Slavery in The Colonial United States - The Rise of The Anti-slavery Movement

The Rise of The Anti-slavery Movement

African and African American slaves expressed their opposition to slavery through armed uprisings such as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Slave Insurrection of 1741, through malingering and tool-breaking, and most commonly, by running away, either for short periods or permanently. Until the Revolutionary era, almost no white American colonists spoke out against slavery. Even the Quakers generally tolerated slaveholding (and slave-trading) until the mid-18th century, although they emerged as vocal opponents of slavery in the Revolutionary era.

In 1688, 4 German Quakers in Germantown, a town outside Philadelphia, wrote a petition against the use of slaves by the English colonists in the nearby countryside. They presented the petition to their local Quaker Meeting, and the Meeting was sympathetic, but could not decide what the appropriate response should be. The Meeting passed the petition up the chain of authority to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where it continued to be ignored and was archived and forgotten for 150 years. In 1844 the petition was rediscovered and became a focus of the burgeoning abolitionist movement. It was the first public American document of its kind to protest slavery. It was also one of the first public declarations of universal human rights. Thus although the petition itself was forgotten, the idea that every human has equal rights was discussed in Philadelphia Quaker society over the next century. Slavery was officially sanctioned by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1776. Following the Revolution, the northern states all abolished slavery, with New Jersey acting last in 1804. By 1808 all states (except South Carolina) had banned the international buying or selling of slaves. Acting on the advice of President Thomas Jefferson, who denounced the international trade as "violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, in which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe" in 1807 Congress banned the international slave trade. However, the domestic slave trade continued.

The French colony of St. Domingue abolished slavery in the massive slave uprising that accompanied the Haitian Revolution; emancipation was officially proclaimed in 1793. Haiti was the first government in the Americas to abolish slavery, and the Haitian Revolution inspired some copycat movements in North America, notably Gabriel's Rebellion of 1800, which failed. Slavery proved to be a key contributing issue to the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the United States finally abolished slavery by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.

Critics of slavery as an economic institution argued that the practice was inherently inefficient and unprofitable in the long run. A popular myth suggests that slavery in the South would have died out even without a Civil War due to its inability to maintain lasting economic gains. Southern abolitionists reasoned that slaves did not have the necessary personal incentive needed to propel productivity in the farming sector. Studies have since shown that slavery was indeed a highly efficient mode of production for particular crops like sugar and cotton. A plantation's gang system made use of an effective division of labor wherein slaves worked on tasks that suited their physical capabilities in an organizational setting not unlike that of a factory.