Abolitionists had various reasons for wanting to end slavery, including seeing it as cruel or wanting economic equality. Works like The Impending Crisis of the South and Uncle Tom's Cabin influenced public opinion by depicting the harms of slavery and led to political divisions between those who wanted to abolish slavery and southern slaveholders. Abolition was a major issue separating the North and South and contributing to the start of the Civil War.

1. Abolitionists, in short, believed slavery
should be banned. Abolition was a fierce
issue in the minds of Americans. These are
some of the early, most prominent
Abolitionists that contributed to the
separation of the country.

2.  Notall abolitionists wanted slavery banned
because they saw it as cruel and inhumane.
Some only wanted abolition because they
hated the slave aristocracy and wanted to
help poor southern whites. Some only
wanted slavery banned in the new territories
so everyone could compete economically.

3.  Hinton Helper wrote The
Impending Crisis of the South,
a book that said slavery should
end because the South was
developing much slower than
the North.
 He believed the South’s focus
on the cotton economy
restricted its growth and made
nonslaveholding whites poorer.
 Southern slaveholders banned
his book because they feared
the nonslaveholding whites
would turn on them.

4.  The Free Soil Party was a political party
united by their wanting of abolition in the
new territories. They rose to prominence in
the late 1840s – early 50s.
 They believed that free new territories
would be economically and morally superior
than territories with slavery.
 In 1854, the Republican Party superseded the
Free Soil Party.

5.  Garrison was a hardcore abolitionist and very
uncompromising.
 He wrote The Liberator, an anti-slavery
newspaper, and eventually in 1833, he and
other abolitionists founded the American
Anti-Slavery Society.
 He used the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution to defend his arguments.

6.  Probably the most influential
abolitionist was Harriet
Beecher Stowe. She was a
white woman in the North
who, in frustration at the
strict fugitive slave laws,
published her novel Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.
 The novel was so influential
to dividing the North and
South that Abraham Lincoln
told her in 1862, “So you’re
the little woman who wrote
the book that made this great
war.

7.  The novel focused on a slave and
his family, and his cruel
treatment from his slaveowner.
 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best
selling novel in the 19th century.
 The cruel images in the novel
made Northerners see the
cruelty of slavery and turned
more people to fierce
abolitionists. The South banned
it because they thought it was
untrue and unfair.
 The novel led to further
separation between the North
and South.

8. Abolition was a main factor in the division of
the country. Abolitionists hated slaveowners,
and slaveowners hated abolitionists. Works of
abolitionists, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, led
the country into Civil War.