Although white abolitionists drew public attention to the cause, African Americans themselves played a major role in the abolitionist movement from the start. The abolition of slavery was an especially important goal to the free African Americans of the North. Most African Americans in the North lived in poverty in cities. Although they were excluded from most jobs and were often attacked by white mobs, a great many of these African Americans were intensely proud of their freedom and wanted to help those who were still enslaved.

African Americans took an active part in organizing and directing the American Anti-slavery Society, and they subscribed in large numbers to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. In 1827, Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm started the country’s first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. Most of the other newspapers that African Americans founded before the Civil War also promoted abolition. Born a free man in North Carolina, writer David Walker of Boston published an impassioned argument against slavery, challenging African Americans to rebel and overthrow slavery by force. In 1830, free African American leaders held their first convention in Philadelphia. They discussed starting an African American college and encouraging free African Americans to emigrate to Canada.

Frederick Douglass, the most widely known African American abolitionist, was born enslaved in Maryland. After teaching himself to read and write, he escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838 and settled first in Massachusetts and then in New York. As a runaway, Douglass could have been captured and returned to slavery. Still, he joined the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society and traveled widely to address abolitionist meetings. A powerful speaker, Douglass often moved listeners to tears with his message.

For 16 years, Douglass edited an antislavery newspaper called the North Star. Douglass won admiration as a powerful and influential speaker and writer. He traveled abroad, speaking to huge antislavery audiences in London and the West Indies. Douglass returned to the United States because he believed abolitionists must fight slavery at its source. He insisted that African Americans receive not just their freedom but full equality with whites as well. In 1847, friends helped Douglass purchase his freedom from the slaveholder from whom he had fled in Maryland.

Some abolitionists risked prison and death by secretly helping African Americans escape from slavery. The network of escape routes from the South to the North came to be called the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad had no trains or tracks. Instead, passengers on this “railroad” traveled through the night, often on foot, and went north, guided by the North Star. The runaway slaves followed rivers and mountain chains or felt for moss growing on the north side of trees.

During the day passengers rested at “stations”—barns, attics, church basements, or other places where fugitives could rest, eat, and hide until the next night’s journey. The railroad’s “conductors” were whites and African Americans who helped guide the escaping slaves to freedom in the North. In the early days, many people made the journey north on foot. Later, they traveled in wagons, sometimes equipped with secret compartments. African Americans on the Underground Railroad hoped to settle in a free state in the North or to move on to Canada. Once in the North, however, fugitives still feared capture. After her escape from slavery, Harriet Tubman became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. Slaveholders offered a large reward for Tubman’s capture or death.

The Underground Railroad helped only a tiny fraction of the enslaved population. Most who used it as a route to freedom came from the states located between the northern states and the Deep South. Still, the Underground Railroad gave hope to those who suffered in slavery. It also provided abolitionists with a way to help some enslaved people to freedom.

The antislavery movement led to an intense reaction against abolitionism. Southern slaveholders and many Southerners who did not have slaves opposed abolitionism because they believed it threatened the South’s way of life, which depended on enslaved labor. Many people in the North also opposed the abolitionist movement.

Even in the North, abolitionists never numbered more than a small fraction of the population. Many Northerners saw the antislavery movement as a threat to the nation’s social order. They feared the abolitionists could bring on a destructive war between the North and the South. They also claimed that, if the enslaved African Americans were freed, they could never blend into American society. Economic fears further fed the backlash against abolitionism. Northern workers worried that freed slaves would flood the North and take jobs away from whites by agreeing to work for lower pay.

Opposition to abolitionism sometimes erupted into violence against the abolitionists themselves. In the 1830s a Philadelphia mob burned the city’s anti-slavery headquarters to the ground and set off a bloody race riot. In Boston, a mob attacked abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and threatened to hang him. Authorities saved his life by locking him in jail. Elijah Lovejoy was not so lucky. Lovejoy edited an abolitionist newspaper in Illinois. Three times angry whites invaded his offices and wrecked his presses. Each time Lovejoy installed new presses and resumed publication. The fourth time the mob set fire to the building. When Lovejoy came out of the blazing building, he was shot and killed.

Southerners fought abolitionism by mounting arguments in defense of slavery. They claimed that slavery was essential to the South. Slave labor, they said, had allowed Southern whites to reach a high level of culture. Southerners also argued that they treated enslaved people well. Some Southerners argued that Northern workers were worse off than slaves. The industrial economy of the North employed factory workers for long hours at low wages. These jobs were repetitious and often dangerous, and Northern workers had to pay for their goods from their small earnings. Unlike the “wage slavery” of the North, Southerners said that the system of slavery provided food, clothing, and medical care to the workers.

Other defenses of slavery were based on racism. Many whites believed that African Americans were better off under white care than on their own. “Providence has placed [the slave] in our hands for his own good,” declared one Southern governor. The conflict between proslavery and antislavery groups continued to mount. At the same time, a new women’s rights movement was growing, and many leading abolitionists were involved in that movement as well.

Harriet Beecher Stowe called the Fugitive Slave Act a “nightmare abomination.” Stowe, the daughter of New England minister Lyman Beecher, spent part of her childhood in Cincinnati. Abolitionism ran in her family; her brother Henry Ward Beecher was already an outspoken Abolitionist, and by the mid-1850s would become the driving force behind aiding the free movement in Kansas Territory. There, on the banks of the Ohio River, she saw enslaved people being loaded onto ships to be taken to slave markets. As an adult and the wife of a religion professor, she wrote many books and stories about social reform. Her most famous work was a novel about the evils of slavery.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. Packed with dramatic incidents and vivid characters, the novel shows slavery as a cruel and brutal system. The heart-wrenching story shows slave families forced to cope with separation by masters through sale. Uncle Tom mourns for the family he was forced to leave. In one heroic scene, Eliza makes a daring dash across the frozen Ohio River to prevent the sale of her son by slave traders. The novel also takes the perspective that slavery brings out the worst in the white masters, leading them to perpetrate moral atrocities they would otherwise never commit.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly became a sensation, selling over 300,000 copies in the first year of publication. Across the north, readers became aware of the horrors of slavery on a far more personal level than ever before. Although banned in most of the south, it served as another log on the growing fire. The book sold even more copies in Great Britain than in the United States. Ten years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the British people made it difficult for its government to support the Confederacy, even though there were strong economic ties to the South. The book had such an impact on public feelings about slavery that when Abraham Lincoln was introduced to Stowe during the Civil War, he said, "So, you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."