Another key way in which the anti-slavery movement impacted politics is that it was the precursor to the women's suffrage movement—the first wave of feminism.
A number of white women from the North and the South spoke out against slavery, including Lucy Stone and Angelina Grimke. These women also held the view that men and women should be equal, and they learned to speak out about their own subordination through their advocacy on behalf of black people who were enslaved. Sojourner Truth also addressed repressive notions of femininity in her speech "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. During her speech, she held up her muscled arms, sculpted from years of farm labor, which she had been forced to handle just as any male slave, and asked if her life and her body still made her a woman or something other. The question forced white feminists to reassess notions of femininity which had been used to oppress them.
Support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, was mixed, and it was a point over which suffragists disagreed. Frederick Douglass had been a supporter of women's suffrage, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, the latter two women disagreed with him over the passage of the amendment—not because they did not want black men to vote, but because the law still excluded women.
The anti-slavery or abolition movement polarized United States society. As anti-slavery groups and individuals increasingly condemned slavery and called for its immediate cessation, slave-owners went on the offensive. Some declared that it was not good enough to characterize slavery as a necessary evil or an institution that would gradually fade away in face of modernity. Instead, they insisted it was a beneficial institution, it should expand west, and the slaves were better off on the plantations than industrial factory workers were in the Northern states.
John C. Calhoun, for example, stated that slavery had helped improve the lives of the slaves, because they were "civilized" by their contacts with European civilization. As time went on, both proponents and opponents of slavery became less willing to compromise, each side insisting that Christianity supported their argument and each side demanding that their adherents toe an increasingly hard line.
Slave rebellions tied to abolition, such as John Brown's Harper's Ferry uprising, led to harsh reprisals and even more polarization. By Lincoln's election, there was little hope that the two sides could have a meeting of the minds.
The anti-slavery movement started as something only a minority of Americans wanted. There were always fears of what would happen if the slaves were freed, and many Americans, while not personally in favor of slavery, were afraid of a slave revolt. The anti-slavery movement had religious undertones as well, as many claimed that if all were equal in the eyes of God, then slavery was a moral evil. William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator was one of the great early anti-slavery publications, and Garrison achieved fame and notoriety when he burned a copy of the Constitution because he said that he could not support a document that assisted slavery. Slavery became such an issue in Congress that Congress passed a "gag rule," which meant that they would not talk about it. When the United States expanded, there were worries that the balance between free and slave states would be disrupted, so Congress passed the Compromise of 1820. This created a line at the southern border of Missouri, although Missouri was a slave state, and allowed the creation of Maine as a free state. In 1840, James Birney ran as an abolitionist candidate in response to Whigs who could not accept slavery. Slavery was the key issue in the Compromise of 1850 as the nation sought to add new territory but not disrupt the delicate balance between free and slave states. In 1856, the Republican Party ran on a platform of not allowing slavery into the new territories. Slavery was also at the heart of an American bestseller; Uncle Tom's Cabin provided a dramatic portrayal of what life was like for a slave family. The book inflamed passions in both free and slave states—more Northerners called slavery barbaric and more Southerners called the book a farce because Stowe did not study slavery closely.
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