Article #6 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History

African Americans in the Abolitionist Movement

 

African Americans were prominent in the abolitionist movement.  Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass have gained considerable recognition in most standard accounts of the abolitionist era:

                                                                                               

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 then, after years of physical and emotional abuse, gained her freedom when the state of New York terminated slavery as a legal institution in 1827.  Sojourner Truth cut a formidable figure as a tall, forceful speaker who gave ringing orations, some planned and others spontaneous, at numerous conventions.   She was a suffragette and women’s rights advocate, as well as abolitionist.  Sojourner Truth famously rose from her seat at a gathering in upstate New York in 1851 to time and again issue the refrain, “Ain’t I a woman?” as a rhetorical response to a man who had characterized women as fragile creatures needing help to get into carriages and step over mud puddles.  She said, for example,

 

Nobody helps me into carriages and over mud puddles, or gives me any best place!

And ain’t I a woman?  Look at me!  Look at my arm!  I have ploughed and planted

and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!  And ain’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man---  when I could get it---  and

bear the lash, as well!  And ain’t I a woman?

 

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was born to slavery in Maryland but escaped to New York in 1838.  He taught himself to read and write, read voraciously, and used his gift for oratory to propel him to the forefront of the abolitionist movement.  His North Star was one of the first abolitionist newspapers in the United States.  Douglass continued to be a figure of major importance, the greatest advocate for African American rights, in the years after the Civil War (1861-1865) and even after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction.  Douglass worked through his disappointment with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and a putative advocate of citizenship rights for all, by calling for a clear-eyed view of that party’s failure to fulfill its promises to the African American people.  But he never lost faith in the United States Constitution as a document enunciating principles on the basis of which liberty for all could eventually be realized:

 

If the Republican Party cannot take a call for justice and fair play, it ought to go

down…  Parties were made for people, not people for the parties…  if liberty, with us,

is but a sham, and our suffrage thus far only a cruel mockery, we may yet congratulate ourselves upon the fact that the laws and institutions of our country are sound, just,

and liberal. 

                                                                                            

Harriet Tubman gained her fame especially for her work as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, the system of pathways and hideaways by which escaped slaves made their way to freedom in the North, to states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, and often on to Canada.  She was born a slave in Maryland but in 1849 walked a hundred miles to freedom in Pennsylvania.  Tubman made the trip back to the South fifteen times to guide at least 100 slaves to freedom;  these included her parents and six of her ten siblings.  A $400 bounty was placed on her head, but neither she nor her “passengers” ever got caught.

 

Less famous but hugely important were African abolitionists such as Letitia Still and William Still, who time after time offered their home as a station for passengers on the Underground Railroad.  Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld brought several small groups together as the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.  Martin Delaney helped Frederick Douglass launch the North Star and then penned many a pungent anti-slavery tract.  Prominent Philadelphia church leaders Thomas Gray, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen wrote lengthy essays against both slavery and discriminatory treatment of African Americans.  John B. Russworm and Samuel E.Cornish were among the first prominent African American journalists, having established the very first black newspaper in 1827.

 

Efforts by people such as these helped create an atmosphere in which the Republican Party was founded upon a platform for abolition that was actually quite moderate and gradualist.  But the fact that a mainstream, white-dominated party could be advocating for the termination of involuntary servitude was worrisome enough for southern stakeholders to induce Civil War.