Abolition & Women’s Rights: Arguments, Networks & Disagreements — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Immediate, and without compensation

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, proposed freeing enslaved people and sending them to West Africa. It drew respectable support, including from slaveholders, which was the clue. Free Black communities in Philadelphia and New York rejected it almost unanimously; they had been born in the United States, built it, and were not going to accept that the price of freedom was leaving.

Garrison started The Liberator in 1831 and the American Anti-Slavery Society followed in 1833. Their method was the revival's: local societies, subscriptions, travelling speakers, and an enormous postal campaign that in 1835 mailed abolitionist tracts into the South by the hundred thousand.

The reaction tells you how seriously it was taken. A Charleston crowd burned the mailbags in the street and the Postmaster General declined to enforce delivery. Congress adopted a gag rule in 1836, automatically tabling every antislavery petition without reading it, and kept it until 1844. Mobs attacked speakers in northern cities, and in 1837 the printer Elijah Lovejoy was shot dead in Alton, Illinois, defending his press. Abolition was a minority position in the North as well as a crime in the South.

Garrison's own position narrowed as the fight went on. By the 1840s he was burning copies of the Constitution in public, calling it a covenant with death for the protections it gave slavery, and arguing that the free states should leave the Union rather than stay complicit in it. Douglass started in the same place and moved the other way, concluding that the Constitution could be read as an antislavery document and that the fight therefore belonged in politics and at the ballot box. The split between them is the argument the whole movement kept having: stand outside a corrupt system and denounce it, or get inside it and use it.

Part 2 · Harriet Tubman

She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, and carried a head injury all her life from an overseer's thrown weight. She escaped alone in 1849, walking north by night to Philadelphia, and then did the thing almost nobody did: she went back.

Over roughly ten years she returned to the Eastern Shore about thirteen times and brought out around seventy people, including her parents and several brothers, working in winter when nights were long, leaving on Saturday evenings so that advertisements could not be printed until Monday, and carrying a pistol. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the free states unsafe, she extended the route to St Catharines in Canada.

She was not finished. In the Civil War she scouted for the Union Army, and in June 1863 she guided the raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina that destroyed plantation supplies and carried off some 750 enslaved people in a single night, the only such operation of the war planned with a woman's intelligence work at its centre. She spent her last decades in Auburn, New York, fighting the federal government for a pension it took thirty years to grant.

Part 3 · Sojourner Truth, and the speech everyone quotes

She was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, and spoke Dutch before she spoke English. New York's gradual emancipation law freed her in 1827. The next year she did something remarkable: she went to court to recover her son Peter, who had been sold illegally out of state to Alabama, and she won, one of the first Black women in the country to win such a case against a white man. In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth and went out to preach.

In 1851 she spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Two versions of that speech exist. Marius Robinson, who was present and knew her, printed a transcript weeks later in which she said plainly that she was a woman's rights, that she had as much muscle as any man and could do as much work, and that she had borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery.

Twelve years later, in 1863, Frances Gage published a different version from memory: shorter sentences, a southern dialect Truth never spoke, and the refrain "Ar'n't I a woman?" that made it famous. Gage's version is the one on the posters. It is also the one written down last, by someone else, in a dialect belonging to a region Truth never lived in, during a war in which a stirring version was useful. Both tell you something; only one is close to the room.

Part 4 · Seneca Falls and the split

In 1840 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton travelled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and were refused seats, made to sit behind a curtain and listen. Eight years later, in July 1848, they convened a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York.

The Declaration of Sentiments they produced copied the Declaration of Independence deliberately, clause by clause, substituting "all men and women are created equal" and then listing grievances the way Jefferson had listed the king's: no vote, no property rights in marriage, no legal standing, no access to the professions or to higher education. Around three hundred people attended and a hundred signed. The resolution demanding the vote was the only one that did not pass unanimously, and it carried in part because Frederick Douglass stood up and argued for it.

The alliance held for twenty years and broke on the Fifteenth Amendment. When Reconstruction offered the vote to Black men but not to women, some campaigners argued it was the Black man's hour and others refused to support any amendment that left women out; the split ran through friendships and lasted decades. It is worth knowing because the next course opens on exactly those amendments.

Seneca Falls is often taught as the beginning, which is a little misleading. Black women including Maria Stewart had been speaking publicly about rights since the early 1830s, and the Declaration of Sentiments said nothing at all about women who were enslaved. Truth's intervention at Akron three years later was aimed partly at that gap: a movement describing women as delicate and in need of protection was not describing anyone she knew. The convention matters because it put the demands in one document, not because nobody had made them before.