among the working and upper classes was minimal. In 1839 the society split into two main groups, the radicals and the gradualists. The division was caused by disagreement concerning policy and tactics. The radical leaders, who besides Garrison included Wendell Phillips, Lucretia Mott, and John Brown, refused to join a party necessarily committed to gradual and legal emancipation of the slaves; these leaders retained control of The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society. The gradualists, who included James Birney, Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Weld, believed that emancipation could be achieved legally by means of religious and political pressure. Many other activists eventually supported working through political organizations to abolish slavery, including the most famous antislavery orator, Frederick Douglass. Douglass had escaped from slavery in 1838 and worked passionately for the antislavery cause. He joined other men and women, such as Sojourner Truth and Charles Lenox Remond, who traveled throughout the North testifying against slavery and organizing moral and political opposition. Abolitionist women commonly organized fairs and concerts to raise funds for antislavery work. In 1840 the Tappans founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which, along with numerous state organizations, carried on most of the United States antislavery agitation. One year earlier, a group led by Birney had founded the first antislavery political party, the Liberty party, in the United States. Birney was the unsuccessful presidential candidate (1840 and 1844) of the party, the adherents of which later helped found the Free-Soil party (1848) and the Republican Party (1854). By the 1850s advocacy of violence against slave owners had replaced the earlier "moral suasion." This was especially true during the bitter controversy over extending slavery into Kansas. Only with the victory of Union forces in the Amer...
