Abolitionism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"The most influential abolitionist tract was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the best-selling novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (which made the escape narrative part of everyday news), Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery. Her depiction of the evil slave owner Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee who kills the Christ-like Uncle Tom, outraged the North, helped sway British public opinion against the South, and inflamed Southern slave owners who tried to refute it by showing some slave owners were humanitarian. It inspired numerous anti-Tom novels, several written and published by women."--Sholem Stein "During the Age of Enlightenment, many philosophers wrote pamphlets against slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Denis Diderot in the Encyclopédie. In 1788, Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for the abolition of slavery. After the Revolution, on 4 April 1792, France granted free people of colour full citizenship."--Sholem Stein |
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Abolitionism was a political movement that sought to end the practice of slavery and the worldwide slave trade. It began during the period of the Enlightenment and grew to large proportions in several nations during the 1800s, eventually succeeding in some its goals although child and adult slavery and forced labor continue to be widespread to this day.
See also
- Abolition of slavery timeline
- Abolitionism and Queen Charlotte's paintings
- American Anti-Slavery Society
- American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a spin-off of the American Anti-Slavery Society
- Anti-Slavery International
- Anti-Slavery Society
- Come-outer
- Compensated emancipation
- List of opponents of slavery
- James Redpath
- Liberia
- Slavery in the British Virgin Islands
- The Slave in European Art
- The Slave Power
- Underground Railroad