BOOK PREMISE

There are arguably three great social undertakings in American History. The progress of the worker via labor unions, the equality of women via the women’s suffrage movement, and the abolition of slavery via a fratricidal war. The writings on any of these three would fill a small town library. Maybe a large one.

What these upheavals have in common is that they combat the notion of chattel as applicable to humans. Using the new thinking of the American Revolution, the inherent contradiction of one human being owning another aroused in each of these movements a kind of informal manifesto from a set of idealists. Promulgation, Popularization, Contention, Resolution.

All three of these movements are still being worked out in this nation, and indeed the world at large. This book speaks to an aspect of the abolition of slavery that has received sidelong attention in the literature, even overlooked. Much has been written about the introduction of slavery to the New World, colonization, the abolitionist movement, cotton and slavery in general, and the Civil War itself. Even this last movement resulted only in freedom for the enslaved, and not liberty, the promise of the Declaration.

The year 1808 marked the statutory end of importation of slaves into the United States. After this date and until 1830 (marking the year that William Lloyd Garrison was found guilty of libel as a result of an article in abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation) much of the literature covers colonization. In at least one work covering this period, Alice D. Adams’ monograph published by Radcliffe College, the obscurity of this term is noted in its title, “The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America, 1808-1831.”

Adams introduced her work in her preface as follows:

“The period 1808-1831 has most commonly, perhaps, received the name of “the Period of Stagnation.” It is credited with no aggressive anti-slavery work; it is rarely credited with even real anti-slavery sentiment of any sort. The anti-slavery workers are said to have trusted that the abolition of the African slave trade would do all the work necessary for the benefit of the slave, even to his ultimate emancipation, until William Lloyd Garrison with his trumpet-blast waked the sleepers and began the new era, whose history is familiar to all.”

However, in the decades preceding 1808 the Religious Society of Friends had been laying the groundwork in anti-slavery activism to effect emancipation, if gradualist, sometimes called “manumission.” The patenting of the cotton gin in 1794 opened new markets for cotton and increased demand for slaves. The abolitionists within the Society could not fail to come to the conclusion that slavery would not dwindle, but expand. Two of the best-known of these, Charles Osborn and Benjamin Lundy, proposed a long-term plan to form societies to oppose slavery, which would coordinate their efforts within a constitutional framework. The largest of these overarching groups was the North Carolina Manumission Society. Within ten years of this conception, Lundy reported that its various branches had grown to 3,000 members in a total nationwide of 6,625.