Anti-Abolition Backlash to Womens Rights

Anti-Abolition Backlash

• “gag rule” blocks Congress from considering petitions
  • Congress received more than 130,000 petitions from citizens demanding the abolition of slavery in Washington D.C and other federally controlled territories
• anti-abolitionist propaganda in the north and the south
• violence, and it was sometimes even lethal

The Movement Splinters, c. 1839

• disagreements arise over the best strategy
• William Lloyd Garrison: a prominent American Christian, abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer
  • continued moral suasion, but advocated a new constitution
• others: moral suasion led to political action
  • moral suasion: act of persuading a group or person to act in a certain way through rhetorical appeals, persuasion, or implicit and explicit threats
  • The Liberty Party, 1839-48
• others turn to direct resistance
  • aiding runaways
  • especially by the 1850s, some militarized

Women’s Rights

• some abolitionists came to believe racial and gender inequality were connected
• frustrated by sexism within the abolitionist movement
  • 1840s World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused female delegates
• 1848 Seneca Falls Convention
  • Seneca Falls is in New York
  • limited results, but laid the groundwork

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