Antislavery Movement

Abstract

In the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, the antislavery movement attracted a significant number of Americans who believed that slavery was a moral evil and a political and economic detriment to the United States. Although abolitionists were, throughout most of their struggle, a beleaguered minority in the United States, their efforts to uproot an entrenched institution constituted one of the most significant social movements in American history. Abolitionists were a diverse lot in terms of their backgrounds, and they often disagreed intensely with one another about how broadly to define their movement’s aims and how best to achieve them. This complexity has engendered rich and multifaceted scholarship, and the bibliography that follows emphasizes several recent developments in that literature. While earlier generations of scholarship sometimes lionized (or reviled) individual white abolitionists, recent studies emphasize the many ways in which Black activists were at the vanguard of the movement. This new work highlights the connections between the antislavery struggle and early efforts to secure racial equality in both the North and the South. It also suggests that enslaved people ought not to be considered as merely the objects of abolitionists’ benevolent regard but instead active participants in antislavery struggles in their own right. Recent scholarship has also expanded the chronological and geographical scope of the antislavery movement. While studies of abolitionism have often focused on the decades just before the Civil War, recent work has shown antislavery to have been a century-long struggle extending from the American Revolution through Reconstruction (and even beyond). Scholars of antislavery have also traced the movement’s robust transnational dimensions by tracking fugitives from slavery across the borders of the United States and making connections between antislavery activism in the United States and in other places throughout the Atlantic World. It should be noted that some scholars differentiate “antislavery” and “abolitionist,” with the latter term connoting opposition not only to the institution of slavery but also to anti-Black racism more broadly. However, this distinction is not employed consistently across the scholarship, and it does not line up with 19th-century usage. Consequently, in this bibliography, the terms “antislavery” and “abolitionist” are used more or less interchangeably.