Abolition

Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown details the final chapter of the radical abolitionist who led the raid on Harpers Ferry. It includes his courtroom statements and legal proceedings, highlighting the national attention to his execution for treason against Virginia. It emphasizes Brown…

Former President John Quincy Adams argued on behalf of Africans who had seized the Spanish slave ship Amistad after being illegally enslaved and brought into U.S. waters. Speaking before the Supreme Court, Adams denounced the U.S. government’s support for Spanish slave traders and defended the…

This diplomatic agreement between the United States and Great Britain expanded the naval enforcement zones established by their 1862 treaty to combat the African slave trade. The 1863 article allowed British and American warships to search and detain suspected slave-trading vessels near Puerto Rico…

In this speech, Henry David Thoreau defends abolitionist John Brown after his failed raid on Harpers Ferry. Thoreau portrays Brown as a principled man who acted on moral conviction to oppose slavery. He criticizes public opinion, the press, and political leaders for condemning Brown while…

On Wednesday, February 1st, 1865. The New York Tribune’s front page celebrated our country’s newfound freedom.

Created by former Director of Educational Services for Fourscore, Kimberly Hase Galek, this timeline presents the history of the abolitionist movement and slavery in the United States from 1775-1865.

President Lincoln ended slavery in D.C, 8 1/2 months before he would end slavery nationwide. Former owners who remained loyal to the union were paid for each enslaved freed.

<p><span class="deck">Packed like animals in the holds of slave ships, Negroes bound for America were prey to disease, brutal masters, and their own suicidal melancholy.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">Boston is so bright a beacon of Revolutionary history that it is easy to forget that the city played an equally significant role in another civil war. Dara Horn, a Harvard junior, seeks out the moral engine of the Union cause.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Two hundred years after his birth, Americans still revere him as a martyr and loathe him as a fanatical murderer. What was he?</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Without the material support of a half-dozen prominent northerners known as the Secret Six, John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago may well have never occurred.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Tempers flare and violence reigns in the pre–Civil War battleground of Kansas.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">At five critical junctures in American history, major political compromises have proved that little of lasting consequence can occur if the entrenched sides don't make serious concessions.</span></p>

<p>In what many consider the greatest anti-slavery oration ever given, Frederick Douglass called for “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”</p>

<p>Her novel helped to end slavery and proved that Lincoln was right when he said, “Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”</p>

<p>The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”</p>