, in Connecticut in 1650, and in Virginia in 1661.Abolitionists, reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries dedicated to eliminating slavery, especially in the English-speaking countries. Although the Quakers had long opposed slavery, abolitionism as an organized force began in England in the 1780s, when William Wilberforce and the Clapham Secta group of wealthy evangelical Anglicansbegan agitating against the African slave traffic. Their success (1807) stimulated further political assaults on slavery itself. With compensation to owners and apprenticeship arrangements, Parliament abolished West Indian slavery in 1833. British example, Quaker traditions, evangelical revivalism, and northern emancipations (1776-1827) aroused interest in abolitionism in the United States. The abolitionists differed from those of moderate antislavery feelings in that they called for an immediate end to slavery. The most extreme abolitionists denied the validity of any laws that recognized slavery as an institution; thus, they systematically violated the fugitive slave laws by organizing and operating the Underground Railroad, which concealed and transported runaway slaves to Canada. The activities and propaganda of the abolitionists, although discredited in conservative northern quarters and violently opposed in the South, made slavery a national issue. Most historians cite 1831 as the beginning of the United States abolitionist movement, when William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in Boston. This newspaper soon became the leading organ of American abolitionism. In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in Philadelphia under Garrison's leadership; this society was the most militant of all the antislavery organizations. Viewed as fanatics by the general public, the abolitionists were relatively few in numberonly about 160,000 in the period 1833 to 1840. Most were educated church people of middle-class New England or Quaker heritage. Support...
