Rev. Richard Allen - Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church
American Colonization Society
Quakers William Penn
John Newton
William Wilberforce
Missouri Compromise, 1820
William Lloyd Garrison The Liberator January 1, 1831 Lift up the standard of emancipation.... till every chain be broken, and every bondman set free!... I do not wish to think,or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm... tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen....I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD.
Charles Grandison Finney
Amistad mutiny, 1839
Mexican-American War
Wilmot Proviso, 1846 Compromise of 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, 1850
Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 1845
Harriet Jacobs
He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled.... I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master, I was compelled to live under the same roof with him. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things.... But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death....
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader's hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin 1852
Preston Brooks Charles Sumner
Bleeding Kansas
Dred Scott vs. Sandford, 1857
John Brown's raid, Harper's Ferry, 1859
I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible.... [which] teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them.... I have endeavored to act on that instruction. I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered, as I have done,... in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood farther with the blood of my children and the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
"The Saint... whose martyrdom... will make the gallows glorious as the Cross." Ralph Waldo Emerson A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that? Henry David Thoreau
Lincoln's Inauguration, 1861
Fort Sumter
Sherman's March
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With... the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn