The Abolishment of Slavery Essay Example

“The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free”– Henry David Thoreau. Men are going to act how they like, and until men can decide to make the law free, it will not be. The abolitionist movement began around 1830 because a more organized, radical and immediate effort to end slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and their Abolitionist allies Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and Angelina Grimke, all fought to end abolitionism.

In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in London. Revolutionary France abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1794, although it was restored in 1802 by Napoleon as part of a programe to ensure sovereignty over its colonies. Haiti formally declared independence from France in 1804 and became the first sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere to unconditionally abolish slavery in the modern era. The northern states in the U.S. all abolished slavery by 1804. The United Kingdom and the United States outlawed the international slave trade in1807, after which Britain led efforts to block slave ships.

The britain abolished slavery chroughout its empire by the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, the French colonies re-abolished it in 1848 and the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1888 Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. In Eastern Europe, groups of Europeans organized to abolish the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia,and to emancipate the serfs in Russia. Slavery was declared illegal in 1948 under the Universal Declaration of Human rights.

Also, childern and adults slavery and forced labour are illegal in almost all countriesin the world today, as well as being against international law, but human trafficking for labour and for sexual bondage continues to affect tens of millions of adults and children.Lincoln once said to Horace Greeley “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be & quot;the Union as it was.If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.”

In conclusion, abolitionism ended in 1865 and started in 1830. Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and John Brown started it because more organized, radical and immediate effort to end slavery than earlier campaigns. Historians always believed that ideas set forth during the religious movement that is also,known as the Second Great Awakening inspired abolitionists to rise up against slavery.