Frederick Douglass An Abolitionist

A person who favors the abolition of a practice or institution, especially capital punishment or slavery.
The best known African American abolitionist was Fredrick Douglass. Douglass escaped from slavery when he was 21 and moved to Massachusetts. As a former house servant, Douglass was able to read and write. In 1841, he began to speak to crowds about what it is like to be enslaved. Also, once the colonization effort was defeated, Free African-Americans in the north became more active in the fight against slavery. They worked with white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to spread the word. They developed publications and contributed money. Many, such as Robert Purvis, dedicated their lives to freeing individual
Many slave owners had hundreds of slaves. Slave masters did not always treat their slaves well. Some owners were afraid that if the slaves were freed, the slaves might take over the plantations or hurt the owners. Many slaves ran away. Some slaves did fight back against cruel masters. Many times, an abolitionist would help runaway slaves escape to free states in the North. The abolitionists were part of the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a group of secret stops and homes. The slaves could find safety there as they escaped to the North. Each year, the Underground Railroad helped over 1,000 slaves escape. More and more people were seeing how bad slavery was. The early abolitionist movement in the United States and Great Britain during the late eighteenth century was guided by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, the French and American revolutions, and Christian morality. The concept that individuals were created equal and had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness led them to advocate abolitionism. The slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1791 led by Toussaint Louverture was based on these ideas of universal liberty and freedom. The importance of the Haitian revolution to the idea of abolitionism is important because it demonstrated that slavery could be abolished
The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies during the nineteenth century grew out of a liberal political reform agenda that sought to provide better treatment for slaves with the view that emancipation would occur gradually. Slave uprisings in Martinique, Cuba, Tortola, Trinidad, Grenada, and Dominica convinced colonial authorities that slavery needed to be reevaluated. For example, in Barbados, after slavery was abolished in 1834 the government instituted an apprenticeship program of six (unpaid) years for field workers and four years for household servants. Abolitionists became increasingly strident in their condemnations of slave owners and “the peculiar institution of slavery.” Often, at Fourth of July gatherings of abolition societies, they reportedly used the occasion to denounce the U.S. Constitution as a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” Many of them came to believe in “higher law,” that a moral commitment to ending slavery took precedent over observing those parts of the Constitution that protected slavery and they refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act. Slave owners or their representatives traveling north to reclaim