against human enslavement was the “Antislavery movement.” This movement sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americas, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In colonial-era North America, the Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers, stood almost alone in professing that slaveholding was incompatible with Christian faithfulness. As one scholar, Duncan Macleod puts it, “Religion was undoubtedly of primary importance among the early inspirations of antislavery and common to all the religious sources of antislavery was the idea of sin.”1 The Age of Enlightenment and the American Revolution, however, led more Americans to equate the slaves’ right to freedom with the colonists’ demand for independence. Consequently, Northern states began the gradual emancipation of their slaves. Duncan continues in saying that, “The belief in a natural order and equilibrium was supportive of existing institutions and hierarchies as legitimate responses to the environment.”2 After years of dull, pitiless bondage, “some newly freed blacks lived high, invested their small wages in fancy clothes, and played the dandy.”3 Many former slaves celebrated their emancipation with a well-deserved vacation. “For many blacks, the connection between slavery and labor was so intimate that freedom literally meant idleness.”4 These free Blacks were living off the land, and working only when necessary. They had used their freedom to create new opportunities, as they were finally allowed to “enjoy the fruits of their own labor.”5 Blacks were now purchasing farms, opening shops, and entering trades from which slavery barred them – and soon they would appear on the workforce as painters, poets, authors, ministers, and merchants. It appeared as though those who fought slavery had achieved success. However, even though the federal government prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787 and banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, antislavery agitation eventually dropped off due to the increasing profitability of Southern slavery. As one scholar put it, “whether inspired by Revolutionary principles, Christian equalitarianism, or their own interests, the emancipationists proved to be no match for the planters.”6 The doors had slowly shut on Black freedom. Southern states were now writing laws that cleverly limited the rights of blacks, and as one emancipationist advocated, “attorneys on the opposition make such subtle constructions of our laws, the laws themselves being unfavorable, and the prevailing disposition of judges unfriendly to our cause…that they baffle many hopeful cases.”7 The fight for emancipation and the hopes of abolitionists had been severely wounded. The legacies of the peculiar institution continued to burden blacks as they struggled to find a place in free society. With time came the modern American abolition movement, which emerged in the early 1830s as a by- product of religious revivalism popularly known as the Second Great Awakening. Revivalist tenets led abolitionists to see slavery as the product of personal sin and to “demand emancipation as the price of repentance.”8 Abolitionists recognized that slavery received moral support from racial prejudice, and they lobbied to overturn the nation’s racially discriminatory practices. During the 1830s, abolitionists tried to reach and convert a mass audience. The American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, attracted tens of thousands of members with lecturing agents, petition drives, and a wide variety of printed materials.
Approximate Word count = 2654
Approximate Pages = 10.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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