2009年10月27日 · The Civil War and Its Aftermath. President Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery but was cautious about fully supporting the more radical ideas of the abolitionists. As the power struggle between the...

In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (ratified 1865).

Abolitionism, movement between about 1783 and 1888 that was chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated total of 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas.

Learn about the abolitionist movement, from its roots in the colonial era to the major figures who fought to end slavery, up through the Civil War. In his 1937 mural, John Stewart Curry painted abolitionist John Brown in full cry.

Lists of some of the causes and effects of abolitionism. The abolitionist movement arose in the late 18th century to end the transatlantic slave trade and emancipate enslaved persons in western Europe and the Americas. In the United States slavery would not be officially abolished throughout the country until 1865.

For abolitionists, the coming of the Civil War was the culmination of a decades-long struggle for the slave’s freedom. Adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment two years later assured abolitionists that their struggle, and the slave’s fight, had truly reached a successful conclusion.

The war, which began as a sectional power struggle to preserve the Union, in turn led Lincoln (who had never been an abolitionist) to emancipate enslaved persons in areas of the rebellion by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and led further to the freeing of all enslaved persons in the United States by the Thirteenth Amendment to the ...

Abolitionism as a principle was far more than just the wish to limit the extent of slavery. Most Northerners recognized that slavery existed in the South and the Constitution did not allow the …

By the Civil War abolitionist women had helped accumulate two million signatures on antislavery petitions. Abolitionists predicted in the 1830s that moral suasion would compel guilty southern masters to liberate slaves and nonslaveholding whites to press for emancipation laws.

“American emancipations: Abolitionism in the Civil War era” describes how Brown’s death put a spotlight on slaveholders too. While southern masters and their northern allies vilified abolitionists, some Republicans joined abolitionists in using Brown’s memory to focus on slave power outrages.