Search Results: Abolitionism

Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-1793) was a French journalist, abolitionist, and politician who played a prominent role in the French Revolution (1789-1799). A leader of the Girondins, a moderate political faction, Brissot was instrumental...

Antoine Pierre Joseph Marie Barnave (1761-1793) was a French lawyer, politician, and one of the most influential orators of the early stage of the French Revolution (1789-1799). He is notable for being a champion of constitutional monarchy...

Nat Turner's Rebellion (also known as the Southampton Insurrection) was a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, between 21 and 23 August 1831. Led by Nat Turner (l. 1800-1831), an educated slave, the insurrectionists killed at least...

Denmark Vesey (c. 1767-1822) was a free Black man living in Charleston, South Carolina, as a carpenter and community leader. A former slave himself, Vesey became involved in the antislavery movement and was accused of planning a large-scale...

Mary Prince (l. c. 1788 to c. 1833) was the first enslaved Black woman to publish an autobiography/slave narrative. Prince was illiterate but dictated her life story to the writer Susanna Strickland (l. 1803-1885), published in 1831 as The...

The Underground Railroad was a decentralized network of White abolitionists, free Blacks, former slaves, Mexicans, Native Americans, and others opposing slavery in the United States who established secret routes and havens to help slaves...

Harriet Jacobs (l. c. 1813-1897) was a former slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), her autobiography, describing her life as a slave in North Carolina, her flight to freedom in the North, and her...

Sojourner Truth (l. c. 1797-1883) was an African American abolitionist, women's suffrage advocate, and civil rights activist who famously "walked away" from slavery in 1826, sued in court for the return of her son and, between 1843 and her...

Henry Box Brown (l. c. 1815-1897) was an enslaved African American who became famous as "the man who mailed himself to freedom" after he had himself shipped in a box from Richmond, Virginia, to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

A portrait of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (center) at the Siege of Yorktown; on the right is depicted James Armistead, an enslaved African American spy who gathered intelligence on the British army to deliver to the marquis. After...