Abolition, Slavery 287Jeff rey, Julie Roy. Th e Great Silent Army: Ordinary Women in the
Anti-Slavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998.
Rediker, Marcus. Th e Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Vi-
king, 2007.
Th omas, Hugh. Th e Slave Trade: Th e Story of the Atlantic Slave
Trade: 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.Abolition, Slavery
Th e United States in the three decades before the Civil War
was fl ooded with various reform movements. Inspired by
the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, these
reform movements sought to improve or perfect human
society by eliminating any evil the reformers believed was
an aff ront to the moral and spiritual health of the nation.
Reformers attacked such issues as failure to observe the
Sabbath, poor treatment of the mentally ill, crime and pun-
ishment, temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of
slavery. General antislavery sentiment had developed in
both the North and the South during and immediately aft er
the American Revolution. Ironically, by the mid-1820s,
there were more antislavery societies in the South, over 100,
than in the North, just 24. However, by 1830, Southern an-
tislavery sentiment had largely disappeared. Th e larger an-
tislavery movement included advocates of the colonization
movement; gradualists who believed in a slow move toward
emancipation through voluntary manumission; free-soil
advocates who simply opposed further extension of slavery;
and abolitionists who pursued an immediate compulsory
end to slavery. It was not until the late 1820s and 1830s, as
part of the massive push to reform society, that immediate
abolition came to dominate the antislavery movement.
As late as the mid-1700s, most organized Western
reli gions or denominations had failed to discourage their
congregations from practicing slavery. Many European
governments were actively engaged in the slave trade. Slaves
could be found in all of the 13 British North American col-
onies, and throughout the American Revolution, many of
the founding fathers were slaveholders. Antislavery senti-
ment, prior to 1787, was largely limited to those practicing
the Quaker faith. Quakers would continue to be leaders of
the movement until slavery was eventually abolished. In
1787, as the nation took its fi rst steps, Congress barred slav-
ery from the Old Northwest territory, the area north of theNorth and South Carolina, did not want the federal govern-
ment to be able to abolish the slave trade, which it clearly
would be able to accomplish if so motivated using the pow-
ers given it through the Commerce Clause. Ironically, the
states of the Upper South, particularly the powerful state of
Virginia, wanted an end to the Atlantic slave trade because
they were economically invested in being the prime source
of the internal slave trade: Virginia and, to a lesser extent,
Maryland made most of their money “breeding” and selling
slaves “down the river” (the origin of that phrase) into the
Lower South. Th e Lower South, on the other hand, wanted
to foster competition among suppliers of slaves, hoping to
get better prices.
Th e result of this confl ict was a compromise: Al-
though Congress had the power under the Commerce
Clause to ban the international slave trade, the members
of the Constitutional Convention enacted the infamous
(and oft en misunderstood) “Slave Trade Clause.” Article 1,
Section 9[1], stated that Congress was prohibited from
banning the international slave trade until the year 1808.
Even so, Congress did in fact prohibit the importation of
slaves from outside the United States on the fi rst day it was
allowed to do so: January 1, 1808. With the abolition of
the international trade, the domestic slave trade proved to
be vastly profi table to the Upper South, and the sale and
“shipping” of slaves around slave states and territories
formed the bedrock of the region’s physical and fi nancial
infrastructure.
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah;
Equiano, Olaudah; Wilberforce, William
Rebecca HallBibliography
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Drescher, Seymour. Th e Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus
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Press, 2002.
Finkleman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the
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London: Cambridge University Press, 2002.