Harriet Tubman Library Guide: Abolitionist

Compiled by a prominent abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is combines information taken from witnesses, and from active and former slave owners, to generate a condemnation of slavery from both those who observed it and those who perpetuated it. The narrative describes the appalling day-to-day conditions of the over 2,700,000 men, women and children in slavery in the United States. Weld demonstrates how even prisoners--in the United States and in other countries--were significantly better fed than American slaves. Readers will find one of the most meticulous records of slave life available in this text. Unlike personal slave narratives, which focus on a single man or woman's experience, American Slavery details the overall conditions of slaves across multiple states and several years.

Dismantling Slavery is the first book to address these two giants of abolition—Douglass and Garrison—simultaneously. While underscoring the evolution of abolitionist discourse, Dismantling Slavery unveils the true nature of the friendship between Douglass and Garrison, a key ingredient often overlooked by scholars. Drawing on the writings, speeches, and experiences that shaped the two as abolitionists, Nilgün Anadolu-Okur’s groundbreaking study is one account of the ways in which abolitionist discourse was shaped and put to the purposes of moral and democratic reforms.

The clearly and concisely written entries in this reference work chronicle the campaign to end human slavery in the United States, bringing to life the key events, leading figures, and socioeconomic forces in the history of American antislavery, abolition, and emancipation. * Offers an accessibly written reference work comprising easy-to-find subject entries for readers unfamiliar with this period in history * Includes primary sources--such as former slave Sojourner Truth's famous speech, "Ar'n't I a Woman?" at a women's convention in Ohio in 1851--that promote critical thinking and interpretive reading skills underscored in the Common Core Standards * Provides additional reading suggestions and a bibliography of sources to supply avenues for further study

This book is the story of the remarkable transformation of Upstate New York's famous 'Burned-over District;' where the flames of religious revival sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett details the regional presence of African Americans from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit generated from evangelical impulses. He includes in his narrative the struggles of great abolitionists--among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen, and Samuel May--and of many lesser-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom both regionally and in the nation as a whole.

This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition. Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject.

Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance. Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery's legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition.

In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum Black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning Black press, and the formation of militia groups, Black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Drawing on both new and neglected evidence, this book reconstructs Old John Brown's aborted "war" to free the 3.8 million slaves in the American South before the Civil War. It critiques misleading sources that either exalt Brown's "heroism" and noble purpose or condemn his "monomania" and "lawlessness". McGlone explains the sources of his obsession with slavery and his notorious crime at Pottawatomie Creek in "Bleeding Kansas" as well as how the Harpers Ferry raid figured into Brown's larger vision and why he was captured in the federal armory there.

A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition.