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Back
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| John Quincy Adams (-) | ||
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| Richard Allen (1722-1803) | ||
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During the mid-1780s, he became minister to a small group of free blacks in Philadelphia. Along with Absalom Jones, he founded the Free African Society of Philadelphia, the first African American mutual aid society. In 1787, after whites churchgoers relegated African American worshippers to a balcony, Richard Allen organized the country's first independent African American church. "Mother Bethel" became one of the leading African American community institutions in Philadelphia, and it served as a catalyst for the development of black schools, mutual aid societies, and petition campaigns against the slave trade and slavery. In 1816, he established the first African American religious denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The next year, he organized an African American convention in Philadelphia, which vigorously protested against colonization.
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| Charles Ball (1706-1790) | ||
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Born in Maryland around 1780, Ball toiled as a slave in Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia, and managed to escape twice. In 1837, he published his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Charles Ball.
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| Henry Bibb (1815-1854) | ||
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For excerpts from The Narrative
of the Life and Adventures of an American Slave (1849), see:
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| James Birney | ||
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In Danville, a committee of leading citizens informed him that they would not permit him to establish an antislavery newspaper in the city. When Birney announced that he would go through with his plans, the committee bought out the paper's printer and the town's postmaster announced that he would refuse to deliver the newspaper. In a final effort to publish his paper, Birney moved across the Ohio River into Cincinnati, where a mob destroyed his press while the city's mayor looked on. Birney helped found the Liberty Party in 1840, which called upon Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, end the interstate slave trade, and cease admitting new slave states to the Union. The party also sought the repeal of local and state "black laws" which discriminated against free blacks. The party nominated him for president in 1840 and again in 1844. Although he gathered fewer than 7100 votes in his first campaign, he received 62,000 votes four years later, and captured enough votes in Michigan and New York to deny Henry Clay the presidency.
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| Henry "Box" Brown | ||
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For excerpts from the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851), see: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbox.htm Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbox.htm
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| William Wells Brown (1814-1884) | ||
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For excerpts from Narrative
of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), see: Picture credit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbrownW.htm |
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| Martha Browne | ||
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Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1808, the daughter of a slave woman and an unknown white man, she published her Autobiography of a Female Slave in 1857.
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| Henry Clay Bruce (1836-1902) | ||
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The Abolitionists
As a
diplomat and one of the nation's ablest secretaries of state,
Adams unintentionally helped open new territories to slavery
in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. After serving for one term
as president, he played a critical role in nurturing antislavery
sentiment in the North, even though he never considered himself
an abolitionist. As a Representative in Congress, he led a nine-year
campaign to overturn the "Gag Rule," under which the
House automatically tabled antislavery petitions. In the face
of accusations of treason and assassination threats, he succeeded
in making slavery subject to parliamentary debate. He also argued
successfully on behalf of the Amistad rebels, African blacks
who had staged a revolt on Spanish slave ship Amistad and were
tried for mutiny and murder. He convinced the U.S. Supreme Court
that the rebels' enslavement was illegal under international
law and that African captives had the same right to use violence
to win their freedom as did the American colonists during the
Revolution. Perhaps most importantly, he developed the idea that
a president, under his powers as commander-in-chief, had the
authority to abolish slavery.
After growing up as a slave to a wealthy
Pennsylvania lawyer and political office holder, Allen and his
family were sold in the early 1770s to a Delaware farmer. Both
Allen and his master underwent religious conversion, and his
owner, convinced that slavery was sinful, let Allen and a brother
to purchase their freedom. During the early 1780s, Allen worked
as a wagon drive, shoemaker, and sawyer, and also preached to
audiences of blacks and whites.
Born
to a white father and a slave mother in Shelby County, Ky., Bibb
was held in slavery in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and
escaped in 1837. In 1851, he moved to Canada, where he and Josiah
Henson established a colony for escaped slaves. He also founded
Canada's first African American newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive.
Birney
was one of many Southerners to discover that it was hopeless
to work for slave emancipation in the South. He had been born
to a wealthy Kentucky slaveholding family, and like many members
of the South's slaveholding elite, was educated at Princeton.
After graduation, he moved to Huntsville, Ala., where he practiced
law and operated a cotton plantation. In Huntsville, he developed
qualms about slavery and began to work as an agent for the American
Colonization Society. Soon, his doubts about slavery had grown
into an active hatred for the institution. He returned to Kentucky,
emancipated his slaves, and in 1835 organized the Kentucky Anti-Slavery
Society.
Born
into slavery in Virginia in 1815, Brown escaped by having himself
nailed into a small box and shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia.
An orator for the American Anti-Slavery Society, he published
a narrative of his life in 1851.
One
of the nation's first African American novelists and historians,
Brown was born in Lexington, Va., and raised in Missouri. After
serving as a slave driver, he was hired out to transport slaves
to the New Orleans slave market, but managed to escape. He published
a narrative of his life in slavery in 1847. His novel Clotel
(1853) offers a fictional reworking of the story that Thomas
Jefferson fathered several children by a slave mistress.
The
Virginia-born Bruce published his autobiography, Twenty-Nine
Years a Slave, in 1895.