The Northern Abolitionist Movement
America had always been home to people who felt that slavery was wrong and should be eliminated. These people, called abolitionists because they wanted to abolish or destroy slavery, denounced the practice as horrible and evil. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, however, their efforts to eliminate slavery from U.S. soil failed to gather enough popular support because everyone knew how much the South depended on slaves to make its economy and society work. But in the 1830s and 1840s, organized opposition to slavery in the United States became more powerful and confrontational (meeting an issue head-on) than it had ever been before. Describing slavery as an evil and un-Christian system and a stain on the values enshrined in America's Declaration of Independence, the abolitionists finally convinced large numbers of Northerners that slavery should not continue. This development angered and frightened white Southerners, who recognized that the abolitionist movement was a serious threat to the society that they had built for themselves.
Early Abolitionists
The very first abolitionist demonstration in America took place in 1688. A group of brave Quakers gathered in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to voice their religious objections to the slave trade. At first, few people paid much attention to the Quakers' calls for an end to slavery.
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