Cultural Politics

                   ABOLITION OF SLAVERY MOVEMENTS

Slavery in the US lasted from 1619 to 1864 when the Emancipation Proclamation was (reluctantly) signed by Abraham Lincoln. Over those many decades a variety of anti-slavery and abolitionist movements arose on colonial American and U.S. soil. While white allies were often vital to the process, it was ultimately black men and women themselves who led the cause of abolition. Former slaves like Fredric Douglass and Harriet Tubman both wrote eloquently about and took direct action against the horrors of chattel slavery.

In terms of culture and resistance, the great freedom songs created by slaves not only fueled the movement, but inspired generations of black Americans, especially during the Civil Rights era of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. While often encouraged as a pacifying tactic by slave owners, Christianity also became a source of cultural resistance for many slaves as allegories like the Babylonian Captivity were read as tales of future emancipation. Posters and broadsides played a large role in the movement, as did literature in the form of slave autobiographies, poetry and novels.

This site offers links to some of the best sites on the web treating the history of slavery and abolition, and also offers a bibliography for further study.

Featured Sites

• “American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology.” A very rich resource from University of Virginia. Includes not only many of the best known slave narratives but excerpts from Works Progress Administration slave oral histories, including some sound recordings of ex-slaves telling their stories.
• “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38.” Extraordinary site from the American Memory Project, based on the famous taped interviews with former slaves.
• “From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909.” Rich collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress American Memory Project. The 397 titles include first-person accounts of slavery, tracts from anti-slavery organizations, legislative and presidential campaign materials, investigative reports, sermons, commencement addresses, organizational proceedings, and previously published materials from newspapers and magazines. Among the noted authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Alexander Crummell, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.

Some Key Sites

• Abolition of the Slave Trade.  Rich Schomberg Center site with essays, original texts, visual art images, and bibliographies.
• Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements and Sectional Conflict. Library of Congress site.
• American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology. See above under “featured sites.”
• Brief biography of Frederick Douglass and excerpts from several speeches. A commercial site selling recordings of readings of Douglass's speeches.
• Confessions of Nat Turner. Turner (1800-31) led the most (in)famous slave revolt in the US.
• The Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln (1863).
• Excerpts from Slave Narratives. Another useful site, from University of Houston, that includes some different texts from those at the Virginia.
• Fourth of July Address. Frederick Douglass.
• Frederick Douglass A biography of the life of Frederick Douglass. by Sandra Thomas.
• “From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909.” Rich collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress American Memory Project. See above under “featured sites.”
• Fugitive Slave Laws, 1793 and 1850. Key legal documents in history of slavery.
• Harriet Tubman homepage. One of the key figures in the “Underground Railroad” for escaping slaves.
• Last Meeting of Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Excerpted from Douglass Life and Times.
• My Escape from Slavery. Frederick Douglass (The Century Illustrated Magazine 23, n.s. 1 (Nov. 1881): 125-131.
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
• Our Nig. Harriet Wilson.
• A Plea for Free Speech in Boston. Frederick Douglass (Dec. 4, 1860).
• Selection from Sociology of the South (1854). George Fitzhugh, a leading opponent of abolition.
• Slavery, Abolition and Emancipaton. Curated by Brycchan Carey
• Slavery in Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau (1854).
• Stand from Under. Lydia Maria Child (originally published in The Liberator).
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database A database of over 35000 slave trade expeditions. Providing information about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes.
• Brief history of abolitionist Underground Railroad as it ran through Rochester, NY.
• Museum of Slavery in the Atlantic. Links to historical documents and other resources.
• From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. Useful overview of slavery and abolition.

Historical Studies

• Abbott, Richard H. Cotton & Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.
• Andrew, William, ed. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Aptheker, Herbert. Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
• __. American Negro Slave Revolts. New Edition. New York: International Publishers, 1974.
• —. Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years. New York:  Greenwood, 1992.
• —, ed. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. New York: Citadel, 1951.
• Ashworth, John. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1 of 2; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995.
• Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative Life and Adventures of Charles Ball. 1837
• Basker, James G., ed. American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation. Library of America, 2012.
• Basker, James G., gen. ed. Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings, 1760-1820. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005.
• Bay Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind, African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford, 2000.
• Bell, Caryn Cosse. Revolution, Resistance, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1996.
• Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism As a Problem of Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
• Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Random House, 1974.
• Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Steven Miller, Joseph Reidy, and Leslie Rowland, eds. Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War. New York: Free Press, 1992.
• Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave.  New York: Author, 1849.
• Birnbaum, Jonathan, and Clarence Taylor. Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
• Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. New York: Verso, 1996.
• Blackett, R. J. M. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
• Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972.
• Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping the Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
• Blue, Frederick J. No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
• Buckmaster, Henrietta. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement.Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
• Cheesebrough, David. Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
• Cumbler, John T. From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
• Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. 1984.
• — The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975.
• —. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966.
• Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, 1845.
• Foner, Eric. Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
• —. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1995. 
• —. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1980. 
• Foner, Philip S. and Herbert Shapiro. Northern Labor and Antislavery: A Documentary History. Westport: Greenwood, 1994.
• Foner, Philip S., and Josephine F. Pacheco. Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner—Champions of Antebellum Black Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.
• Fredrickson, George M.. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
• __. The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988.
• Gellman, David N. Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
• Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979.
• __. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
• Gilroy Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Goodheart, Lawrence B., and Hugh Hawkins, eds. The Abolitionists: Means, Ends, and Motivations. 3d ed. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995.
• Gougeon, Len, & Joel Myerson, eds. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson’s Antislavery Writings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
• Hammond, John Craig. Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
• Hammond, John Craig, & Matthew Mason, eds. Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
• Hansen, Debra Gold. Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
• Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
• Harrold, Stanley C. American Abolitionists. New York: Longman Press, 2001.
• —. The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
• Jacobs, Harriet Ann.  Edited by Lydia Maria Child. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861.
• Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
• —. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Levine, Robert. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
• Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.
• Nash, Gary B., & Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Newman, Richard, Patrick Rael and Phillip Lapsansky, eds.. Pamphlets of Protest, An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790-1860. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York,
• Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, 1853.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
• Perry, Lewis. Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.
• Rael, Patrick. Colored Americans: Forging Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
• Rappleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
• Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
• Sernett, Milton C. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
• Sinha, Manisha. The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Strong, Douglas M. Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999.
• Sundquist, Eric, ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time. Edited by Olive Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Wilson, Carol. Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1994.
• Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, 1859.
• Yee, Shirley, J. Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in American Activism, 1828-1860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Additional Bibliographies

A Bibliography of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation by Brycchan Carey.

Abolition of Slavery. Comprehensive list broken down by Law, Race & Gender, Politics, & Religion.