Abolitionists People
Who Made It Happen
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was an American abolitionist and novelist who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history.Her father was Lyman Beecher, pastor o...
Henry Walton Bibb
Henry Walton Bibb (1815-1854) was a runaway slave and antislavery lecturer who published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, in 1849.Bibb's mot...
Maria W. Chapman
Maria W. Chapman (1806-1885) was a prominent American abolitionist and a close associate of William Lloyd Garrison. She was a Ladies' High School principal in Boston before she married merchant Hen...
Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was a very influential antislavery author who came from an abolitionist family in Massachusetts.She married David Lee Child in 1828, and naturally, both were avid anti...
Lucretia Coffin Mott
Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880) was a feminist, abolitionist, and one of the pioneers of the women's movement.She was a Quaker who both studied and taught at a Friends school near Poughkeepsie, Ne...
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was a champ of the abolitionist movement—so much so that he was able to write not one, not two, but three bestselling autobiographies about his life. Born Fred...
Henry Highland Garnett
Henry Highland Garnett (1815-1882) was one of the most prominent black leaders throughout the antebellum period and a leading figure in the American Anti-Slavery Society.An escaped slave, Garnett a...
William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was one of the most prominent and uncompromising abolitionists of the nineteenth century.He published The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper, from 1831 until the...
Angelina Grimké Weld
Angelina Grimké Weld (1805-1879) was an abolitionist who wrote and lectured in favor of emancipation and women's rights.Horrified by the brutalities of slavery that she witnessed while growing up,...
Sarah Moore Grimké
Sarah Moore Grimké (1792-1873) was an abolitionist who wrote and lectured as an advocate for emancipation and women's rights.She was born into a prominent slaveholding family in Charleston, South...
Wendell Phillips
Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) was a wealthy Harvard Law School graduate who gave up his career and social prestige in order to join up with the abolitionist cause in 1835. He became one of its most...
Gerrit Smith
Gerrit Smith (1797-1874) was a wealthy abolitionist from Utica, New York. He was the only abolitionist to hold a Congressional office, the president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society for three y...
Arthur Tappan
Arthur Tappan (1786-1865) was an American abolitionist from Northampton, Massachusetts. He became very wealthy from the dry goods business that he ran with his brother and partner, Lewis, in New Yo...
Lewis Tappan
Lewis Tappan (1788-1873) was an abolitionist, philanthropist, and activist who ran a very profitable dry goods business with his bro/partner, Arthur, in the Big Apple.Thankfully, Lewis and his brot...
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), born Isabella Baumfree, was one of the most famous female African-American abolitionists of the nineteenth century.Born into slavery, Truth was set free in 1827 and too...
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), born Araminta Ross, was a runaway slave and abolitionist who guided some 300 fellow runaways to freedom as one of the most famous and successful "conductors" on the Unde...
David Walker
David Walker (1796-1830) was a free Black man, a self-taught clothes dealer, a radical abolitionist, a devout Christian, and a writer who published his self-titled David Walker's Appeal in 1829....
John Woolman
John Woolman (1720-1772) was one of the OG abolitionists, and the most influential Quaker antislavery activist prior to the revolutionary era.In 1754, Woolman published Some Considerations on the K...
Elizur Wright
Elizur Wright (1804-1885) was an actuary—a.k.a. a statistician—on top of being a Yale graduate and a leading abolitionist in the American Anti-Slavery Society.During the summer of 1835, he had...