African American Studies in Credo: Slavery and Abolition

A movement culminating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that aimed first to end the slave trade, and then to abolish the institution of slavery and emancipate slaves. The movement took place in Europe, mainly in the UK, and in the USA.

Began in April 1861 and ended in April 1865. Sometimes called ‘the War Between the States’ or ‘the Second American Revolution’, a conflict in the USA which resolved two great issues: the nature of the Federal Union and the relative power of the states and the central government; and the existence of black slavery. Those four years transformed American society.

A trade in Africa which started in ancient times. Slaves were sent across the Sahara and were traded in the Mediterranean by Phoenicians; Graeco-Roman traders in the Red Sea and beyond traded slaves from E Africa to Egypt and the Middle East. Additionally, the business of trading in slaves, especially the transportation of Black Africans to America from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856–57; It involved the then bitterly contested issue of the status of slavery in the federal territories. The Supreme Court decision of 1857 denied ‘blacks’ (African Americans) US citizenship and made slavery legal in all US territories.

In U.S. history, the executive order abolishing slavery in the Confederate States of America.

Bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. By 1854 the organization of the vast Platte and Kansas river countries W of Iowa and Missouri was overdue.

Secret order of Southern sympathizers in the North during the Civil War. Its members were known as Copperheads.

From Britannica concise encyclopedia
Form of entertainment popular in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It originated in the 1830s with the popular white performer Thomas D. Rice, known as “Jim Crow,” who wore the stylized makeup called blackface and performed songs and dances in a stereotyped imitation of African Americans.

Institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. The enforced servitude of one person (a slave) to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is considered the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States.

From Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World
No book published in the United States during the nineteenth century had as great an impact on American politics and society as the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), written by the New England abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in the decade preceding the U.S. Civil War.

Loosely organized system for helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada or to areas of safety in free states. It was run by local groups of Northern abolitionists, both white and free blacks.

16th President of the United States (1861–65). Born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in backwoods Hardin co., Ky. (now Larue co.), he grew up on newly broken pioneer farms of the frontier. President during the Civil War. Author of the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive order abolishing slavery in America, who also passed the thirteenth amendment making slavery illegal. Assassinated in 1865 by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

Although he was born a slave in Maryland in 1818, in 1895 he died a free man who not only had bought his own freedom with the money he earned from his publications and public speaking tours but also had risen to the highest position an African American had ever held in the U.S. government. Author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, a profoundly influential African American text during his era, Douglass rose through the ranks of the antislavery movement to become the most electrifying speaker and compelling writer produced by black America in the nineteenth century.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut; American writer whose antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), one of the most controversial books of its' time, had great political influence and advanced the cause of abolition.

He spent his boyhood in Ohio. Before he became prominent in the 1850s, his life had been a succession of business failures in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York.

US abolitionist; Born a slave in Maryland, she escaped to Philadelphia (where slavery was outlawed) in 1849. She helped set up the Underground Railroad, a secret network of sympathizers to help slaves escape to the North and Canada.

US antislavery and women's-suffrage campaigner. A former slave, she ran away and became involved with religious groups.

American abolitionist leader who founded and published The Liberator (1831-1865), an antislavery journal.