American Pageant Chapter 16

American Anti-Slavery Society (1833-1870)

Abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison, who advocated the immediate abolition of slavery. By 1838, the organization had more than 250,000 members across 1,350 chapters.

American Colonization Society

Reflecting the focus of early abolitionists on transporting freed blacks back to Africa, the organization established Liberia, a West-African settlement intended as a haven for emancipated slaves.

Amistad (1839)

Spanish slave ship dramatically seized off the coast of Cuba by the enslaved Africans aboard. The ship was driven ashore in Long Island and the slaves were put on trial. Former president John Quincy Adams argued their case before the Supreme Court, securing their eventual release.

black belt

Region of the Deep South with the highest concentration of slaves. The "Black belt" emerged in the nineteenth century as cotton production became more profitable and slavery expanded south and west.

breakers

Slave drivers who employed the lash to brutally "break" the souls of strong-willed slaves.

Gag Resolution

Prohibited debate or action on antislavery appeals. Driven through the House by pro-slavery Southerners, the gag resolution passed every year for eight years, eventually overturned with the help of John Quincy Adams.

Liberia

West-African nation founded in 1822 as a haven for freed blacks, fifteen thousand of whom made their way back across the Atlantic by the 1860s.

Mason-Dixon Line

Originally drawn by surveyors to resolve the boundaries between Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1760s, it came to symbolize the North-South divide over slavery.

Nat Turner's revolution (1831)

Virginia slave revolt that resulted in the deaths of sixty whites and raised fears among white Southerners of further uprisings.

West Africa Squadron (established 1808)

British Royal Navy force formed to enforce the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It intercepted hundreds of slave ships and freed thousands of Africans.

The Liberator

A militantly abolitionist weekly, edited by William Garrison from 1831 to 1865. Despite having a relatively small circulation, it achieved national notoriety due to Garrison's strong arguments.

Free Soil Party

political party that believed in not allowing slavery to expand to new territories gained by the United States

Missouri Compromise

Missouri wanted to join the Union as a slave state, therefore unbalancing the Union so there would be more slave states then free states. The compromise set it up so that Maine joined as a free state and Missouri joined as a slave state. Congress also made a line across the southern border of Missouri saying except for the state of Missouri, all states north of that line must be free states or states without slavery.

William T. Johnson

Mulatto free slave who owned slaves himself; "barber of Natchez"

William Wilberforce

British statesman and reformer; leader of abolitionist movement in English parliament that led to end of English slave trade in 1807

Theodore Dwight Weld

American abolitionist whose pamphlet Slavery As It Is (1839) inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin

William Lloyd Garrison

American editor, writer, and abolitionist who began anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator and helped found New England Anti-slavery Society and the American Anti-slavery Society

David Walker

1785-1830 African American abolitionist born to free mother and slave father so considered free but constantly running from slave traders as a

child; wrote Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary work that called for violent end of white

supremacy

Sojourner Truth

c. 1797-1883 former slave who was freed when New York became free; gifted public speaker who worked for the abolitionist cause

Martin Delany

Black abolitionist who visited West Africa in 1859 to examine sites where African-Americans might relocate

Frederick Douglass

most prominent African American leader of the 19th

century in the U.S.; attempted to escape slavery and finally succeeded in 1838; became agent for the MA Anti-slavery Society and a great orator of the abolition movement; published 3 accounts of his life

started abolitionist newspaper the North Star