The first all-female anti-slavery society in the U.S. is established in Salem, Massachusetts. Called the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, this groundbreaking group is initially made up entirely of African American women.

In addition to campaigning against slavery, it supports secular and Sabbath schools for free Black community members, assists people who are newly freed or have escaped from slavery, and opposes racial segregation and discrimination in the northern free states.

In 1834, the Society expands its membership to include White women and officially re-organizes as the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. The SFASS supports William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and shares his commitment for an immediate end to slavery and an expanded role for women in the abolitionist movement.

Teacher and poet Charlotte Forten Grimké, founding member of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem in Salem, Massachusetts. Source: Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

1832 Regional anti-slavery society birthed in Boston

From the January 19, 1833 issue of the abolitionist newspaper, "The Liberator." Source: Boston Public Library.

Minutes of the meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) on February 27, 1832. The NEASS was formally established the previous month.

Source: The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. Read the whole document here.

The New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) is launched in the basement of the historic Black Baptist church on Belknap Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the heart of the Black community.

The 12 charter members who sign the new organization’s constitution are abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and 11 other White men.

In a gesture of collective solidarity, four prominent Black activists – John T. Hilton, James C. Barbadoes, Rev. Hosea Easton, and Rev. Thomas Paul – also sign their names to the founding document. Hilton and Barbadoes are among the co-founders of the Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA), the country’s first Black abolitionist organization. The following year the MGCA merges with the NEASS, which subsequently becomes increasingly interracial.

Garrison, a devout reader of the Bible, is the initiator and driving force of the NEASS. In All on Fire, his biography of the abolitionist, historian Henry Mayer notes that, from Garrison’s perspective, “the twelve founders constituted not only an apostolic number for preaching … but a proper-sized jury to ‘sit in judgment on the guilt of the country.’”

1832 Maria W. Stewart: Militant abolitionist, women's rights champion

Pioneering Black abolitionist and women’s rights champion Maria W. Stewart gives a landmark speech entitled “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?” to the New England Anti-Slavery Society at Franklin Hall in Boston, Massachusetts.

Maria Stewart is believed to be the first Black American to publicly lecture about women’s rights and to make public anti-slavery speeches. She is also the first U.S.-born woman to address racially mixed audiences that include women and men – something considered scandalous, even blasphemous, at the time. (Biblical bans on women teaching are interpreted as prohibiting women from speaking in public.)

Stewart and other African American female writers and orators, such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, Sarah Louisa Forten, and Jarena Lee, make a critical and inspirational contribution to the rise of militant Black abolitionism. Writer and lecturer Marilyn Richardson, author of Maria Stewart, America’s First Black Political Writer, asserts that Stewart was “a clear forerunner to generations of the best known and most influential champions of black activism, both male and female,” including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Harper.

Born free as Maria Miller in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803, Stewart is orphaned at the age of five. During her early years, until she is 15, she is “bound out” as a servant in the household of a White minister. Denied a formal education, she continues to support herself for the next five years by doing domestic work while pursuing opportunities to educate herself when and where she can. This includes attending Sabbath School literacy classes and religious instruction before church service on Sundays.

Maria W. Stewart’s Franklin Hall speech is printed in the November 17, 1832 issue of the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Source: Public Domain.

After moving to Boston, she marries James W. Stewart, an independent shipping agent, who serves in the War of 1812 against Britain and is a prisoner of war there; he dies just three years later in 1829. Through a series of shady legal maneuvers, the White executors of her husband’s will cheat Maria Stewart of what would have been a substantial inheritance.

In 1830, Stewart suffers another wrenching loss with the death of her intellectual and political mentor, the Black abolitionist leader David Walker. Stewart and Walker had been neighbors – tenants in the same house at 81 Belknap (now Joy) Street in the African American enclave on Beacon Hill in Boston.

As a public political activist, Maria Stewart moves into a proscribed realm of masculine authority and challenges conventional notions of what is “appropriate” for women – much less Black women – to do and say. In her three short years in Boston, she writes and speaks on a range of topics of vital importance to the Black community, including abolition, equal rights, educational opportunities, the colonization movement – a controversial scheme to send free Black Americans to a new American colony in Africa – and racial pride and unity.

A bold and militant orator driven by political and religious zeal, Stewart is involved with a number of local Black empowerment institutions in Boston, including the Massachusetts General Colored Association and the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society.

Her writings regularly appear in The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper co-founded and edited by the White abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. Indeed, she is the first woman to respond to Garrison’s call for Black women to write for The Liberator. Many of her articles are re-published as pamphlets and volumes for sale in the anti-slavery cause.

Passionate about education, Stewart calls on Black women to strike out on their own and seek education as a means of fulfilling their individual and collective destinies. In her book, Marilyn Richardson says that, for Stewart, “the pursuit of literacy was a sacred quest at this period when laws passed in the South made it a crime to teach slaves to read or write.”

While urging Black women to excel in their traditional roles as domestic servants and homemakers for the sake of their families’ economic security, Stewart also asks them to transcend those roles through education: “How long shall the daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

Stewart herself becomes a teacher after leaving Boston for New York. She teaches in public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and is an assistant principal of the Williamsburg School in Brooklyn. While in New York, Stewart continues her political activities. She joins women’s organizations and attends the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1837. A collected volume of her work is published there and advertised for sale with other abolitionist literature.

In later years, she teaches privately in Baltimore and then at a school in Washington, D.C. after moving there in 1861. In about 1870, Stewart is appointed head of housekeeping at the Freedmen’s Hospital and Asylum in Washington, which caters to the medical needs of thousands of African Americans who have come to the city during the Civil War. It is a post formerly occupied by Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and women’s rights activist.

In 1878, at the age of 75, Stewart begins receiving an eight-dollar-a-month widow’s pension based on her husband’s service in the U.S. Navy in the War of 1812. She uses her pension to republish her collection of religious meditations, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, with added material about her life during the Civil War. The book appears in 1879 shortly before her death in the Freedmen’s Hospital.

1832 Chloe Spear: A story of 30 years in bondage

Illustration from "Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear, a native of Africa, who was enslaved in childhood, and died in Boston, January 3, 1815." Source: New York Public Library/Digital Collections.

Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear, describing the life of an African American woman enslaved by a prominent Boston, Massachusetts family, is published.

Written by an anonymous White woman who was a fellow congregant at Boston’s interracial Second Baptist Church, the book appears in print a full 17 years after its subject has died.

Born in 1749, Chloe Spear is enslaved at about the age of 12. She is believed to have arrived in Philadelphia in 1761, and been purchased by Captain John Bradford of Boston. According to historian Jared Ross Hardesty, throughout her enslavement, Spear was "free to engage in a number of 'domestic avocations.’”

But there were limits: when Bradford caught her learning how to read, he "threatened to suspend her by her two thumbs and severely whip her if he found her doing so again." He apparently made good on his threat, because the memoir refers to the beatings Bradford gave her for this same “offense.”

Undaunted, Chloe Spear acquires a psalter and not only learns to decipher the words but to embrace their spirit, becoming a lay leader within Boston’s Baptist community.

The memoir highlights Spear's piety and industry, and provides details of her will. It indicates that she managed to amass significant property, despite being enslaved for some 30 years. Her bequests include $500 dollars to her grandson; clothing, linen, and $20 to $25 each to six women of color who attended Second Baptist Church; and $50 each to two men of color, Cesar Fletcher and Primus Grounds, the latter also a fellow congregant at the church.

The property listed in her estate includes the tools of a laundress ('1 Pair Flat Irons,' '1 Folding Board & Bench'); and several luxury goods and furnishings ('1 Ebony Tea Table,' '2 Small Looking Glasses,' '5 Pictures,' and a seven-dollar 'Brass Fire Sett.') According to historian Margot Minardi, Spear clearly economized, but "she also allowed herself some of the household goods that served as markers of refinement in the early nineteenth century."

A deeply religious woman, she marries a man called Cesar Spear, and they have seven children, all of whom she outlives. After Massachusetts abolishes slavery in 1783, Chloe Spear works as a laundress and the couple run a boarding house for sailors and other workers. Together, they earn enough money to purchase a house in Boston’s North End. Following Cesar's death, the boarding house also serves as a site for religious meetings and social gatherings for people of all races. As a result, Chloe Spear becomes a beloved figure in both Black and White religious and working-class communities.

Chloe Spear dies from severe arthritis and "rheumatic affections" in 1815, and is buried in the Bradford family's vault, located in Boston's Granary Burying Ground. She is featured in five obituaries in Boston newspapers, and Dr. Thomas Baldwin, a minister of the Second Baptist Church, writes a biography of her, which is published in a Baptist missionary magazine.

1833 Native leader designates “Days of Mourning” to mark colonists' arrival

A sustained effort by the Wampanoag people to reclaim control of their land is led by William Apess, a Native American Methodist preacher whose book, A Son of the Forest, one of the first autobiographies by a Native American, had been published four years earlier.

Proudly identifying as Indigenous and people of color, the Wampanoag – whose traditional territory spans what is now southeastern Massachusetts, parts of eastern Rhode Island, and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket – spend the first decades of the 19th century pressing for the removal of their state-appointed guardians and for recognition of their right to self-rule (on what is, in fact, their ancestral lands).

A major issue for the Wampanoag in the Mashpee, Massachusetts area is illegal logging by White settlers on tribal land. By the 1830s, almost all of the large hardwood trees in the state had been cut down, mainly for use as firewood. One of the few places that still contains virgin hardwood is on land set aside for the Mashpee Wampanoag. For years, they have complained to state officials about the encroachment of White loggers and have raised other issues of concern. They received no response.

The tribal council finally decides to take strong action. At a meeting on May 21, Mashpee leaders, assisted by William Apess, draw up a document that comes to be known as the Mashpee Indian Declaration of Independence. The Mashpee declare their right to govern themselves, and they draw a line in the sand: as of July 1, outsiders would no longer be permitted to cut wood on their land.

The Mashpee Wampanoag also take back possession of their meetinghouse. A White minister, Reverend Phineas Fish – whose salary is paid from a charitable fund for evangelizing Indians – has prohibited its use by the tribe and preaches there to an almost entirely White congregation. Most of the Christian Wampanoag, led by one of their own, Blind Joe Amos, attend Baptist services elsewhere.

Moreover, Rev. Fish himself has long been implicated in the theft of wood from tribal land. The Mashpee complain that he has enriched himself by appropriating hundreds of acres of woodland at the tribe's expense.

The Mashpee take steps to enforce their ban on illegal logging after the July 1 deadline. When a party of White people try to haul away firewood cut on the reservation, tribal members physically prevent them from doing so.

Local county officials respond by declaring the Mashpees to be in a state of “riot.” They arrest William Apess and another leader on charges of trespass and assault. Apess is jailed for a month as a result. An attorney assists them in successfully appealing to the legislature, but initially Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr. threatens the group with military force.

William Apess. From his book, "A Son of the Forest," 1831. Source: Public Domain.

Ultimately, the campaign wins some notable victories: Massachusetts agrees that Mashpee will be a self-governing district with most of the powers of other towns, except the right to send representatives to the state legislature; guardians are replaced by popularly elected town officers; and Rev. Fish is fired and the Mashpee receive half the amount of his annual salary to use at their own discretion. In the longer term, Apess’s effort has the unintended effect of prompting the state to explore revoking Indigenous people’s special status, including the legal protection of their land.

The campaign serves as a vehicle for Apess – who was born in Colrain, Massachusetts – to awaken White New Englanders to their colonial governments’ denial of basic rights to their Indigenous neighbors. He delivers a series of public lectures “highlighting the troubles of Mashpee and Indians everywhere at the hands of self-righteous, hypocritical white Christians,” according to historian David J. Silverman in his book, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and The Troubled History of Thanksgiving. William Lloyd Garrison and other Boston area abolitionists provide support for Apess’s efforts and for the subsequent publication of his lectures.

His best-known address takes the form of a memorial eulogy for Pumetacom, also known as King Philip, the Wampanoag paramount chief who led a multi-tribal revolt against New England colonists in 1675-76 – called King Philip’s War by Europeans – to stop colonial expansion and protect Native lives, lands, and cultures. Pumetacom’s father, Ousamequin, had welcomed the Pilgrims and assisted them in the early years of their settlement on Wampanoag land.

Silverman writes that Apess’s lecture, Eulogy on King Philip, “reversed the emerging myth of the pious Pilgrim Fathers to transform the Wampanoags into heroes and the English into villains.” According to Apess, Ousamequin was a model of kindness “that would do justice to any Christian nation or being in the world” because he patiently suffered “the most daring robberies and barbarous deeds of death that were ever committed by the American Pilgrims” in the founding of the Plymouth colony. These include kidnappings, grave robbing, theft of Wampanoag corn, and an unprovoked massacre of Indians at Wessagusset (modern-day Weymouth, Massachusetts).

Apess declares Pumetacom (Philip), to be “the greatest man that ever lived upon the American shores” for leading his people in resistance against colonial exploitation. Apess ranks him above George Washington because, as summarized by Silverman, “he fought against a darker tyranny and for greater freedom with far fewer means at his disposal.” Additionally, Philip always treated his enemies with honor, “quite unlike white people’s barbarity towards Indians during King Philip’s War and in every war against them since.”

“Yet Apess’s most important political point,” writes Silverman, “was that Philip was a sage for taking up arms rather than submitting to white people’s indignities.” The preacher invites his listeners to imagine Philip coming back from the dead to discover that Indian life under colonial rule was just as unbearable as he had feared it would be.

“How true the prophecy,” Apess laments, “that the white people would not only cut down (Indians’) groves but enslave them…. Our groves and hunting grounds are gone, our dead are dug up, our council fires are put out.” Whites like President Andrew Jackson – whose administration forcibly removed an estimated 46,000 Native American people from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi to designated western reservations – were intent either on “driving the Indians out of the states,” writes Apess, or, as in New England, “dooming them to become chained under desperate laws.” Either way, there was no justice for Indians in White America, which was the outgrowth of “a fire, a canker, created by the Pilgrims from across the Atlantic, to burn and destroy my unfortunate brethren.”

For that reason, Apess declares that December 22 – the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing in Plymouth – and the Fourth of July should be treated by Indians as “days of mourning and not joy.” In 1970, heeding Apess's call, Wampanoag activist Frank James, together with Wampanoag and Narragansett leaders and the American Indian Movement, organize the first National Day of Mourning at Plymouth on the day most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. The event, focused on mournful reflection and teaching, has been held annually ever since.

William Apess, who is Pequot and was adopted by the Mashpee Wampanoag, claims descent from Pumetacom through his maternal line. After publishing Eulogy on King Philip, Apess disappears from New England public life. He moves to New York City with his second wife and children, and struggles to find work there during a time of economic recession. He dies of a stroke in 1839.

An historical marker celebrating William Apess is located outside the public library in Colrain, Massachusetts, the town where he was born. In 2021, the town's selectmen issued a proclamation declaring May 21 – the date of the Mashpee Indian Declaration of Independence – to be annually celebrated as William Apess Day. "We urge the residents of Colrain and surrounding towns to read works both written by and about Apess, and to consider how they, too, can honor Apess’ brilliant legacy."

1833 Emiliano Mundrucu: Challenges racism in court

Telegraph, a sidewheel steamer, depicted here on the Hudson River in New York in 1837. Watercolor on paper by James Bard. Source: Public Domain.

Brazilian-born revolutionary, abolitionist and civil rights campaigner Emiliano Mundrucu sues a steamboat captain for denying his wife access to the ladies’ cabin on a voyage in Massachusetts waters. He is possibly the first Black person in U.S. history to mount a legal challenge against racism and segregation.

Mundrucu, his wife Harriet, a free Black Bostonian, and their one-year-old daughter Emiliana, are taking a business trip from New Bedford to Nantucket, Massachusetts aboard the steamer Telegraph. During the crossing, Harriett feels unwell, and tries to seek shelter with her daughter in the “after” or ladies’ cabin – an area of the ship designated exclusively for women – but their path is blocked because they are Black.

The ship’s captain, Edward Barker, tells Mundrucu: "Your wife a'n't a lady. She is a n---er.” Underscoring the racial segregation on the boat, Barker adds: “I don’t allow any n-----s in the cabin." He directs the couple to the forward – inferior – cabin where there are no berths and passengers have to sleep on mattresses on the wet floor. Mundrucu refuses, insisting that he has paid the most expensive fare for the trip. The captain then orders the family, their luggage, and their horse off the vessel. (The horse falls overboard, and has to be rescued from the water by Mundrucu and several bystanders.)

Mundrucu sues Barker for breach of contract and for damages, and appeals to the jury to consider the captain’s actions a “violation of humanity” for refusing to allow his sick wife entry to the ladies’ cabin. The jury returns a guilty verdict, with damages assessed at $125 (about $3,971 today.)

However, Barker appeals to the state Supreme Judicial Court, which overturns the ruling. Mundrucu and his attorney and friend, abolitionist David Lee Child, begin preparing an appeal to the federal court system. But they drop the case when Mundrucu decides to return to Brazil after the Brazilian government grants him a reprieve for his role in a secessionist rebellion there.

The case attracts widespread coverage in newspapers across the northeastern U.S. and internationally as a notable example of the fight against segregation on public transportation. Five years later, perhaps inspired by the Mundrucus, New York-based Black abolitionist David Ruggles also boards the Telegraph in New Bedford to travel to a meeting of fellow abolitionists in Nantucket – and is denied the right to purchase the $2 ticket that would allow him to sit anywhere on the ship. He never makes it to the meeting.

Desegregation efforts in Massachusetts continue to gain momentum, and in 1843, campaigns spearheaded by abolitionists finally force an end to racial segregation on trains and the legalization of interracial marriage in the state.

It all began with Emiliano and Harriet Mundrucu. Historian Caitlin Fitz believes that Emiliano’s connections in Boston – he has built a network of important contacts among leading abolitionists and Freemasons since moving to the city – and the way the clash unfolds on board the Telegraph indicates that the Mundrucus’ protest actions may have been premeditated.

"We sometimes assume that these acts of resistance were spontaneous, that Emiliano and Harriet just got angry," Fitz told a BBC News reporter for an article on Mundrucu. "Maybe they were angry, but they were also strategic political thinkers who were thinking very carefully about the best way to bring about change."

Indeed, the Mundrucus’ actions are typical of the public protests undertaken by activists to raise public awareness and spark debate about discrimination and civil rights issues.

As a Black Brazilian immigrant, Emiliano Mundrucu – who speaks English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese – brings a tradition of Black resistance to Boston that has been shaped by his experiences as a Black man in South America and the Caribbean. Born into relative poverty in Recife, Brazil in 1791, he serves in the Brazilian military, rising to the rank of captain in a pardo battalion. (Pardo refers to the triracial descendants of Indigenous people, Southern Europeans, and West Africans.)

Mundrucu is part of two popular but failed rebellions in northeast Brazil, in 1817 and 1824 respectively, aimed at establishing a confederation of three neighboring states independent of the ruling Portuguese monarchy. The insurrectionists are inspired in part by the Haitian Revolution – the revolt of enslaved and free Black people that had made Haiti independent from France in 1791.

Mundrucu flees Brazil and subsequently settles in Boston, although he travels back to the country of his birth on several occasions. Between 1824 and 1827, he visits two fledgling republics – Haiti and Venezuela. With the advent of a more liberal political environment in Brazil, Mundrucu receives a government pardon, and he briefly resumes his military career there in the mid-1830s before returning to Boston in 1841.

Mundrucu is one of Brazil’s earliest abolitionists. The issue of slavery is personal for him: his father is an enslaver, and after his death, Mundrucu travels to Brazil in 1837 to settle his estate. He immediately emancipates the people his father had enslaved – 50 years before Brazil as a country abolishes slavery.

In Boston, where Mundrucu runs a clothing store, he and his family struggle financially, and he declares bankruptcy at least once. Meanwhile, he is prominent in abolitionist and civil rights campaigns, including efforts to desegregate schools, public transportation and public spaces, and to establish full citizenship rights for African Americans.

In January 1863, as the elected vice-president of the Union Progressive Association, a predominantly Black abolitionist group in Boston, Mundrucu stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Frederick Douglass and other leading Black abolitionists to celebrate President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that frees all enslaved people in the U.S. Sadly, he dies later that year.

In an article for Black Perspectives, historian Lloyd Belton writes that Mundrucu “brought a unique, inter-American perspective to emancipationist and civil rights movements in Boston…. He should be recognized and celebrated among the pantheon of African American abolitionists and activists who fought against the twin evils of slavery and racism.”

1833 Attacks force closure of school for girls of color

White activist and teacher Prudence Crandall opens the first school for girls of color in Canterbury, Connecticut.

Twenty girls from Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the local community enroll in Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. They include students of African, Native American, Haitian, and Indian descent.

Local White citizens protest that the school will endanger their safety; one prominent resident claims that the boarding school will encourage "social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks." Threats and violent attacks on the school follow, and the Connecticut legislature passes a Black Law which prohibits any school from teaching African American students from outside the state without town permission.

Crandall defies the law and continues to teach her students, despite a boycott from townspeople: shopkeepers won’t serve them, stagecoach drivers refuse to provide them with transportation, and the town’s doctors decline to treat them. Opponents even poison the school's well with animal feces.

Crandall is prosecuted and Arthur Tappan, a prominent White abolitionist, donates $10,000 for her defense. Her lawyers argue that prohibiting the education of African Americans from outside the state is unconstitutional. The state Supreme Court eventually rules in her favor. But local vandalism against the school increases; townspeople try unsuccessfully to burn the school down and later break almost 90 window panes using heavy iron bars.

Prudence Crandall, by Francis Alexander, 1834; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

In 1981, artist Carl Henry painted a reproduction that hangs on the wall of the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury, Connecticut. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

For the safety of her students, her family and herself, Prudence Crandall closes her school on September 10, 1834. She is later involved in the women's suffrage movement and runs a school in LaSalle County, Illinois.

In 1886, the state of Connecticut honors Prudence Crandall with an act by the legislature, prominently supported by the writer Mark Twain, that provides her with a $400 annual pension (equivalent to $11,455 today).

The experience of Prudence Crandall and her school is by no means unique. For example, one year after it closes, segregationists launch a campaign against the racially integrated Noyes Academy established by New England abolitionists in Canaan, New Hampshire. Railing against racial mixing, the segregationists claim that the village will be “overrun with negroes from the South — the slaves were to be brought on to line the streets with huts and to inundate the industrious town with paupers and vagabonds — and other tales too indecent and too ridiculous to be repeated.”

After White residents vote to remove the school, some 300 of them physically do so. With the aid of teams of oxen, they haul the building to the village green, damaging it beyond repair in the process. It is later destroyed by arson. George Kimball, one of the founders of the Noyes Academy, helps the Black students leave at night for their safety.

Among those who attend the school during its brief existence are several future prominent African-American abolitionists, including Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Paul, Jr., Thomas S. Sydney, Julia Williams, Charles L. Reason, and Alexander Crummell.

The attacks against these two schools are symptomatic of widespread racist hostility from Whites towards Black residents in New England. In 1824, White mobs rampage through Hard Scrabble, a working-class and predominantly African American neighborhood, in Providence, Rhode Island, attacking and destroying Black homes and other buildings. In 1831, another such neighborhood, Snow Town, is similarly targeted.

1833 Domestic slave trade: over one million sent south

Union soldiers occupy the slave-trading firm of Price, Birch & Company in Alexandria, Virginia, in about 1865. The building was previously the headquarters of Franklin & Armfield, one of the largest slave trading companies in the country started by Isaac Franklin and John Armfield.

Source: The New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project.

The discovery of decomposing bodies of enslaved people in Natchez, Mississippi provides a window into the horrors of the rapidly growing domestic slave trade in the U.S.

All the dead had succumbed to cholera, and their clothes identify them as the “property” of a leading slave trader, Isaac Franklin. Anxious to prevent the cholera outbreak from infecting other people he had enslaved – and to limit his financial losses – Franklin and an assistant had tossed the corpses into a ravine and covered them with dirt.

Many White residents of Natchez, shocked by the grisly unearthing and worried about their own health, clamor for action by the Board of Selectmen, the city’s governing body. The board convenes an emergency meeting and bans the sale of enslaved people within Natchez city limits.

Isaac Franklin admits nothing and skirts the ban by moving his slave pen and showroom a mile outside the city limits. There he resumes what will become, with his business partners, John Armfield and Rice Ballard, the largest slave-trading operation in the country with a geographic reach rivaling any other economic enterprise. Between them, they are responsible for the forced displacement and sale of tens of thousands of enslaved people.

Dealing in human flesh proves astonishingly lucrative. When he dies, Isaac Franklin possesses the modern equivalent of $435 million, making him one of the wealthiest men in the United States.

The rapid rise in the domestic slave trade begins after 1808, when Congress ends the legal importation of enslaved people from overseas. Meanwhile, the growth of cotton and sugar plantations in Lower South states – Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana – is fueling a rapacious demand for more enslaved labor.

Franklin and other traders strive to satisfy and profit from that demand, especially by taking advantage of the “slave surplus” in Maryland and Virginia where planters have depleted the soil growing tobacco and turned to crops like wheat that require fewer enslaved workers. Franklin and his ilk buy thousands of enslaved workers in upper South states, and sell them in New Orleans, Natchez, and other slave-trading centers in the Lower South. The enslaved are either marched to market in shackles – a distance of up to 1,000 miles – or transported by ships along the Gulf coast (and in later years overland by rail).

Between 1800 and 1860, this massive forced migration underpins slavery’s expansion in the U.S. According to historian Joshua Rothman in his book, The Ledger and the Chain, American enslavers and slave traders send about one million Black people from the upper to the lower South during this period – twice as many as were transported in two centuries from Africa to mainland North America via the transatlantic slave trade. From Virginia alone, between 300,000 and 350,000 people are sold south.

The enslavers and traders are also responsible for the movement of millions more within individual states. “By the time they were through,” Rothman writes, “the number of enslaved people in the United States had more than quadrupled, the number of slave states below the Mason-Dixon line had nearly doubled, and slavery had crossed the Mississippi River and the Rio Grande.”

In the 1830s, “exporting” enslaved people to the lower South becomes a reliable source of income for many Virginia enslavers. One visitor from England observes that Virginia’s “principal traffic now consists in raising slaves for the more Southern parts, becoming a complete slave nursery.” In the 1840s, visiting British anti-slavery activist Joseph Sturge notes that the slaveholding sections of the country are “divided into the ‘slave breeding’ and ‘slave-consuming’ states.”

Some prominent White Virginians applaud the economic advantages of this development. State delegate James Gholson opines that enslavers have as much right to profit from the increase in the births of enslaved people as “the owner of broodmares.”

The mass expulsion of Native Americans from their lands in the lower south as a result of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies opens up fresh opportunities for cotton growers – and for traders like Franklin to supply enslaved labor for new and expanded plantations. They engineer the importation and sale of tens of thousands more enslaved workers. In Alabama, for example, the enslaved population in the state more than doubles in the 1830s, with cotton production increasing almost 90% in an eight-year period.

African Americans fight the growing domestic slave trade in the limited ways available to them. In 1829, a coastal slaver chartered by John Armfield, one of Isaac Franklin’s partners, is carrying 197 enslaved people from Norfolk, Virginia to New Orleans for sale. Between 30 and 40 of them organize an on-board rebellion that is ultimately unsuccessful. Similar shipboard resistance plots are foiled on two other slavers out of Norfolk. In Alexandria, Virginia – second only to Baltimore, Maryland as the premier urban center of the domestic slave trade in the Upper South – African Americans organize protests against the “dealers in slaves.” In 1825, authorities there violently suppress a street march and arrest protest leaders.

Weathering economic downturns, the domestic slave trade stays robust. According to Joshua Rothman, slave traders and enslavers move 250,000 people across state lines in the 1850s. That is a 35 percent increase from the 1840s and close to the boom years of the 1830s. They increasingly use railroads to transport enslaved people, ironically along tracks financed by sales of the enslaved and laid by enslaved workers. It is faster and cheaper than walking a coffle – a group chained together – overland, and losses from exhaustion, hunger, injury, and death are minimized.

In later life, both Isaac Franklin and Rice Ballard build plantation empires by pouring their immense profits from slave trading into land and enslaved people. By the time of his death in 1846, Franklin has six plantations and "owns" 600 enslaved workers. In the two decades before the Civil War, Ballard establishes a financial interest in nearly a dozen plantations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and exerts control – alone or with a business partner – over some 500 enslaved people. During the 1850s, his planting operations yield a net profit of $330,000 ($9,537,552 today).

1833 Female anti-slavery groups proliferate

The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) is founded, and grows to 600 members from the city and surrounding areas. Within five years, New England has over 65 such societies, 40 of them in Massachusetts.

As the women’s anti-slavery movement spreads west, BFASS helps organize the first national women’s anti-slavery convention in 1837. By the following year, Ohio boasts 30 female anti-slavery societies and a statewide organization coordinating their activities. By 1855, over 200 such societies are active in the free states. Most of their members are working class – the wives and daughters of farmers, carpenters, mechanics, and the like.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, the girls and young women who labor for a pittance in the mills relate their oppression to that of enslaved people who grow the cotton they are turning into textiles. Their opposition to slavery is an expression of solidarity against the alliance of the “lords of the loom and the lords of the lash.”

Abolitionist women do the volunteer in-the-trenches work that is critical to sustaining the movement. Female anti-slavery societies raise funds; sell subscriptions to abolitionist newspapers; purchase pamphlets and tracts; finance the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses and support for African Americans fleeing bondage in the South for freedom in the northern states and Canada; and pay the salaries of anti-slavery agents.

Anti-slavery sewing circles create articles sporting abolitionist homilies like “May the use of our needles prick the consciences of slave-holders,” which they sell at anti-slavery fairs and bazaars.

From the 1839 "Liberty Bell," a publication of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Source: Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

The female anti-slavery societies also form the backbone of the massive abolitionist petition campaigns. The BFASS spearheads several multi-state campaigns. Members canvass the region and establish networks to amass signatures to send to Congress. More women than men sign petitions – sometimes twice as many – and women coordinate signature-gathering efforts.

At a time when women cannot vote, petitions allow them to participate in the national political debate over such issues as slavery in the District of Columbia; the interstate slave trade; the U.S. annexation of Texas, previously Mexican territory; and the Gag Rule that prevents Congress from considering abolition petitions.

1833 Abolition group is rare for being racially integrated

Seal of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society based on an image by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler who was a member. Source: Public Domain.

The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) is launched after women are initially excluded from the American Anti-Slavery Society; the AASS later welcomes women to its ranks.

The PFASS, which affiliated with the AASS, is one of the few racially integrated anti-slavery societies in the antebellum era. Integration is rare even among female anti-slavery societies.

The 18 co-founders of the PFASS include Mary Ann M'Clintock, Margaretta Forten, her mother Charlotte, and Sarah and Harriet Forten. Many White members of the group are Quakers, among them Lucretia Mott and Angelina Grimke.

PFASS activists play key roles in the eventual birth of the women’s movement and shape Black women's community activism for later generations, especially in the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In her book, Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America, historian Beth A. Salerno writes that many women tended to join women-led organizations because they had “a less competitive atmosphere and more genteel interaction.”

1833 National anti-slavery group established

The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by 63 delegates at a meeting hall owned by a Black benevolent society.

Six male Black abolitionists are named managers of the new organization: James McCrummell, Robert Purvis, James Barbadoes, Peter Williams, John Vashon, and Abraham Shadd. The delegates also appoint four agents for the AASS: William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel May, Theodore Weld, and Amos Phelps.

Dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery in the U.S., the AASS serves as the principal activist and coordinating arm of the abolitionist movement. By 1840, the AASS has some 2,000 affiliated groups with between 150,000 and 200,000 members. Some historians put the number as high as 250,000.

AASS member groups sponsor meetings, adopt resolutions, gather signatures for anti-slavery petitions to be sent to Congress, publish journals, and print and distribute educational materials. They also send out agents and lecturers – 70 in 1836 alone – to carry the anti-slavery message to Northern audiences.

Among the most impactful speakers at AASS public meetings are formerly enslaved African Americans, including Frederick Douglass and Williams Wells Brown, who speak about the cruelty and dehumanization of slavery from their own personal experience.

The anti-slavery activities of AASS and its member groups frequently meet with violent public opposition, with mobs invading meetings, attacking speakers, and burning printing presses.

Joseph Carpenter, abolitionist and friend of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, with an unidentified child.

From "Portraits of American Abolitionists," a collection of images of individuals representing a broad spectrum of viewpoints in the slavery debate. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

1833 Lydia Maria Child: Abolitionist and rights advocate

Illustration from "An Appeal In Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans." Source: Library of Congress. Read the book here.

Abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, and Native American rights activist Lydia Maria Child publishes An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.

In her book, she argues for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people without compensation to enslavers. She is said to be the first White woman to write a book supporting this policy, which is promoted by many leading Black abolitionists and more radical White male abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison. Child insists that emancipation is practicable and that Africans are intellectually equal to Europeans.

Along with many other female abolitionists, Child campaigns for equal female membership and participation in the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), provoking a controversy that will later split the movement.

In 1839, Child is elected to the executive committee of the AASS; the following year she becomes the editor of the society's National Anti-Slavery Standard. The paper is published continuously until 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is passed, guaranteeing citizens' right to vote regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

1833 Youth choirs part of vibrant anti-slavery culture

The abolitionist Juvenile Choir of Boston is founded. Comprising African American children aged three to 10, the choir is led by their primary school teacher, Susan Paul, one the first African American members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

During its two years of existence, the “colored” Juvenile Choir sings patriotic and anti-slavery songs at packed concerts and anti-slavery events in Boston, drawing rave reviews.

By teaching her students songs about slavery, Paul is able to ensure that African American voices are literally heard on the issue. Her students also learn about Northern abolitionism, fostering participation of young African-Americans in the abolitionist movement.

The Juvenile Choir is one of several local youth choirs, including the Garrison Juvenile Choir – named for abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison – in which children learn to read music and are introduced to the works of classical and semi-classical composers.

They are part of a flourishing anti-slavery musical culture that accompanies abolitionist meetings and creates a common spirit. Singing is employed to open meetings, introduce speakers, and close gatherings with a finale.

Program schedule for the Fourth of July celebration by the New England Anti-Slavery Society at Boylston Hall, Boston in 1834. It features "music by a colored juvenile choir under the direction of Miss Susan Paul." Source: Wikiwand.

1833 Britain frees 800,000, compensates enslavers

.An 1849 poster announcing an event in Worcester, Massachusetts to celebrate the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies.

Source: Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

With passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, Britain abolishes slavery in most of its colonies, freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and South Africa as well as those in Canada.

Persistent resistance by enslaved Africans and a growing fear among plantation owners of more widespread uprisings fuel the momentum for the legislation. Anti-slavery activism also plays an important part: in 1833 alone, several abolitionist petition campaigns organized in Britain collectively garner 1.3 million signatures.

The British government pays out 20 million pounds sterling (about 17 billion pounds or $23 billion today) to more than 46,000 British enslavers and investors to compensate them for the loss of their human “property.” That compensation amounts to about 40% of the entire British government spending for the year. The loan borrowed by the state to finance this giveaway is only finally paid off in 2015.

Those who had been enslaved receive precisely nothing.

The aim of the Slavery Abolition Act is to dismantle the large-scale plantation slavery that exists in Britain’s tropical colonies, where the enslaved population is usually larger than that of the White colonists.

People of African descent enslaved in British North America – which by now is mainly Canada – are relatively isolated and far smaller in number. The new law results only in their partial liberation: Children under the age of six are freed while others are to be retained by their former “owners” for four to six years as “apprentices.”

The law makes Canada a haven for African Americans. Between 1834 – when the legislation takes effect – and the early 1860s, thousands of fugitives from slavery and free Black people head north from the U.S. to find freedom and greater security on Canadian soil.

1834 Mill workers support enslaved cotton pickers

Women mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts  join forces with other women to form the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society.

The city is the rapidly expanding center of the New England textile industry, and more than 5,000 women work in the city’s 22 textile mills; by 1858, that number more than doubles – to 52 – with over 9,000 women tending the looms 12-14 hours a day.

Lowell has a strong abolitionist community, and women are in the forefront of both anti-slavery and labor reform activism.

Most women mill workers are from poor rural farming families. While they gain a measure of independence with their own paycheck, many see the connections between their struggles for improved health and working conditions, and the plight of enslaved people in the South who plant and pick the cotton they are turning into textiles.

Women mill workers posing by the satinet machines in the Taft or Old Huguenot Mill in Worcester, Massachusetts, in about 1880. Source: Oxford Free Public Library Historical Museum, Digital Commonwealth.

Acting in solidarity, they collect signatures for petitions – one national petition to end slavery in Washington, D.C. contains 1,640 signatures of Lowell women – and help raise money for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Some of their overseers in the mills are Quakers who encourage their abolitionist activity, but are quick to censure or fire them when they make demands for better working conditions.

The movements for women's rights, factory workers' rights, and the abolition of slavery intertwine in Lowell in the 1840s and 1850s. Mill worker and labor organizer Sarah Bagley – who co-founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association which campaigns for a 10-hour day with 10,000 petition signatures to the state legislature – writes: “Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious employment I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily! … the whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied.

"Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.”

1834 New songs help inspire anti-slavery activism

Top: From "Anti-slavery Melodies: For the Friends of Freedom" by Jairus Lincoln, published by Elijah B. Gill for the Hingham Anti-Slavery Society in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Bottom: The Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845 daguerreotype. Source: Gilman Collection, gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005, Wikimedia.

Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison compiles the first anti-slavery “songster,” A Selection of Anti-Slavery Hymns.

Music and song have always been a source of inspiration and solidarity in political and social movements, and the abolitionist movement is no exception.

Among the most popular White abolitionist singers are the Hutchinson Family Singers from Milford, New Hampshire. Their signature song, "Get Off The Track!," becomes the soundtrack of the anti-slavery movement of the 1840s in the way that “We Shall Overcome” will be for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

The troupe debuts the song – with a melody ironically borrowed from a racist tune, “Old Man Tucker” – at an 1844 meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that has participants, including Garrison, clapping, cheering, and chanting the refrains. (Garrison himself also writes lyrics for abolitionist songs, such as "Song of the Abolitionist (I Am an Abolitionist)."

The Hutchinsons and their four-part harmonies are a big hit. The group performs throughout New England, and in 1845 tours Great Britain with Black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Outspoken abolitionists themselves, the Hutchinsons also advocate for women’s rights and temperance through their music.

1834 White mobs riot, rampage in two cities

Anti-Black and anti-abolitionist riots in New York City and Philadelphia destroy scores of Black homes, businesses, and churches sympathetic to abolition.

During a four-day rampage in Philadelphia, White mobs tear down one Black church and sack another, destroy more than 30 Black homes, and randomly beat Black residents.

It is one of several racist riots in the city during the 1830s and 1840s spurred by surging immigration, competition for jobs, White hostility to the increasing number of Black residents, and the rise of abolitionism.

In New York, the disorder and chaos last for nearly a week with thousands of rioters sometimes controlling whole sections of the city. Among the prominent targets of their anger are the silk merchants and ardent abolitionists Arthur Tappan and his brother, Lewis, who have recently underwritten the formation in the city of a female anti-slavery society. A mob ransacks Lewis’s house after he and his family have fled; staff at Arthur Tappan’s store arm themselves with muskets to defend it.

Other factors behind the riots include the growing social assertiveness of former enslaved people and of free-born African Americans; and the fiery oratory of abolitionist Protestant ministers, many of whom are also anti-Catholic. (In the 1830s, some 30,000 Irish Catholic immigrants are arriving in New York City each year.)

Depiction of a riot in the Kensington section of Philadelphia on July 7, 1844. Lithograph by H. Bucholzer. Source: Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

1834-1837 Anti-abolition and racist violence surges

In 1835, a pro-slavery mob in Boston, Massachusetts seizes White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, drags him through the streets, and threatens to kill him. Source: New Hampshire Historical Society.

Abolitionists are increasingly targeted and attacked by pro-slavery and racist mobs.

Forty of the 70-plus recorded instances of anti-abolition violence occur during these three years, just as the abolitionist movement is gaining ground.

The violence is stoked by supporters of colonization – the plan to deport Black Americans to a new American colony in Africa –racist newspapers, the complicity of law enforcement, and business elites fearful of disrupting economic and political ties with the slaveholding South.

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