Viewed as a "Temple of Free Discussion," where anti-slavery, women's rights, and other reform lecturers can be heard, Pennsylvania Hall had been built by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society with over $40,000 in mostly small donations from African Americans, women, and working people, and with donated labor and materials.

Some 3,000 abolitionists are attending a four-day gathering to dedicate the new building and for a series of meetings, including the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman is speaking when the mob breaks down the door of the hall, smashes windows, and throws stones through the resulting holes.

At the end of the meeting, Black and White female abolitionists leave together, arm-in-arm, through a hail of stones, eggs, and jeers. Later, the mob breaks into the building, destroys furniture, and sets fires that quickly spread.

“Destruction of Pennsylvania Hall.” Print by J.T. Bowen. Source: Library of Congress.

As the hall is engulfed by flames, most police and firefighters stand by without intervening. It later emerges that the attack had been organized and planned, and that the mayor of Philadelphia had advance knowledge of it. A few rioters are arrested but none are put on trial. The city’s official report blames the fire and riots on the abolitionists, saying they had upset the citizens by encouraging "race mixing" and inciting violence.

The gutted shell of the hall, which was located in the heart of the city’s anti-slavery Quaker community, stands for several years after the blaze and becomes a pilgrimage site for abolitionists.

The destruction of Pennsylvania Hall is emblematic of a broader problem: abolitionists in many towns find it difficult to secure venues for their meetings because of opposition from some White community leaders and churches, and the threat of arson.

1838 Frederick Douglass escapes, reaches freedom

Anna Murray Douglass circa 1860. Sources: Wikimedia Commons, National Park Service.

An 1847 image of Frederick Douglass. Courtesy of Yale University Library's Visual Resources Collection.

Frederick Douglass, who will become a nationally and internationally famous abolitionist leader for his compelling oratory and incisive anti-slavery writings, escapes from bondage in Maryland.

Dressed in a sailor's uniform made for him by Anna Murray, a free Black woman who will soon become his wife, he carries papers that Anna has borrowed from a retired Black sailor that identifies him as a free man.

Douglass travels 200 miles by train and steamboat to reach Philadelphia, an anti-slavery stronghold, and then by ferry and train to New York City.

Warned that slave catchers are roaming the city streets, he is directed by a “warm-hearted and generous” Black man to the home of the Black abolitionist David Ruggles near the docks.

Ruggles is the secretary and prime organizer of the New York Committee of Vigilance, founded three years earlier to combat an epidemic of kidnapping of Black people by slave catchers and bounty hunters who sell them into Southern slavery. The Committee also provides escapees from slavery in the South with shelter and transportation, as well as legal representation if they are caught.

Ruggles takes Douglass into his home and advises him to change his name to help avoid capture. (Enslaved as Frederick Bailey, he now becomes Frederick Johnson and later Frederick Douglass.)

Ruggles writes a letter to Anna Murray, urging her to come to New York immediately. Eleven days later the couple are married in Ruggles’ parlor. The ceremony is performed by the Rev. James W.C. Pennington, a fellow abolitionist who is also formerly enslaved.

1838 Four thousand Cherokees perish on "Trail of Tears"

Abolitionists advocate in support of the Cherokee Nation which is resisting expulsion from their ancestral lands in the southeastern U.S. as a result of the federal government’s Indian removal policy.

In the early 1800s, the homelands of the sovereign Cherokee Nation cover a vast region in what is now northwest Georgia and adjacent land in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama.

Under the terms of an 1819 treaty, the United States guarantees that Cherokee land will be off-limits to White settlers forever. “Forever” lasts less than 20 years.

The government justifies its plans for forced removal on the basis of the Treaty of New Echota, which it had negotiated three years before with a minority party of Cherokees. But a majority of the Cherokee people consider that treaty fraudulent, and the Cherokee National Council votes to reject it.

Cherokee chief John Ross battled the U.S. government for decades on behalf of his people. Source: The Art Archive.

Led by Principal Chief John Ross, opponents submit a petition containing 15,665 signatures of Cherokee citizens to both houses of Congress, urging the legislature to void the agreement. To their dismay, the Senate ratifies it by a single vote, and President Andrew Jackson – who has declared the removal of eastern tribes a national objective – signs it into law on March 1, 1836.

Spurred by the conviction that the Cherokees’ lands are being taken from them in order to expand slavery, abolitionists in at least six states organize their own petitions against removal, with women in the forefront of the campaign. At a Philadelphia meeting, between 2,000 and 3,000 abolitionists pass resolutions protesting removal and send them to Pennsylvania’s governor, Congressional representatives, and U.S. President Martin Van Buren, who has succeeded Jackson.

The protests prove futile. In 1838, 7,000 U.S. troops arrive in Cherokee Territory where they drag men, women, and children at gunpoint from their homes with only the clothes on their backs. Families are forbidden from returning for blankets, extra clothing, or household goods. Their homes are burned down, cattle and hogs killed, property stolen, and land distributed to White settlers by lottery.

The 16,000 Cherokees are herded into makeshift stockades with little sanitation, scarce or contaminated water, and insufficient food. Beginning in November, they are divided into groups of 1,000 and force-marched 1,200 miles westward over rugged terrain to be resettled on lands in government-designated "Indian Territory" (present-day Oklahoma). They endure heavy rains, snow, and freezing temperatures. Some walk without shoes. Some are shot and killed by the U.S. Army, their bodies abandoned on the roadside. In all, about 4,000 Cherokees – one-quarter of their nation's population – die of exposure, hunger, and disease during the tragic journey, which Cherokees call the “Trail of Tears.”

A man who participates in the forced migration and later becomes a Confederate soldier recalls, “I fought through the Civil War and saw men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

After federal troops begin forcing Cherokees from their homes, abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison says: “We have driven the Cherokees, at the point of a bayonet, into a distant wilderness, from their abodes of civilization … all for the laudable purpose of getting their lands, that the ‘divine institution’ of slavery, may be extended, and perpetuated.”

Abolitionist support for the Cherokees is complicated by the ugly truth that some Cherokees are enslavers. African American historian Tiya Miles told a 2018 symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. that Native Americans had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” Native American “ownership” of enslaved Black people came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to White settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization.’”

By the end of the decade in 1840, the U.S. government had ethnically cleansed tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chicksaw people from their ancestral territories east of the Mississippi River, thereby opening 25 million acres of Indigenous land to White settlement and to slavery.

1838 Abolitionists demand Congress restore free debate on slavery

Celebration in 1908 of the 60th anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other feminist leaders came to their activism through the abolitionist movement.

Source: Seneca Falls Historical Society.

A group of Brookline, Massachusetts women petitions the U.S House of Representatives to rescind the so-called “gag rule” that blocks discussion of all anti-slavery petitions presented to Congress. Theirs is one of over 32,000 requests for such action from across the country.

The notorious gag rule had been passed two years before on the initiative of pro-slavery Southern legislators – with the support of some northern Democracts – in response to growing anti-slavery sentiment in northern states expressed in thousands of petitions to Congress.

Designed to stop the flood of paper and curb debate on slavery, the gag rule requires that all anti-slavery petitions to Congress be tabled without further action or discussion.

It is the latest effort by enslavers and their allies to retain their power in the federal government by attacking the foundations of democracy. In 1835, postmasters in the South had refused to deliver anti-slavery literature sent through the federal mails, and mobs had broken into post offices, seized the packages, and burned them.

In response to the gag rule, the American Anti-Slavery Society launches a campaign to embarrass Congress with a tidal wave of petitions. In its first 18 months, the campaign generates over 300,000 petitions covering the full spectrum of anti-slavery issues, including abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, opposing the U.S. annexation of Texas, ending the interstate slave trade – and repealing the gag rule.

The Brookline women ask for the rule’s revocation because it is based on “an assumption of authority at once dangerous and destructive to the fundamental principles of republican government, to the rights of minorities, to the sovereignty of the People, and to the Union of these United States.”

Their views align with those of former U.S. president and Massachusetts representative John Quincy Adams who champions opposition to the gag rule in the House of Representatives. More radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison – who believe the constitution is fundamentally pro-slavery– consider responding to the gag rule with an all-out assault on slavery on constitutional grounds.

But Adams and other moderates focus their argument more narrowly on the right of all people, free or enslaved, to petition Congress and to have their petition given proper consideration, even if it is subsequently rejected on its merits. In 1837, Adams – who denies being an abolitionist himself – causes a near riot in the House when he submits a petition purportedly from 22 enslaved people.

Adams’ stand receives strategic support from within Congress by a small emerging group of anti-slavery Whigs, including William Slade of Vermont, that is working with abolitionists to fuel a national debate over the “Slave Power” – the idea that Southern enslavers exert a stranglehold on federal policy-making in favor of slavery because they dominate the two major political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs.

That domination is evident as pro-slavery legislators in Congress successfully defend the gag rule, ensuring that it is renewed by resolution and then becomes a permanent standing rule. With the dogged and wily Adams a consistent thorn in their side, they try in vain to strip him of his chairmanship of a Congressional committee and to censure him.

But such efforts have the effect of convincing growing numbers of northerners that the "Slave Power" threatens civil liberties. In part due to Adams' efforts, the gag rule is finally suspended in 1844.

Far from dampening anti-slavery activism, as its proponents had intended, the gag rule has the opposite effect – especially among women. Because women and Black and Indigenous people cannot yet vote, petitions offer them a critical means to make their voices heard on political and social issues of the day.

A study by political scientists Colin Moore and Daniel Carpenter found that, starting after the 1836 gag rule, women collected 50 to 80 percent more signatures on anti-slavery petitions than their male counterparts, walking the same petition with the same request, through the same town, in the same two-year period.

Moreover, these women – many of them teenagers at the time – remained active in politics for decades afterwards; a number of them signed the Seneca Falls Declaration on women’s rights at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848. And women who were social movement leaders after the Civil War were four to five times more likely than men to have come to their activism through petitioning.

1838-1846 Cooperatives produce fair-labor goods, model shared values

Abolitionists create economic enterprises in western Massachusetts that provide economic opportunities for formerly enslaved people, model egalitarian and cooperative values, and produce fair-labor alternatives to goods derived from slave labor.

Ten families – including those of George W. Benson, brother-in-law of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison – band together to form the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI).

They purchase a four-story working silk mill and farmland in what is now the town of Florence and encourage others to join them in their utopian quest for “a better and purer form of society.”

The NAEI’s 120 members, who include Sojourner Truth and other escapees from slavery, vote to abolish wages within their community and instead create a profit-sharing workers’ cooperative for the business which supports them: producing silk as an alternative to cotton fabric made by enslaved workers.

In another abolitionist venture, David Lee Child and his wife, women’s rights advocate and author Lydia Maria Child, farm beets on 100 acres of leased land in Florence and make beet sugar as a substitute for cane sugar from plantations that use enslaved labor.

Abolitionists David Lee and Lydia Maria Child receive recognition for their sugar beet enterprise from the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association that promotes the mechanical arts and trades.

Source: David Ruggles Center for History & Education, Florence, Massachusetts.

1839 New book spurs outrage at "slave breeding"

"American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses," published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Source: Boston Public Library. Read this publication.

A new book published by the American Anti-Slavery Society fuels condemnation by abolitionists and others of the practice of “slave breeding” by Southern enslavers.

American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses is written by the prominent White abolitionists Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimke, and her sister, Sarah Grimke.

The influential book – which sells 100,000 copies in its first year – draws on thousands of Southern newspaper reports, speeches and writings of Southern political leaders and clergy, and firsthand accounts of travelers. Together, they paint a vivid and damning picture of the cruelty and dehumanization of the slavery system – based primarily on enslavers' and their supporters' own words.

Since the early days of chattel slavery in the U.S., Southern enslavers have actively encouraged their enslaved “property” – whom many compared to livestock such as cows, horses and pigs – to reproduce by cajoling, threatening, and coercing them into intimate relationships.

It is highly profitable: under state laws, the children born of these relationships are automatically owned by their mothers’ enslavers and can be sold or exploited for their labor on the plantation.

Weld and the Grimkes attribute the high rate of natural increase of the enslaved population to the “deliberate practice” of slave breeding. They document the violent coercion used to force enslaved women and girls to have “criminal intercourse,” as well as the common talk of “brood mares,” “breeding wenches,” and “the best stock.” And they argue that in the Upper South – primarily Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee – “the only profit their masters derive from [enslaved people] is, repulsive as the idea might justly seem, in breeding them like other livestock for the more southern states.”

This is a reference to the surge in the domestic slave trade following the passage of an 1807 law banning U.S. participation in the international slave trade. The cotton boom in the Deep South has created an almost insatiable demand for more enslaved labor there. Since importing kidnapped Africans is no longer a legal option, the domestic slave trade rapidly expands to fill the gap. And planters in the Upper South, especially in Virginia, have surplus workers to sell after shifting from highly labor-intensive tobacco production to mixed-crop agriculture requiring fewer workers.

In American Slavery As It Is, the authors cite examples of the mass “export” of enslaved people to the Deep South and the enormous profits derived from the trade. According to the Virginia Times, an influential political paper, 40,000 enslaved people in Virginia are sold South in 1836, generating sales worth $24 million ($806 million today.) The Natchez Courier in Mississippi reports that “the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas imported two hundred and fifty thousand slaves from the more northern slave states in the year 1836.”

Some White historians have questioned whether systematic programs of slave breeding ever existed because of a lack of tangible, written economic and/or commercial evidence. But, according to historian Gregory D. Smithers in his book, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence and Memory in African American History, “generation after generation of black Americans have discussed slave breeding as a reality of life in the slave South.”

Smithers writes that the testimony of formerly enslaved people “played an instrumental role in the emergence of a powerful slave-breeding discourse. In the early republic, “eyewitness” accounts and participants’ testimonies emphasized sexual abuse, violence, and family separation through sale…. As former slaves continued to add their voices to anti-slavery protests, non-slaveholding Americans were slowly forced to confront slavery’s physical and emotional impact on African American mothers, husbands, and children in the South.”

Some of the slave-breeding calculations of enslavers are described by historian Aisha Djelid in her paper, “The master whished to reproduce” : The (Forced) Reproduction of Enslaved Life in the Antebellum South, 1808-1865. Some enslavers prefer to avoid purchasing particularly fertile women since they cannot be as productive in the fields when pregnant; they are reduced to being a “half-hand” rather than a full hand.

Other enslavers favor “breeding women” who could produce lots of children as future laborers or for profitable sale on the auction block. Enslavers systematically control the children born from coercive sexual relationships to keep them healthy and protect their value. Many enslavers carry out a feeding regime, including compelling enslaved children to eat from long troughs like livestock so they can control and monitor what they eat. Female enslavers give the children medicine to rid them of worms or other parasites, and force them to run around the plantation to maintain fitness.

A powerful female voice condemning and exposing the physical and emotional suffering endured by enslaved women is that of Harriet Jacobs. Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, she escapes with the aid of the Underground Railroad and becomes a passionate abolitionist.

In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs writes: “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents.

"If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will. She may have had religious principles inculcated by some pious mother or grandmother, or some good mistress; she may have a lover, whose good opinion and peace of mind are dear to her heart, or the profligate men who have power over her may be exceedingly odious to her. But resistance is hopeless.”

Many enslaved women do resist, both by fighting off their sexual attackers – risking severe punishment, even death – and by preventing or ending unwanted pregnancies. As historian Liese M. Perrin describes in her article, "Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South," enslaved women chew cotton roots as a contraceptive – a practice likely brought from their West African homelands. And they induce abortions by taking calomel, a mercury and chlorine-based medication, or turpentine. Lu Lee, formerly enslaved in Texas and a midwife, tells an interviewer in the 1930s that, after turpentine manufacturers became aware of the practice, they changed the recipe to render it useless for causing abortions.

Practices such as chewing cotton roots to avoid pregnancy “were subtle yet effective ways to resist slavery covertly,” writes Perrin. “In avoiding direct confrontation, (enslaved) women had the potential to resist in a way which pierced the very heart of slavery – by denying white slave owners the labor and profits that their children would one day provide.”

In his book, Gregory Smithers comments on the enduring impact and significance of slave breeding. “In the different forms of memory produced by black people since the nineteenth century, slave breeding became critical to historical explanations of the racial and sexual objectification of black bodies; of the distortion of ideals regarding gender roles between black men and black women; of the fragile nature of black family life; and of the need for African Americans to craft narratives that make sense of the brutal ways in which life can be conceived and snuffed out – for instance, through interracial rape and lynchings – in a racist society.”

1839-1841 Revolts cast spotlight on illegal slave trade

Rebellions by kidnapped Africans and enslaved African Americans on board the slave ships La Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841) help to radicalize the abolitionist movement. Activists and anti-slavery politicians find themselves defending the right of the enslaved to rebel.

In the La Amistad case, 56 kidnapped Mende people from Mendiland (in modern-day Sierra Leone) are being transported to Cuba by Spaniards who had purchased them to work as slaves on their plantations.

Some of the captives rebel and take control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. In the melee, three of the Africans are also killed. The rebel leader, Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque), orders the plantation owners to sail the ship back to Africa.

The owners pretend to agree but actually head up the east coast of the U.S. They are counting on the ship being intercepted, bringing an end to the revolt.

Their plan pays off. A U.S. Navy patrol boat seizes the La Amistad off Long Island, New York and the 43 surviving Africans are jailed on charges of murder and piracy. Spain requests their return to Cuba – then a Spanish colony – under international treaty. But after a two-year legal battle, the Mende are freed by the U.S. Supreme Court and return home.

The high-profile La Amistad case becomes a forum for abolitionists to make their case against the national recognition of slavery and to cast a spotlight on the prolific – and by this time illegal – African slave trade.

The Creole revolt, often described as the most successful uprising of enslaved people in U.S. history, draws attention to the expanding domestic slave trade, and, in particular, the “coastwise” trade. Slave traders are moving thousands of enslaved African Americans by sea, river, and overland from plantations and slave markets in the Upper South – North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia – to the Deep South to feed the increasing labor demands of cotton planters there.

An American brig, the Creole is en route from Virginia to New Orleans, a major slave trading center, when a group of the enslaved African Americans on board succeed in seizing and gaining control of the ship. Two people die in the uprising, an enslaved person and a crew member. The rebel leaders demand that the ship head for the British-ruled West Indies where slavery has been abolished.

When the ship arrives in Nassau in the Bahamas, British authorities determine that the 128 enslaved African Americans on board are free and, because they were illegally held captive, had the right under British law to use force to regain their freedom. This includes the 19 men identified as being responsible for the revolt who were initially imprisoned on charges of mutiny.

Southern planters and politicians are outraged and demand the return of the enslaved people aboard the Creole. Abolitionists refute the idea that the “human property” of American enslavers should be protected in foreign ports.

The Creole case attracts national attention in the U.S. and provokes a diplomatic spat with Britain. In 1852, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass publishes a novella called The Heroic Slave, inspired by the Creole revolt.

A bronze memorial to the Amistad captives stands in front of New Haven City Hall in New Haven, Connecticut on the site where they were jailed during their trial. The work of African American sculptor Ed Hamilton, the memorial was dedicated on September 18, 1992.

Prior to its unveiling, a gravestone in a cemetery in Farmington, Connecticut marked “FOONE,” the name of one of the Amistad captives, had been the state’s only landmark honoring what some consider to be the first civil rights case in the U.S.

Thank-you letter from La Amistad captives to former U.S. president John Quincy Adams, who argued their case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The letter is signed on the back by those who could write: Kali, Cinqui, Cici, Kinna Fabana, Banna, Fagino, and Batu.

Source: Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

The Amistad Memorial in New Haven, Connecticut pays tribute to Sengbe Pieh and the other Mende people who escaped slavery in 1839 by commandeering the Spanish ship La Amistad. The three-sided relief sculpture tells the triumphant story of Sengbe Pieh’s journey.

On one side, he is shown in his West African homeland, in modern-day Sierra Leone, prior to his capture. The second relief depicts one of the courtroom trials in the United States. The final scene shows Sengbe Pieh free again, embarking on a ship for his return to Africa.

Created by artist Ed Hamilton, the bronze sculpture stands in front of New Haven City Hall on the site of the jail where Mende captives were once held.

Source: Connecticut Freedom Trail.

In their shipboard revolts, the Creole and Amistad rebels are far from alone. Historians estimate that some form of uprising occurred in a tenth of all slaving voyages. If correct, according to historian Sean M. Kelley, author of American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, that would put the total number of rebellions on American slave ships at nearly 200.

1839 Women's role is key issue in anti-slavery society split

White abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison championed women's leadership in anti-slavery efforts. Painting by Constance Nowell. Source: Courtesy of the Garrison family.

The American Anti-Slavery Society splits over basic differences of approach and strategy.

The more radical faction led by William Lloyd Garrison denounces the U.S. Constitution as pro-slavery; eschews electoral politics as a result, instead favoring continued agitation to strengthen public opposition to slavery; and insists that women share leadership and power in the organization.

The involvement of women in the AASS becomes a key issue. A minority of anti-feminist male delegates leaves the Society and forms the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that does not admit women. It advocates political action in the electoral arena, leading directly to the birth of the Liberty Party in 1840.

Because of this cleavage in national leadership, most AASS activity in the 1840s and 1850s is carried out by state and local societies. The AASS is formally dissolved in 1870, after the Civil War and Emancipation.

1839-1858 Gift sales raise thousands for anti-slavery cause

The Liberty Bell is an annual abolitionist gift book sold or given to participants in the National Anti-Slavery Bazaar organized by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFAAS) in Boston, Massachusetts.

Edited and published by the White abolitionist, Maria Weston Chapman, and named after the symbol of the American Revolution, The Liberty Bell appears nearly every year from 1839 to 1858.

In addition to income from the book, BFAAS fairs raise thousands of dollars annually for the anti-slavery cause by selling ladies' aprons, cloaks, cuffs, bags, purses, knitted quilts, and other items.

1840 Liberty Party aims to advance abolition through ballot box

First Liberty Party ticket in Massachusetts, 1840. Source: Oldpoliticals.com.

The Liberty Party is formed by a breakaway faction of the the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) to advance the cause of abolition through electoral politics.

By contrast, William Lloyd Garrison and his followers in the AASS – “Garrisonians” – believe the constitution is fundamentally pro-slavery; engaging in elections is thus tantamount to legitimizing slavery and its evils.

The Liberty Party platform, that includes land reform, progressive taxation, a 10-hour work day, and labor rights, attracts substantial African American and working-class support. Although the party is racially inclusive, it does not formally support women’s rights, including their right to vote.

The party wins just 2.3% of the popular vote in the 1844 presidential election. But it and the Free Soil Party, a coalition of anti-slavery activists and politicians that secures 10% of the vote four years later, help accelerate a major realignment in U.S. politics.

Both the two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, have systematically downplayed slavery, opting instead to spar over seemingly unrelated issues including taxation, trade policy, banking, and infrastructure spending. As slavery becomes increasingly central to national debate, northern anti-slavery Whigs grow disenchanted with their party’s unwillingness to take a stand against it. Instead, the party tries to bridge the widening rift within its ranks by crafting a measured pro-slavery platform.

As a result, many northern Whigs quit the party and, together with disgruntled northern Democrats and the moderate Free Soil Party – which is anti-slavery but will tolerate it in states where it already exists – form a new coalition that becomes the Republican Party.

In less than two years, the Republican Party emerges as the most popular political party in the North, electing the Speaker of the House in February of 1856 and winning 11 of 16 free states in the presidential contest later that year.

1841 First history of Black people in U.S. published

Abolitionist, minister, and author James W.C. Pennington publishes his Textbook of The Origin and History of the Colored People Etc. Etc., the earliest known history of Black people in the United States.

Born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1807, James Pennington trains as a carpenter and blacksmith. At the age of 19, he escapes, leaving behind his parents and 11 siblings.

He finally finds refuge in Pennsylvania with a White Quaker couple, William and Phoebe Wright, who, like most Pennsylvania Quakers at the time, are anti-slavery. They teach the young man to read and write, and pay him for his work. He adopts the surname “Pennington” after a prominent English Quaker called Isaac Pennington.

In 1828, with the help of the Wrights’ connections, Pennington moves to New York City where he finds work as a coachman for a wealthy lawyer. He continues his education, paying tutors out of his earnings and learning Latin and Greek.

Later, he teaches school in western Long Island, and studies at Yale Divinity School in Connecticut. He is the first Black student at Yale University, and authorities refuse to enroll him because of his skin color. He is permitted to audit classes at Yale Divinity School, but he does not receive a degree or certificate.

James W.C. Pennington by John Robert Dicksee, printed by Day & Son, published by Charles Gilpin. Lithograph, circa 1840-1850.

Source: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Pennington is ordained as a Congregational minister. One of the highlights of his duties is conducting marriages, particularly of escapees from slavery like himself. Among those who pledge their vows before him are a fugitive named Frederick Douglass and his betrothed, Anna Murray. The couple have no money to pay for the nuptials, and Pennington graciously waives the cost.

James Pennington becomes increasingly involved in the abolitionist movement. In the late 1830s, he is active in the campaign to free and support the enslaved Mende people from West Africa who are charged with murder and piracy after rebelling on the slave ship, La Amistad. Following a two-year legal battle, the 43 accused Africans are freed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Pennington founds the Union Missionary Society (later renamed the American Missionary Society) that plays an instrumental role in funding the Amistad freedom seekers’ travel back to their homeland in present-day Sierra Leone.

In 1840, Pennington relocates to Hartford, Connecticut to take up a new position as a minister. In addition to his pastoral duties, Pennington teaches in a local school for Black children, and advocates passionately for improving public education and building up the educational and cultural life of African Americans. This commitment is reflected in his writings for The Colored American, a leading African American newspaper published in New York.

With the paper’s decline, Pennington ventures into publishing himself to help maintain an African-American voice in the struggle against slavery and racism. For a brief period, he produces two anti-slavery newspapers, The Northern Star and Clarksonian. In 1841, he publishes his Textbook of The Origin and History of the Colored People Etc. Etc. Among other things, his book rebuts arguments about African American inferiority, including those advanced by founding father and U.S. president Thomas Jefferson.

While in Hartford, Pennington continues to be active in aiding those who have fled slavery in the South. With other activists, he helps fugitives reach the safer haven of Canada; in one instance, he shelters a family of seven who arrive at his door.

Pennington travels widely in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, speaking and raising money for the abolitionist cause. His memoir, The Fugitive Blacksmith, is first published in 1849 in London. While in Europe, Pennington is awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the first African American to be so honored.

As a fugitive from slavery, Pennington lives for decades in constant danger of being returned to bondage. That danger increases after passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which makes it easier for enslavers to reclaim their “property” and severely penalizes anyone aiding enslaved people who are on the run. Accordingly, abolitionist friends and supporters in England raise the necessary money to purchase Pennington from the estate of his now deceased enslaver, thus securing his legal freedom.

After the end of the Civil War, Pennington moves to Florida where he conducts missionary work until his death in 1870.

According to historian Stacey Close in an essay for Connecticuthistory.org, James Pennington is “one of the giants of African American leadership” but he never receives the acclaim afforded other Black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany.

Close writes: “Like Douglass, Pennington spoke with an authentic and powerful voice against slavery and for the dignity of humanity. Like Douglass, he respected the power of education, self-empowerment, and alliances with white abolitionists. Guided by his religious convictions, he gave a national voice to major local issues of the day and a local voice to the greatest national issues of the day.”

In 2022, Yale University honors James Pennington by announcing a new scholarship program in his name. It provides financial support to high school students from New Haven, Connecticut – where the university is based – to attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

1842 "Under ground Rail-road" promoter transports hundreds to freedom

Thomas Smallwood wrote about his experiences in his 1851 autobiography. Source: The American Antiquarian Society. Read the book online.

Black abolitionist Thomas Smallwood, who helps several hundred enslaved people reach freedom in the northern states and Canada, makes literary history by introducing the term “Under ground Rail-road.”

By day, Smallwood runs a shoemaking business from the little house he shares with his wife and four children a short walk from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. By night, he organizes daring and dangerous escapes from slavery, transporting freedom-seekers north by wagon 15 or 20 at a time from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties. For a number of these sorties, he works in partnership with the White Massachusetts-born abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey.

The formerly enslaved Smallwood is also a regular contributor to The Tocsin of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper published in Albany, New York and edited for a time by Torrey. In a story he writes for the paper published on August 10, 1842, Smallwood refers to the “Under ground Rail-road.”

He recounts an exchange with a Washington, D.C. enslaver whose “walking property walked off.” With characteristic satirical wit, Smallwood tells the man that “it was your cruelty to him that made him disappear by that same ‘under ground rail-road’ or ‘steam balloon,’ about which one of your city constables was swearing so bitterly a few weeks ago, when complaining that the ‘d----d rascals’ got off so, and that no trace of them could be found!”

The outburst he cites is from a notorious Baltimore policeman named John Zell, who often collects rewards paid by enslavers for returning their escaped human “property.” “There were, of course, no actual underground railroads at that time,” writes former New York Times journalist Scott Shane in an article for the newspaper. “Mr. Zell was referring sarcastically to a nonexistent, futuristic means of travel, just as we might quip that a person who suddenly vanished must have been teleported to another city or kidnapped by aliens.”

According to Shane, Smallwood “began riffing in his [newspaper] columns on this mythical transport system supposedly speeding people out of the clutches of the slaveholders, wielding the phrase with savage mockery. He advised enslavers bewildered by the disappearance of their enslaved workers to apply at the ‘office of the underground railroad’ in Washington for information on their lost property. He appointed himself ‘general agent of all the branches of the National Underground Railroad.’”

Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland, a book about Thomas Smallwood, says that he is “likely the most fascinating and important African American activist and writer you’ve never heard of.” In his research for the book, Shane unearthed a trove of the unheralded abolitionist’s newspaper dispatches – including his “lost masterpiece of satire” – in a Boston Public Library warehouse in Boston, Massachusetts.

Those dispatches also provide real-time accounts of escapes. During a two-year period, Smallwood, together with Torrey and other activists, uses rented horses and wagons to ferry an estimated 400 enslaved people to freedom in the northern free states and Canada. To cause as much public and political disruption as possible, they specifically seek out and help liberate people “owned” by Southern members of Congress and important political figures. They are also often approached by – and assist – people desperate to avoid the dire fate of being sold south, away from home and family.

At the time, Washington, D.C. is a center of the nation’s interstate slave trade, with more than 1,000 enslaved people transported every year to New Orleans, then the third largest U.S. city, for sale to Southern plantation owners and others. In total, over one million enslaved people are forcibly transported from the Upper South to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South in the decades after Congress bans U.S. participation in the African slave trade in 1808.

Shane comments that the role of African Americans in organizing escapes “was at times overshadowed by attention paid to white allies. My research indicates that Mr. Torrey has long been given credit for escapes Mr. Smallwood organized without him.”

The exploits of Smallwood and Torrey – which are primarily funded by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy White New York philanthropist, abolitionist, and politician who also financially supports the radical abolitionist John Brown – finally attract the attention of law enforcement. With the police closing in, Smallwood moves to Toronto, Canada with his family for their safety. He starts a saw-manufacturing business there and becomes a prominent member of the city's Black leadership. His autobiography is published in 1851 in Canada, where he remains until his death in 1883.

Torrey, a Congregational minister, continues the work of helping freedom-seekers. In June 1844, he is finally arrested, reportedly armed with two pistols. Local Torrey Committees are established in Lowell and other Massachusetts communities to raise money for his legal defense. But their efforts are in vain: Torrey is convicted in Maryland for “stealing” enslaved people and sentenced to six years in prison.

Appeals for clemency addressed to Maryland Governor Francis Thomas are denied. Prison conditions cause a return of Torrey’s tuberculosis – a disease that had killed his parents and baby sister – and he dies in the state penitentiary on May 9, 1846 at the age of 33.

Charles Turner Torrey is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1842 Campaign prevents escapee's return to bondage

Abolitionist mobilization and popular pressure stops Massachusetts officials from sending George Latimer, who had escaped enslavement in the South and found refuge in Boston, back to bondage in Virginia.

His is one of several high-profile cases prosecuted under the federal Fugitive Slave Act that helps unite and increase support for the abolitionist movement.

The controversial measure requires that all law enforcement officials arrest people they suspect of being escapees from slavery or be fined. A strengthened version of the 1793 law, passed in 1850, stipulates that anyone who aids an escapee by providing food and shelter can be jailed for six months and fined $1,000 (more than $30,000 today).

On the day he arrives in Boston with his pregnant wife, Rebecca, George Latimer is recognized by a former employee of the Virginia enslaver from whom he had fled. He is arrested.

Abolitionists launch a massive protest campaign to free Latimer and prevent his return south to bondage. The campaign includes the first fugitive slave abolitionist newspaper, the Latimer Journal and North Star, to give voice to “the moral feeling and strength of the community.” Twenty thousand copies of the journal are circulated throughout Massachusetts.

Enslavers placed these advertisements in the October 15, 1842 issue of the Norfolk Beacon newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia in an effort to recover escapees George and Rebecca Latimer. Source: Norfolk Public Library.

Latimer himself becomes involved in a petition to the Massachusetts General Court that garners 64,000 signatures. It calls for a state law that will forbid state officials and jails from being used to return escapees from slavery. This leads to the almost unanimous passage of a new “personal liberty” law in line with abolitionist demands. Another petition with some 51,000 signatures is sent to John Quincy Adams – then a Massachusetts Congressman and later U.S. president – asking for the repeal of the federal Fugitive Slave Law.

Abolitionists and their allies succeed at the state level: Latimer is released to the custody of his former enslaver who agrees to sell him. With the support of prominent Black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond, Black Bostonians raise the necessary $400 to purchase Latimer’s freedom. Latimer settles in Lynn, Massachusetts and remains involved in abolitionist work.

His case prompts a number of Black abolitionists, including William Cooper Nell and Henry Weeden, to launch the New England Freedom Association as a collective effort to provide material aid and support to other enslaved African Americans who flee bondage and travel north to find freedom in Boston and beyond.

1842 Sarah Parker Remond: Activist for human rights, women's suffrage

African American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894). Source: public domain.

Abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond delivers her first lecture against slavery at the age of 16 in Groton, Massachusetts. It is the start of her 25-year career as an international activist for human rights and women's suffrage.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Remond is one of between eight and 11 children of Nancy and John Remond. Her mother is the daughter of Cornelius Lenox, a Revolutionary War veteran who had fought in the Continental Army.

Her father is a free person of color who immigrated to Massachusetts from the Dutch colony of Curaçao as a 10-year old child in 1798. The couple have built a successful catering, provisioning, and hairdressing business, and become well-established business people and activists.

Rejected by White Salem schools because of her race, Sarah Remond largely educates herself. She attends lectures and concerts, and reads widely, taking advantage of the many books, newspapers, and pamphlets in her home.

Salem is a center of abolitionist activism, and the whole family is committed to the cause. Sarah’s mother is one of the founders of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, her father is a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and her brother, Charles Lenox Remond, is the first Black lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).

The Remond house is a haven and a regular meeting place for Black and White abolitionists; it also shelters escapees from slavery heading north to freedom in Canada.

In 1853, Sarah Parker Remond rises to prominence in abolitionist circles when she refuses to sit in a segregated section of a Boston theater for an opera performance. After being forced to leave the theater, and pushed down a flight of stairs, she sues for damages, wins her case, and is awarded $500. The theater, which admits she has been wronged, is ordered by the court to integrate all seating.

After a two-year stint as a lecturer for the AASS, during which she speaks at abolitionist gatherings in five states, Remond travels to Britain to rally support for the anti-slavery cause – as her brother, Charles, had done 10 years before. Between 1859 and 1861, she gives more than 45 lectures to overflowing audiences in England, Ireland, and Scotland – at times appearing with abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass – and raises substantial funds for the movement. Expecting to encounter racial prejudice in Britain, she writes to an American friend: "I have been received here as a sister by white women for the first time in my life. I have received a sympathy I never was offered before.”

When the Civil War begins in 1861, Remond works to build support in Britain for the Union cause and for the coastal blockade of the Confederate states by Union forces. In her lectures, she especially focuses on the reliance of British textile factories on U.S. cotton grown in the South that is the primary source of income for the Confederacy.

After the war, Sarah Parker Remond solicits funds and clothing for newly emancipated African Americans. Active in feminist as well as abolitionist causes in Britain, she is thought to be the only Black woman among the 1,500 signatories to a women-only 1866 petition demanding the right of British women to vote. Returning briefly to the U.S., she joins with the American Equal Rights Association in working for equal suffrage for women and African Americans.

Remond studies medicine at University College London, graduating as a nurse. In 1867, she moves to Italy where she enters medical school and completes her studies to become a doctor. She practices medicine for 20 years, first in Florence and then in Rome. She never returns to the U.S., and two of her sisters, Caroline and Maritcha, join her in Italy and also become permanent residents there. In 1877, Remond marries Lazzaro Pintor, an Italian office worker. She dies in 1894 at the age of 68, and is buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

In 1999, Massachusetts honors Remond and five other outstanding female residents of the state with the installation in the Massachusetts State House of six tall marble panels with a bronze bust in each.

1843 Abolitionists campaign against segregation, for interracial marriage

Massachusetts abolitionists lead the way in forcing an end to racial segregation on trains and legalizing interracial marriage. Both reforms are the result of protests, petition campaigns, and legal advocacy to advance equal rights for African Americans.

Black abolitionists in northern states make the desegregation of public facilities, including public transportation, schools, and theaters, integral to abolition. The most successful effort is in Massachusetts.

In a forerunner of the civil rights “sit-ins” of the 1960s, Black and White abolitionists – including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, William Cooper Nell, Robert Morris, Charles Remond, and Wendell Phillips – sit together in segregated railroad cars and are often violently removed. They are targeted precisely because they are “damned abolitionists” and traveling in interracial groups.

Market Station in Lynn, Massachusetts is depicted on this Boston and Maine Railroad Company postcard. On September 28, 1841, abolitionist Frederick Douglass is thrown off an Eastern Railroad train for refusing to sit in the “colored coach.” Source: Wikipedia.

After failing to win in the courts, abolitionists launch petitions and hold mass meetings condemning the company in question, Eastern Railroad. Amid a wave of public sympathy and pressure, most Massachusetts railroad companies have voluntarily desegregated their cars by the time the legislature enacts a bill in 1843 banning segregation on the railroads.

The ban on interracial marriage is overturned by the legislature after a five-year fight by African American activists, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and their allies. Before the ban is repealed, interracial couples in Massachusetts find their unions declared null and void and their children classed as illegitimate; any official who solemnizes an interracial union can be fined. African American campaigners and some White abolitionists view the ban as a race law, created to degrade the social and political status of Black residents and support White supremacy.

More than 9,000 people in 90 communities in Massachusetts petition the state legislature to repeal the law. The campaign gains greater traction and support after activists begin framing the interracial marriage ban as “morally unjustifiable” rather than an issue of equal rights.

The repeal is personal for existing interracial couples like Sarah Belden, a White woman, and her romantic partner, Perry Young, who is Black. Six months after the new law is passed, they are married in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Elder Beenan, an African American minister. The couple work, buy land, establish legal residence in the town, and raise four children.

The benefits of their legal marriage come into stark relief in 1859 when Perry Young’s poor health creates an economic crisis for the family, and they seek – and receive – food and other support from the Overseers of the Poor, the local government aid board. Earlier interracial couples in a similar predicament had their claims denied because the marriage ban voided their unions.

Historian Amber D. Moulton, author of The Fight for Interracial Marriage in Antebellum Massachusetts, says that interracialism was profoundly unpopular in the state at the time, but the marriage reform effort succeeded “because … it represented the concerns not only of interracial couples or even African Americans demanding full citizenship, but free Northerners from across the political spectrum defining their families and legal structures in opposition to a powerful slaveholding South.”

1844 Historian derides notions of White superiority

Challenging racist beliefs: Robert Benjamin Lewis's "Light and Truth." Source: Library of Congress. Read the book here.

Light and Truth, believed to be the first history of African and Native American people by an African American, is published in Boston.

The author, Maine-born Robert Benjamin Lewis (1802-1858), is an ethnologist, inventor, and entrepreneur of African and Native American descent. His book elevates Black people in history, challenging racist beliefs of inferiority and referencing Egyptian and other African civilizations.

Lewis’s publishers are four local African American businessmen – clothier Thomas Dalton, shoemaker James Scott, goods dealer Andress V. Lewis (no relation), and shoemaker Charles H. Roberts – who call themselves The Committee of Colored Gentlemen.

An earlier and shorter version of Light and Truth had been published in 1836 in Portland, Maine. At the end of that edition, Lewis notes that he has more to say on the subject and contemplates publishing “another work which will contain much interesting matter, some of which has of necessity been excluded from these pages." Instead, he incorporates new material in the existing book, and expands it from its original 176 pages to 400.

The printer of the new volume is Charles Roberts' half-brother, Benjamin F. Roberts, a prominent civil rights campaigner in Boston. In 1850, Benjamin Roberts sues the city for the right of his daughter, Sarah, to attend her neighborhood school, rather than the Abiel Smith School (designated for African American children) located several miles from her home. Although Roberts v. Boston is decided in favor of the city, public pressure compels the state legislature to outlaw segregated schools five years later.

In Light and Truth, Lewis denounces notions of White superiority. During his life, the American school of ethnology holds that non-White races are inherently inferior and argues that God created the “inferior races” at a different point in time than Caucasians. An ethnologist himself, Lewis exposes the illegitimacy of these views, and asserts that all of humankind has a common origin. He also emphasizes a shared cultural and reproductive history between Africans and Native Americans.

In an article in American Literary History, African American literature specialist John Ernest writes that Lewis's work is "a study in the theological grounds of black nationalism, and an early example of black liberation theology." Lewis saw it as his mission to search "diligently … in the quest of light, and truth, in ancient, sacred and profane history, translated by English historians … truths that have long been concealed from the sons of Ethiopia." According to Ernest, in his effort to dispel the "darkness" of ignorance through "the increase of light and knowledge," Lewis is attempting to record "the history of the community defined by white oppression without the defining terms of the white oppressors.”

Light and Truth goes through two more printings in the 19th century. In 1848, Benjamin F. Roberts and the Committee of Colored Gentlemen reissue the book, and in 1851, another edition – essentially a reprint of the 1844 text – is published by the Reverend Moses M. Taylor of Boston with a preface written by him.

In 1858, Lewis signs on as a ship's cook and steward on a Maine merchant ship bound for the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Sadly, he falls fatally ill on arrival. He is buried in Haiti.

1844 Sea captain branded for freedom voyage venture

Jonathan Walker’s branded hand. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

Jonathan Walker, a White working-class sea captain from Harwich, Massachusetts, is jailed in Florida for attempting to free seven enslaved people. His hand is branded “SS” for “slave stealer” but abolitionists rename him “slave savior.”

A carpenter and shipwright, Walker is working in Pensacola, Florida and preparing to raise a wrecked ship to salvage the valuable copper on board, when he meets seven enslaved men: brothers Charles, Phillip, and Leonard Johnson; Moses Johnson; Harry and Silas Scott; and Anthony Catlett.

The men "were disposed to leave the place.” He tells them that if they choose to go to the Bahama Islands – a British colony where slavery is now outlawed – in his boat, he will “share the risk with them."

It is an ill-fated voyage. As they sail east along the Florida coast, search parties are organized to find them and enslavers offer a reward of $1,700 ($52,601 today) for their capture. Walker falls sick from severe sunstroke, and his passengers are unable to navigate his boat.

The eight men are eventually rescued by two wrecking sloops, and taken to Key West on the Florida Keys. Walker is subsequently returned to Pensacola and jailed for several months before being convicted by a federal jury on four counts of “slave-stealing.” It is not clear what happens to his companions.

Walker is fined $150 plus court costs and sentenced to have his hand branded "SS" for "slave stealer." Because it is the first such sentence imposed locally (at least on a White person), authorities do not possess a branding iron with which to carry it out. The first blacksmith they approach to fashion one declines on the grounds that brands should only be used for animals. A man who finally agrees to do the job refuses to build his own furnace, and officials order a fire built within the courthouse to heat the branding iron. Before his sentence is carried out, Walker is placed in a pillory – a punishment device made of a wooden or metal framework erected on a post, with holes for securing the head and hands – and pelted with rotten eggs.

Walker later recounts his experience of being branded. The sheriff “proceded (sic) to tie my hand to a part of the railing in front. I remarked that there was no need of tying it, for I would hold still. He observed that it was best to make sure, and tied it firmly to the post, in fair view; he then took from the fire the branding-iron, of a slight red heat, and applied it to the ball of my hand, and pressed it on firmly, for fifteen or twenty seconds. It made a spattering noise, like a handful of salt in the fire, as the skin seared and gave way to the hot iron. The pain was severe while the iron was on, and for some time afterwards.”

After the branding, officials return Walker to jail and he is indicted and found guilty of other charges of trespass and damages. A group of abolitionists pay his fines and costs of $596.05 ($18,441 today), and Walker is released.

He moves back to his hometown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts to rejoin his wife, Jane Gage, and their nine children. The family had previously lived together in Pensacola but had returned to Massachusetts because Walker did not want to bring up their children “among the poisonous influences of slavery.” In his view, slavery “ranked with the highest wrongs and crimes that were ever invented by the enemy of man….”

Hailed as a hero by Frederick Douglass and other anti-slavery activists, Walker makes his living for the next seven years on the abolitionist lecture circuit, speaking at events across New England and in the northern and western states. He displays his wounded hand to illustrate the cruel effects of slavery upon both “the body and soul of man.” He and his family later relocate to Muskegon, Michigan, and farm there until Walker’s death in 1878. A monument to his memory, featuring his branded hand, is erected in the Evergreen Cemetery in Muskegon, and becomes a national shrine for those working for racial justice.

Jonathan Walker is the subject of a poem entitled “The Branded Hand” by the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

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