Diverging Dogmas of Abolition
A look at the slave's life in antebellum America. From "Doing As They Can: Slave Life in the American South," American Social History Project
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Whether slavery should exist was disputed nationwide. Even abolitionists disagreed over why and how slavery should end. |
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Back Where They BelongThe American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, advocated sending free blacks back to Africa. Some members cared for blacks’ well-being; others considered them threats to white America.
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God's ChildrenEstablished in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society considered slavery morally wrong, countering colonization.
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". . . this degraded, idle, and vicious population [free people of color] . . . sally forth from their coverts, beneath the obscurity of night, and plunder the rich proprietors of the valleys. They infest the suburbs of the towns and cities, where they become the depositories of stolen goods, and, schooled by necessity, elude the vigilance of our defective police.” |
"Surely the sin is as great to enslave an AMERICAN as an AFRICAN. Therefore we believe and affirm— [. . .] That all those laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are therefore before God utterly null and void; being an audacious usurpation of the Divine prerogative . . . they ought to be instantly abrogated.” |
Such opposite ideologies were bound to face off eventually. They did: in Cincinnati, Ohio at Lane Theological Seminary.