Abolition - Michelle

The abolition movement was the fight against slavery. Slavery was a terrible thing and slaves were treated horribly. Something defiantly needed to change and quick. This was defiantly a struggle but it paid off in the end. This all started in the 1830’s, when people started asking how can the home of the FREE still allow slavery? In 1835 a poster appeared on walls throughout Washington DC, half of the poster showed a picture of our founding fathers reading the declaration of Independence and it said the Land of the Free.
Some Americans had opposed slavery even back during the revolutionary war times. Quakers in 1776 stopped owning slaves and in 1792 every state down to Virginia had anti-slavery societies. Even though there was no slavery in the North they still supported the Southern Slavery. There were blacks and whites that wanted slavery to end, but not everyone agreed on how to end it. Radicals encouraged slaves to run away, others wanted to give farmers time to learn how to do things without end, and others wanted a peaceful way to end slavery immediately. When Fredrick Douglass spoke (an escaped slave) spoke out to a group of people, they cried when they heard how children were treated and laughed when he told them that ministers said that they should love slavery. Douglass soon became a leader in this movement and he started a newspaper called the North Star, saying that “Right is of no sex- Truth is of no color”.
Many women were inspired by the religious movements and became involved in the fight against slavery. When a young woman by the last name of Grimke spoke against slavery, a group of anti-abolitionists threw stones at her, but she continued to speak so they burned the building. The Grimke sisters lead the way for women to speak in public. Some abolitionists were very religious slaves and spoke at all sorts of important meetings. Abolitionists were a minority even in the North but what they spoke and how they acted despite everything that happened to them helped change the attitudes of some Northerners.
This movement was defiantly successful! According to the Census Bureau in 2000 there are 24,903,412 African Americans in America and they are all free.
It also helped pave the way for the next great reform movement, women’s rights.