Trail #1

    In the 1830s, the abolitionist movements started to skyrocket. From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength. People started to form their own opinions on slavery and dig deeper into the different aspects of it. The movement was led by free Black people who included significant names like Frederick Douglass. White supporters also joined him and they included people such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1830, the U.S. population was 12.8 million, with more than 2 million slaves who were still not close to being free. Slaves still had no constitutional rights. They could not testify in court against a white person or even leave the plantation without permission. Slaves often found themselves rented out, used as prizes in lotteries, or as wagers in card games and horse races. 

    While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient, and made little economic sense. The mass majority of Americans who joined the antislavery cause in the 1830s came from the countryside and small villages of the North. They typically grew up in deeply religious, reform-oriented families, creating the basis of their beliefs. Through the Louisiana Purchase, the question of slavery became both geographical and political and ushered in a period of national debate between pro- and anti-slavery states. They wanted to gain political and economic advantage. By 1820, Congress became obsessed with the debate over how to divide the newly acquired territories into slave states and free states. The Missouri Compromise- also referred to as the Compromise of 1820- was an agreement between the pro- and anti-slavery factions regulating slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in new states north of the border of the Arkansas territory, excluding Missouri. Constitutionally, the Compromise of 1820 established a precedent for the exclusion of slavery from public territory acquired after the Constitution and also recognized that Congress had no right to impose upon states seeking admission to the Union conditions that did not apply to those states already in the Union. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise brought Missouri and Maine into the Union. By this time more than 20,000 Indians lived in virtual slavery on California missions. 

The same year, Congress made trade in foreign slaves an act of piracy (the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work). In 1831, Nat Turner led the most brutal slave rebellion in United States history. It attracted up to 75 slaves and killed 60 whites. Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner’s rebellion as evidence that Black people were “inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, and fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement, and assembly of enslaved people.” This was monumental for slavery and its progression toward being abolished. 

    In 1840, the slave population reached its peak of nearly 59,000. By 1860, there were 37,000 enslaved people, just 63 percent as many slaves as two decades earlier. All this being said, slavery was still a prominent thing, and people of color were still being treated awfully and with no respect, despite the movement towards the abolishment of slavery.