During the eighteenth century, however, a growing number of people living in the American colonies looked at slavery with a more critical eye. Free blacks like Episcopal church leader Absalom Jones (1746–1818), businessman James Forten (1766–1842), and Methodist bishop Richard Allen (1760–1831) lobbied tirelessly for the freedom of their race, and some white people—religious leaders and politicians as well as ordinary citizens—expressed reservations about "the peculiar institution," as slavery was sometimes called. Slavery remained common across the colonies, but discomfort with the practice became more evident.
By the end of the 1700s, when America became an independent nation, slavery in the North was fading away. Even some wealthy Southern slaveholders expressed hope that slavery might pass out of existence some day. In the early 1800s, however, the South's reliance on slavery increased as white landholders turned to the labor-intensive crop of cotton for their livelihood. This development was a bitter disappointment to people opposed to slavery.
African Colonization
In 1816, American abolitionists tried a different tactic to end slavery. They recognized that many whites who thought that slavery should be abolished still did not want to live with blacks, either because they saw blacks as inferior or because they thought that racial prejudice was too firmly ingrained in American society to make integration (the mixing of the two races) work.
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