Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond

1801-1822

1803  Igbo Landing: Mass suicide is act of resistance

As a powerful act of resistance, the Igbo Landing takes on enormous symbolic importance in local Gullah (African American) folklore. Local people claim that the landing place and surrounding marshes in Dunbar Creek are haunted by the souls of the dead Igbo warriors. 

Their story is finally recorded from various oral sources in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers Project, a government initiative created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. Post-1980 research reconstructs and confirms the factual basis for the longstanding oral accounts.

In September 2002, the St. Simons African American community organizes a two-day commemoration with events related to Igbo history and a procession to the site of the mass suicide. Seventy-five attendees come from different states across the United States, as well as from Nigeria, Brazil, and Haiti. The attendees designate the site as holy ground and call for the souls to be permanently at rest. 

The Igbo Landing (also called Ibo Landing, Ebo Landing, or Ebos Landing) is now included in the curriculum for coastal Georgia schools.

1804  Haitian victory fuels hope among enslaved in U.S. 

Influenced by the 1789 revolution in France, Haiti’s erstwhile colonial ruler, the successful insurrection reverberates throughout the hemisphere. The international revolutionary spirit that imbues the Haitian struggle helps fuel an upsurge in resistance by the enslaved in the U.S., including a 1795 conspiracy in Louisiana and an 1800 uprising plot led by Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith in Virginia, who becomes known as the “American Toussaint.”  

Abolitionists in the U.S. and elsewhere celebrate the new Haitian republic. In Boston, Massachusetts, Black activists drink toasts to the “liberty of our African brothers” and “the only country on earth where a man of color walks in all the plenitude of his rights.”

But independence comes at a crippling cost to a new country devastated by more than a decade of relentless war. French enslavers insist on compensation for the "theft" of their human "property" and the land that their workers have turned into profitable sugar and coffee-producing plantations. 

In 1825, the French monarch Charles X demands Haiti pay an "independence debt" of 150 million gold francs – 10 times the fledgling nation's annual revenue. The original sum is subsequently reduced, but Haiti still pays 90 million gold francs – about $21 billion today – to France. The debt, financed by French banks and Citibank in the U.S., is not finally paid off until 1947.  

In 2004, Haiti launches a lawsuit to recover the $21 billion but the effort is abandoned when France backs the overthrow of the Haitian government then in power. International campaigners take up the cause, saying the “independence debt” is illegal because slavery was already technically outlawed when the original demand for compensation was made. 

In 2010, a letter to the French government urging France to repay the money it “extorted” from Haiti – one of the world’s materially poorest countries – is signed by parliamentarians from Europe, Canada and the Philippines, as well as scholars, journalists and activists in France, Haiti, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Germany. France forgives an outstanding loan to Haiti of $77 million, but refuses to consider repaying the independence debt.

In a 2013 article about reparations and the legacies of slavery for The New York Times, historian Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, writes that Haitians were “pioneers in the overthrow of slavery and have been paying for it ever since.”

In 2024, a coalition of civil society groups in France begins a new push for reparations, urging the country to repay billions of dollars to Haiti to cover the historic debt imposed upon it.   

1807  Slave trade banned after campaign by activists  

1807  Smugglers defy slave import ban

The 1807 law applies only to the international slave trade, not to the burgeoning domestic slave trade within states or between states. Slavery in the U.S. continues to grow after the law takes effect in 1808. This is partly due to the natural reproductive increase in the enslaved population, and partly to expanded cotton cultivation in the Deep South and the Southwest.

The cotton boom creates demand for yet more enslaved workers – a demand met by slave traders in the Upper South, especially Virginia. Indeed, many such traders welcome the international ban because their livelihood is based on selling enslaved people within the United States, and the law largely eliminates competition from the African slave trade.

1807  More than 200 die in slave ship rebellion

Also in 1807, another U.S. slave ship, Fair American, delivers 88 kidnapped and enslaved West Africans to Charleston. Their arrival is a familiar sight: Charleston imports more enslaved Africans during the era of the transatlantic slave trade than any other city in North America; more than one third are trafficked through this southern port. 

Conditions aboard the slave ships are brutal and traumatic, with many captive passengers perishing before reaching North American shores. The Equal Justice Initiative estimates that at least 13% of all kidnapped Africans destined for Charleston die during the Middle Passage crossing. Those who survive spend weeks quarantined on islands in Charleston Harbor or detained in the city’s warehouses; thousands die awaiting sale in downtown markets.

Most Africans trafficked to South Carolina end up working on labor-intensive rice plantations where their enslavers subject them to random physical torture and summary executions for perceived wrongdoing. Mortality rates on these plantations are higher than anywhere else in the South: about one-third of enslaved Africans who land in South Carolina die within the first year.  

The EJI notes that the kidnapping, trafficking, and sale of Africans escalates dramatically in Charleston between 1803 and 1807. Anticipating a constitutional ban on the transatlantic trade in human beings beginning in 1808, traffickers in Charleston import more than 40,000 kidnapped Africans during these five years – more than half in 1807 alone.

1810  David Ruggles: Marshals support for freedom seekers 

Ruggles’ grocery shop doubles as a circulating library and reading room for African Americans who are denied access to New York’s public libraries. It soon becomes the nation’s first Black-owned bookstore, where Ruggles specializes in anti-slavery and feminist publications, including work by Maria Stewart, the Boston-based Black abolitionist and women’s rights champion. Between 1838 and 1841, Ruggles writes, prints, and publishes The Mirror of Liberty, the first journal edited by an African-American. It is devoted to “the restoration of Equal Liberty and the full enfranchisement of my down-trodden countrymen.” 

In 1835, Ruggles and fellow activists establish the New York Committee of Vigilance, which provides shelter and organized support to fugitives from slavery on their way north to greater security in the northern free states and Canada. The NYCV petitions the state legislature to expand the rights of free Black residents; employs lawyers to go to court to prevent African Americans from being kidnapped and taken south into slavery; and helps secure the freedom of enslaved people brought to the city by Southern or foreign enslavers. Ruggles himself fearlessly boards ships in the New York harbor in search of Black captives or for signs of participants in the illegal slave trade. In three short years, the NYCV reportedly saves 522 individuals from the brutal clutches of slavery.

The NYCV also puts together a network of safe houses and churches across the northeast that become stops on the Underground Railroad. Ruggles himself is a conductor, guiding fugitives to safety and connecting them to other “stations” along the route north to Canada. This work is supported by many unnamed men and women, mainly in the Black community, who feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise protect and assist fugitives from slavery. Among those who gratefully receive such help is Frederick Douglass. He stays at Ruggles’ home in 1838 after escaping the Maryland plantation where he had been enslaved and safely reaching New York.  

By the 1840s, New York City’s Committee of Vigilance has inspired the creation of similar groups in Philadelphia, Albany, Boston, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, and elsewhere, all committed to helping African Americans to flee from and resist slavery.

His courageous anti-slavery activities makes David Ruggles many enemies, even among some abolitionists who consider his confrontational tactics too radical. Ruggles is physically assaulted multiple times, his bookshop is torched (he later re-opens it at another location), there are several efforts to lynch him, and two known attempts to kidnap him and sell him into slavery in the South.

All this takes its toll on Ruggles’ health, leaving him weak, ill, and increasingly blind.  

In 1842, Lydia Maria Child, a fellow abolitionist and friend, arranges for Ruggles to join a radical abolitionist and Utopian commune called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, in the present-day village of Florence, Massachusetts. Applying home treatment based on hydropathic principles, Ruggles regains his health to some degree, but not his eyesight. He begins practicing hydrotherapy, and by 1845, he has established a "water cure" hospital in Florence, one of the earliest in the U.S. David Ruggles dies in Florence in 1849, at the age of 39, from a bowel infection. 

In 2008, The David Ruggles Center for History and Education is founded in Florence. It honors the contributions made to the abolition of slavery by Ruggles and other residents of the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts.

1811  Largest rebellion crushed but inspires others 

The principal organizer and leader of the revolt is Charles Deslondes, an enslaved laborer on the Deslondes plantation. Like other enslavers in Haiti – then known as Saint-Domingue –  the wealthy Deslondes family had sought refuge in Louisiana during the five-year revolutionary war in Haiti against French colonial rule. The victorious rebellion, fueled by armies of enslaved workers, establishes an independent Black republic in Haiti in 1804. When the Deslondes flee to Louisiana, they bring their moveable “property” with them – including Charles Deslondes and others – and subsequently re-establish their lucrative sugarcane operations using enslaved labor.  

“The victory of Africans in gaining their freedom in Haiti had a powerful and stimulating effect on Africans held in bondage all over the world, especially in the Western Hemisphere,” writes historian and author Leon A. Waters in an article for the Zinn Education Project. “It gave enormous encouragement to the Africans on plantations in Louisiana.”

Armed with cane knives, hoes, clubs and some guns, and accompanied by drums and flags, the rebels march towards New Orleans chanting “Freedom or Death.” Their ranks swell as enslaved workers from other plantations join them. Along the way, they kill several planters and torch plantation buildings.

After the authorities are alerted, U.S. troops and militia volunteers are dispatched to crush the insurrection. About 95 of the rebels are killed in the fighting, and 29 of those captured are executed. Their mutilated bodies are displayed, and their heads placed on pikes, to intimidate other enslaved people. Among those interrogated and killed are enslaved workers from a plantation owned by Massachusetts-born Israel E. Trask.

Rebel leader Charles Deslondes is tracked down, captured, and summarily executed without trial. A naval officer, Samuel Hambleton, describes his execution: Deslondes’ hands are chopped off, and he is “shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken – then shot in the Body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted!" 

The legislature of the Territory of Orleans approves compensation of $300 to planters for each enslaved person killed or executed.

Waters, chairman of the Louisiana Museum of African American History and a descendant of the 1811 rebels, comments: ‘“The sacrifices of these brave women and men were not in vain. The revolt reasserted their humanity and redeemed the honor of the people. The uprising weakened the system of chattel slavery, stimulated more revolts in the following years, and set the stage for the final battle, the Civil War (1861-1865), that put an end to this horrible system. The children and the grandchildren of the rebels of 1811 finished the job in the Civil War.”

Waters notes that during the war Louisiana contributes more soldiers to the Union Army – 24,000 Black and 5,000 White – than any other state. Louisiana had seceded from the Union in January 1861, but after U.S. forces capture New Orleans in April 1862, the U.S. government designates the areas of Louisiana then under its control as a state within the Union. Three months later Congress authorizes military commanders to enlist free African Americans, and the overwhelming response within New Orleans’s free Black communities leads to the swift creation of three Union regiments of Black soldiers. 

Since 1995, the African American History Alliance of Louisiana has led an annual commemoration of the German Coast Uprising with descendants of some of the original participants. In 2015, artist Dread Scott began organizing a massive re-enactment of the event that took place in November 2019. 

The Whitney Plantation, near Wallace in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, features a memorial commemorating the 1811 rebellion. It is the first plantation museum in the country dedicated to the experience of the enslaved.

1811  Lewis Hayden: Leading abolitionist, state politician

After re-marrying, Hayden is both determined to be free and fearful of another family break-up. He succeeds in escaping to the North with his second wife, Harriet Bell Hayden, also enslaved, and her son, Joseph, whom Hayden had adopted. With the help of abolitionists, the Haydens travel to Ohio in a wagon – covering their faces with flour to appear White and, in especially dangerous moments, hiding Joseph under the seat – before reaching Canada safely via the Underground Railroad. 

Calvin Fairbank, a Methodist minister, and Delia Webster, a Vermont teacher working in Kentucky, are later convicted and jailed for helping the Haydens escape. Webster serves two months of a two-year sentence before being pardoned by the Kentucky governor. Sentenced to 15 years, Fairbank is freed four years later after Hayden, by then living in Boston, had paid $650 ($22,939 today) to his former enslaver in exchange for an agreed pardon for Fairbank. Hayden had raised the money from 160 friends and supporters. (When Fairbank had first met Lewis Hayden in 1844 and asked him, "Why do you want your freedom?" Hayden had responded, "Because I am a man.”)

In 1845, the Haydens move to Detroit, in the free state of Michigan. The city is a major center for escapees from slavery, and the Haydens establish a school for Black children there. The following year, intent on being at the center of anti-slavery activity, the Haydens relocate to Boston. There they settle in the vibrant free Black community on Beacon Hill, and soon become respected community leaders. Their home on Southac (now Phillips) Street is a meeting place for activists and an important station on the Underground Railroad. 

By some estimates, the Haydens shelter, feed, and otherwise support 75 percent of the hundreds of fugitives from slavery passing through Boston on their way to sanctuary and freedom in Canada. Among them are Ellen and William Craft, who had escaped from slavery in Georgia in 1848. When bounty hunters come to the Haydens’ home to reclaim the Crafts and take them back to bondage, Hayden answers the door carrying a loaded shotgun. He threatens to ignite a keg of gunpowder he keeps under the porch if the men take another step. They back off and the kidnap attempt is thwarted.  

Lewis Hayden is also a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a multi-racial group that protects escapees from slavery from being kidnapped and re-enslaved under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He is one of two activists who are unsuccessfully prosecuted for helping to rescue Shadrach Minkins, an escapee, from federal custody in 1851. Minkins subsequently reaches Canada and permanent freedom.

An independent businessman who runs a clothing store, Hayden is a traveling speaker and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Along with other Black abolitionists, he is also active in the Prince Hall Freemasons, part of an advocacy and mutual support network among free Black communities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and other northern states. He helps establish numerous Black Freemason chapters and eventually becomes Grand Master of the Boston Lodge of Prince Hall Freemasonry.

During the Civil War, Hayden is a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops. His son, who serves in the Union Navy, is killed in action. 

In 1873, Hayden is elected as a Republican representative for Boston in the Massachusetts state legislature. During his one term, he supports the movement to erect a statue to honor Crispus Attucks, a seaman of Native American (Nipmuc) and African descent. Attucks, who had escaped slavery, becomes the first martyr of the Revolutionary War when he is killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre of 1776. 

When Hayden dies in 1889, 1,200 people pack the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston for his funeral. His wife, Harriet, passes five years later, and leaves their entire estate of $5,000 ($161,598 today) to Harvard University for scholarships for African American medical students. It is believed to be the first, and perhaps only, endowment to a university by a formerly enslaved person. 

The Lewis and Harriet Hayden House on Beacon Hill is a designated National Historic Site. It is featured on the Black Heritage Trail, managed by the National Park Service, that honors the historic homes, businesses, schools, and churches of the free Black community on Beacon Hill that was a driving force for abolition and civil rights.  

1812-1815  Escapees from slavery help British forces defeat U.S.     

Hostilities initially center on the Chesapeake region of Virginia – home to the national capital of Washington, D.C. – with British warships sailing into Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac River to punish the upstart Americans. At the start, the British seek only a few local Black men to serve as pilots and guides in the unfamiliar terrain. But in 1813 alone, some 600 enslaved individuals steal or otherwise acquire boats and canoes and bring their families with them to seek refuge aboard the British ships (where they can claim freedom because Britain has abolished slavery). Some 3,400 enslaved people in Maryland and Virginia make that choice during the four-plus years of the war. 

This unexpected influx strains the capacity of the ships’ crews to feed the fugitives as well as themselves. However, as historian Alan Taylor writes in his book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, British naval officers soon realize that the refugees can both help fill their manpower shortage and be a critical source of valuable local knowledge. 

Impressed by the numbers and zeal of the escapees, the British mount a more aggressive campaign aimed at disrupting the plantation economy. They encourage mass escapes of the enslaved, including women and children, since few enslaved men will leave their families behind. And they enlist 400 male fugitives in a special battalion known as the Colonial Marines. According to Taylor, “these men became the best troops in the British force, for, unlike white men, they would not (indeed, could not) desert to enjoy freedom in the republic. Instead, the black marines had to fight to preserve their new liberty.” 

Strengthened by the local intelligence and networks of the escapees, the British become adept at nighttime raids, venturing deeper into the surrounding countryside to procure fresh provisions to feed those aboard their increasingly crowded ships. 

The raids also allow the Black marines to plunder the properties of their former “masters” and retrieve family members. The combined success of their attacks – looting and burning farms and plantations, and disrupting trade – devastates the Chesapeake economy and exhausts the resistance of local militias. As a result, in August 1814, the British forces and the Colonial Marines are able to seize Washington, D.C., where they burn down the White House and the Capitol. 

“The British commanders gloried in the intimidating power of their black recruits,” writes Taylor. “In the Chesapeake region, the Colonial Marines played the part of forest fighters in a manner that resembled the Indian allies deployed by the British along the frontiers of the republic. Armed blacks and Indians haunted the overactive imaginations of the Americans, who dreaded darker-skinned peoples as ruthless savages.” 

The War of 1812 ends on February 17, 1815 with U.S. ratification of a peace treaty negotiated by British diplomats and American government representatives in Belgium two months earlier. Among its provisions, the treaty requires the return to their “owners” of all those who had fled slavery and joined the British. 

But the two British admirals commanding the ships in the Chesapeake agree on a narrower interpretation of that provision, and only 81 individuals are forcibly returned to slavery. The rest are transported to British territories to start new lives: the Colonial Marines and their families to Bermuda and Trinidad, island colonies in the Caribbean; and some 3,000 other war refugees to the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  

Along with their government, many British officers stand firm in protecting the refugees from being re-enslaved because they have developed an empathy for them and naval honor requires it. In one instance, officers propose paying a planter compensation for his lost “property” out of their own pockets rather than returning the people he had enslaved. The offer proves unnecessary: By order of the senior commander, the escapees in question are transported with others to Bermuda and freedom. 

Some officers also form friendships with their Black collaborators. Taylor describes one example: “In September 1814, Lieutenant G.R. Greig went on shore to visit ‘an old negro couple,’ in the Patuxent Valley. ‘We carried as a present for our old friends, the Negroes, a bottle of rum and some dose of salts for which they were very grateful.’”

One outcome of the War of 1812, according to Taylor, is a more aggressive American expansion westward. It is justified as essential “to defend the republic from containment and subversion. So long as the conquests and cessions opened new lands to settlement by masters and their slaves, southern leaders could support the Union, even as they watched it more jealously for signs of being turned against them, for if they ever lost national power, Virginians dreaded a massive uprising by the internal enemy of their nightmares.”

1814  Cotton enriches businessmen, North and South  

Amid this rapid growth, New England mills not only produce large quantities of inexpensive cloth— the equivalent of 15,698 miles of it in 1834. They also manufacture the coarse fabric called "Negro cloth" that clothes the enslaved workers in the Southern cotton fields who grow and harvest the raw material for its production. Rhode Island, a center of the slave trade, plays host to more than 80 “Negro cloth” mills between 1800 and 1860.  

With cotton yielding enormous profits, Northern textile manufacturers and Southern planters have a mutual economic interest in protecting and preserving slavery. 

In his book Empire of Cotton, historian Sven Beckert notes that well-established Boston merchant families invest in the expanding textile industry, including the largest mills in the world at that time in Lowell, Massachusetts. This represented “a tight connection between slavery and industry. Early cotton industrialists such as the Cabot, Brown, and Lowell families all had ties to the slave trade.… [T]he ‘lords of the lash’ and the ‘lords of the loom’ were, yet again, tightly linked.” 

Other notable examples include Benjamin J. Hough, Jr., one of the major investors in a steam cotton mill in Rockport, Massachusetts, who also invests in slave ships; and businessman and lawyer Israel E. Trask, who owns both cotton mills in central Massachusetts and plantations in Mississippi, the latter worked by the 150 people he has enslaved. 

The human cost of textile production is the suffering and countless deaths of enslaved Black people in the South, and the often low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions in the Northern mills. In 1836, some 1,500 Lowell  “mill girls” strike – the first such action of its kind – to protest a pay cut.

1816  Unsung heroines play key movement roles 

Helen Benson Garrison, the wife of White abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, is an abolitionist in her own right with a family history of activism. Her father, George Benson, is an active member of an abolitionist organization in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is born, and the Benson household shelters African Americans on the run from slave traders and hunters. 

For many years, Helen raises funds for the American Anti-Slavery Society, particularly as a manager of the annual Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar. It is through his wife that William Lloyd Garrison is introduced to female abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child and Abby Kelley, who become allies in the movement. Helen – who bears seven children, two of whom do not survive childhood – also regularly houses African-American fugitives from slavery. One Garrison descendant, David Lloyd Garrison, remembers his grandfather saying, “You never knew who would be in the bed next to you when you woke up in the morning.” 

In All on Fire, his biography of William Lloyd Garrison, historian Henry Mayer writes that Helen “managed a complicated household with a blend of frugality and good cheer that made her a quiet but not unappreciated heroine of the movement.”  

1816  Revolts advance abolition cause in British empire

Barbados is the first of Britain’s Caribbean sugar colonies to use a system of industrial agriculture based on enslaved labor and control by terror – in which most workers die within seven years – and it serves as a model for the others. Its merciless culture of violence is reflected in the draconian actions of the British authorities in the aftermath of the Bussa rebellion: 144 enslaved people are executed, 70 are later sentenced to death, and 170 are deported to neighboring British colonies in the Caribbean. Alleged rebels are also subject to floggings during 80 days of martial law. Despite the scope of the rebellion, only two Whites are reported killed. 

While the rebellion fails, its influence is significant for the future of Barbados and it increases momentum for an end to slavery in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere. 

Bussa remains a popular figure in Barbados, representing emancipation and freedom in the hearts and minds of many. In 1985, the Bussa Emancipation Statue was unveiled near the capital, Bridgetown, and in 1998 the island’s parliament named Bussa one of the 10 National Heroes of Barbados. 

1816  "Fantasy" scheme to preserve U.S. slavery launched  

Hundreds of people newly freed from bondage are transported to Liberia to start a new life; substantial numbers soon die from disease. Laws in Southern states require that African Americans leave the state where they had been enslaved after obtaining their freedom. Many find that the price they pay is removal to Liberia.

In addition to Monroe, ACS founders and supporters include other prominent White politicians, businessmen, and lawyers; most are also enslavers. Among them are two other U.S. presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; U.S. Senators Henry Clay and John Randolph; U.S. Congressman Richard Bland Lee; and Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington. 

In his Notes on Virginia, published in 1782 shortly after his term of office as the state’s governor, Thomas Jefferson champions colonization as part of an effort to gradually emancipate all enslaved people in the state. But, according to historian Alan Taylor in his book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia 1772-1832, most Virginians recognize colonization as a “fantasy.” Enslavers “blanched at the logistical and financial challenges of shipping thousands of people thousands of miles away.” Wealthy Virginia planter and law professor St. George Tucker calculates that Jefferson’s colonization scheme would annually cost Virginia at least five times the state’s revenue, requiring an “unthinkable” fivefold increase in taxation. 

Later numbers demonstrate the completely unrealistic thinking behind the entire scheme: Between 1821 and 1847, only a few thousand African Americans, out of millions, emigrate to Liberia. During that same period, the Black population of the U.S. increases by about 500,000.

In 1796, Tucker proposes an alternative plan that would make freedmen low-caste tenants without rights to own land, bear arms, vote, hold office, or marry a White person. This inferior status, he reasons, would pressure Black residents to gradually migrate west, saving White Virginians the cost of sending them to Africa. The plan is angrily rebuffed by both houses of the state legislature.

Black Americans overwhelmingly reject colonization, and it reinforces abolitionists’ demands for Black citizenship. At a meeting at Philadelphia’s Bethel Church in January 1817, some 3,000 free African Americans resolve that they will never be banished from a country whose soil had been “manured” by the “blood and sweat” of their ancestors. “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country; they are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity, of suffering and of wrong.” 

Black abolitionist leaders, including David Walker in Boston, speak out forcefully against colonization. And the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, a network of state and regional anti-slavery societies, rejects colonization as impractical and not a path to general emancipation.   

1817-1819  Anti-slavery papers are movement pioneers

Despite its brief existence and outspoken abolitionist stance in a slave state, The Emancipator achieves remarkable popularity: its 2,000 paying subscribers exceed those of any newspaper in either Tennessee or Kentucky, a reflection of the strong anti-slavery sentiment in the region at the time, particularly in East Tennessee. (In 1816, The Manumission Society of Tennessee boasts 20 branches and nearly 500 members.) Naturally, The Emancipator also attracts substantial opposition from enslavers and slavery supporters in the state who condemn its anti-slavery “agitation.”

After Embree’s death, another fellow Quaker and anti-slavery activist, Benjamin Lundy – who had been an assistant editor at Charles Osborn’s The Philanthropist – decides to launch an anti-slavery paper of his own. In 1821, Lundy publishes the first issue of The Genius of Universal Emancipation in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. Appearing monthly and later weekly – and at times irregularly when Lundy is away lecturing on slavery – the Genius is published successively in Ohio; Greeneville, Tennessee; Baltimore, Maryland; the District of Columbia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It gains national circulation through 21 states. 

It is on one of his speaking tours that Benjamin Lundy meets William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, Massachusetts. Lundy invites the young White abolitionist to join him in Baltimore – where The Genius of Universal Emancipation is now based – to help edit the periodical. Garrison's skills and experience as a printer and editor with his hometown newspaper in Newburyport, Massachusetts enables him to revamp the layout of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, assist with editing and production, and free Lundy to spend more time traveling as an anti-slavery speaker. 

In 1831, drawing on what he learned with Lundy, Garrison co-founds The Liberator, the Boston-based weekly that becomes a standard-bearer for the abolitionist movement for 35 years, and encourages the establishment of other abolitionist papers in free states.

After 1825, new anti-slavery papers debut in rapid succession. Abolitionists take advantage of lower production costs, stemming from new technologies, and faster distribution methods, to reach a growing readership, particularly in the North. These early papers include The African Observer in Philadelphia, founded in 1826; Freedom's Journal – the first African American abolitionist paper – in New York City (1827); The Investigator in Providence, Rhode Island (1827); The Free Press in Burlington, Vermont (1828); and The Liberalist in New Orleans (1828). In 1838, by one estimate, more than 100 anti-slavery newspapers are being published nationwide. 

In an article in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, historian Asa E. Martin writes that the historical value of these early anti-slavery publications “can hardly be overestimated.” They serve as a repository of abolitionist documents, ideas, and plans, as well as vehicles for promoting the anti-slavery cause. “In so doing they paved the way for the coming of Garrison and the modern abolitionists. They were the pioneers of the movement, struggling almost single-handed against the numerous difficulties that threatened to overwhelm them; yet out of chaos they brought an organization, a well defined purpose and a unity of action that made possible the success of the efforts of those who were to follow them.”

*Not to be confused with another abolitionist newspaper named The Emancipator, published in New York City and later in Boston, Massachusetts from 1833 to 1850, that began as the official journal of the American Anti-Slavery Society. After a split in the organization, the paper became a publication of the Liberty Party before later merging with other Boston-based abolitionist newspapers.

1820  Maine becomes a free state in deal over slavery 

Like the rest of New England, the new state of Maine already has substantial economic ties to slavery and the slave trade. Maine shipbuilders and shipmasters contribute to the Triangular Trade that carries products and enslaved people between the Americas and Caribbean island sugar colonies, Europe, and Africa. Exporters in the U.S. ship raw materials to Europe where they pick up manufactured goods. These goods – including cloth, weapons, and rum – are taken to Africa and traded for enslaved people who are transported to the Caribbean and the Americas.

In 1810, Maine leads the northern states in producing fabric made from cotton that is cultivated and harvested by enslaved Black people on Southern plantations. Mass production textile mills of the kind pioneered by industrialists in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts employ hundreds of mainly women workers in Maine towns, including Lewiston, Biddeford, Saco, Augusta, Waterville, and Brunswick. 

Maine traders also purchase cotton to be processed into fabric by home weavers throughout Maine and resold elsewhere. Maine merchants export salted fish to the Caribbean islands as well as timber for the boilers that yield sugar and molasses from sugarcane cultivated by enslaved workers. 

Scholars have only recently begun to uncover the full extent of Mainers’ involvement in the slave trade. There are already several well-documented cases of Maine slave traders continuing their hellish human trafficking after Congress passes an 1820 law making slave-trading an act of piracy punishable by death. They include that of Captain Nathaniel Gordon who is the first person executed under the act in 1862 (see next timeline entry). 

According to Kate McMahon, an historian at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and a Mainer herself, by 1850 Maine and Massachusetts built the vast majority of U.S. ships involved in the illegal slave trade. 

Through her research, McMahon has determined that between 1850 and 1865 some 200 U.S. vessels are engaged in the slave trade between Cuba and the United States. Seventy-five of those are built in Maine, and they generate an estimated $11 million ($330 million today) in annual revenues that flow back to New England. Thus, the trade in enslaved people yields almost five times more money for the region than the trade in lumber. 

The slave trade – foreign and domestic – is the major source of the considerable fortune of Rufus Soule, Maine’s preeminent ship builder of the period. In 1858, one of Soule’s slave ships is seized, evacuated, and burned by the British Royal Navy off the African coast as part of its efforts to enforce the slave trading ban. On the domestic front, Soule transports enslaved people from Baltimore to Southern ports and ships cotton from the South – both highly lucrative enterprises. 

1820  Maine slave trader first to be executed  

In Gordon’s case, he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy, which seizes his ship on its way to Cuba. According to Lieutenant Henry Todd, who is involved in the operation, the Erie’s main deck is so crowded that “one could scarcely put his foot down without stepping on their naked bodies.” 

The hypocrisy of illegal slaving in the midst of a civil war to end slavery is not lost on Abraham Lincoln and other Union leaders. Lincoln rejects clemency for Gordon, despite concerted appeals from politicians, family members, and other supporters.  

Another Maine slave ship captain is prosecuted under the new law in 1846, but without success. Cyrus Libby of Scarborough, Maine is master of the brig Porpoise when it is seized in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Two enslaved and branded African boys, Pedro and Guilherme, are on board. Libby claims the boys are free and employed as servants, and the ship is not engaged in the slave trade. The boys are transported to Boston to give evidence at Libby’s trial, and their testimony and that of others tell a very different story.  

The Porpoise, which was built in Prospect, Maine, had served as a tender – or support ship – for the slaver Kentucky, owned by Benjamin Carver of Searsport, Maine. The Porpoise’s small boats are used to ferry captives from land onto her much larger sister vessel. On the voyage from Africa to Brazil, some of the 500 enslaved Africans aboard the Kentucky revolt. The armed crew easily regains control, and 46 African men, women, and children are publicly executed and dismembered to discourage further rebellion. Testimony in the Boston trial also reveals that Libby had been working with the agent of a notorious Brazilian slave trader. 

Libby, who claims he had only been following the instructions of the vessel’s owner, Maine merchant George F. Richardson, is acquitted. But the Porpoise is not returned to Richardson, having already been sold by the U.S. government to cover court costs. A decade later, a Boston court rules that the vessel had been rightfully seized.

The two young enslaved boys aboard the Porpoise make new lives for themselves in New England. Guilherme moves to Milton, Massachusetts and becomes a well-respected barber. Pedro is taken in by the Parris family in Paris, Maine, and attends public school. During the 1856 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign, Pedro – now Pedro Tovooken Parris – works for candidate George W. Gordon. He tells voters how Gordon, the former U.S. consul in Brazil, had fought the Brazilian government for jurisdiction over the slave-traders in the Porpoise case and had rescued him from slavery. 

1822  Thirty-six hanged after foiled revolt