Abolitionism

Official medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society.

Abolitionism was the political movement for the immediate and uncompensated end of chattel slavery. Abolitionism took root primarily in the United States and United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the United States, it reached its highest and most revolutionary development culminating in the Statesian Civil War, which ended chattel slavery and was the largest expropriation of private property in world history before the Russian and Chinese Revolution.

In the United States, the Confederacy wagered that British workers, suffering from the "cotton famine" caused by the Union blockade, would demand intervention assisting the South. Instead, the opposition of British workers to slavery proved a big factor in preventing British recognition of the Confederacy. Abolitionism was a genuinely revolutionary movement, but it did not abolish exploitation. The exploitation of free labor by capital remained, and the Northern bourgeoisie, abandoned Reconstruction and began the restoration of racial oppression in the form of Jim Crow.

"Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 10.

History

Abolitionism emerged out of the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the late 18th century. The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, despite their limitations, established the principle that human beings were not to be treated as property and this inspired the first organized anti-slavery agitation. We see in Britain, the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, with figures such as William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, agitated for a century before achieving the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in the British colonies in 1833.

In the United States, the contradiction between the ideals within the Declaration of Independence and the existence of a slave state in the South, created an inevitable conflict. The slave-owning class, concentrated in the cotton-producing states, dominated the federal government through the Democratic Party, founded in 1828 as an alliance between Southern slave-owners and Northern urban politicians to protect slavery and suppress the class struggle.

The American abolitionist movement is dated from the publication of the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator on January 1, 1831. The movement was not monolithic, with part of the movement who condemned the Constitution as a pro-slavery document and advocated disunion, few who sought to work through the electoral system and the revolutionaries such as John Brown, who attempted to ignite a slave insurrection and Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest orators and writers of the 19th century was a black abolitionist and an escaped slave.

Douglass broke with Lloyd Garrison over the question of the Constitution with him stating that anti-slavery advocates must claim its promises for Americans of African ancestry and articulated:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

— Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, 1857.

Abolitionists formed a key part in the founding of the Republican Party in 1854 on explicitly anti-slavery principles. Abraham Lincoln, though not himself an abolitionist, was the political figure who carried through the end of slavery in the U.S. His Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freed the slaves in the Confederate states without compensation and made abolition an war aim. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished chattel slavery completely.