When Frederick Douglass became an abolitionist lecturer in 1841, he joined a movement that had grown radical and militant. “Let us glory in the name of revolutionists,” declared the flagship American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison, in an 1844 statement.¹

This was a departure from the sentiment prevalent among most of the prominent founders, who opposed slavery in principle but refrained from demanding a general abolition. Their patience derived in part from their commitment to constitutional federalism, which located property rights and labor relations as domestic concerns of the states, and in part from a hopeful conviction that slavery in America was a dying institution. “Slavery in time will not be a speck in our Country,” Connecticut delegate Oliver Ellsworth declared at the Philadelphia convention, in support of a temporary permission for the importation of slaves.²

Substantial evidence supported that expectation in the year the Constitution went into operation, but thirty years later, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 revolutionized the plantation economy, things looked very different. Between 1790–1820, the population of people enslaved in the U.S. more than doubled, from approximately 700,000 to over 1.5 million. The number of slave- holding states—those that had enacted no measure for immediate or gradual abolition—grew from eight (including New York and New Jersey, which enacted gradual abolition measures in 1799 and 1804) to eleven. Even more tellingly, in the 1819–1820 controversy over Missouri statehood, southern congressmen belligerently affirmed their determination to expand the number of slaveholding states. When New York Representative James Tallmadge proposed to require a prohibition of slavery in Missouri’s constitution, Georgia Representative Thomas Cobb warned, “you have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.”³

Those and like developments convinced some on the antislavery side that the time for patience with slavery, if there had ever been such a time, had expired. A new, more strident, and less compromising form of antislavery appeal, marked at the outset by its scornful rejection of gradualism, emerged under the leadership of a young editor and organizer from Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison. The American Anti-Slavery Society’s Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Garrison and issued upon the organization’s founding in 1833, stated “[t]hat the slaves ought instantly to be set free, and brought under the protection of law . . . That all those laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are . . . utterly null and void . . . and that therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.”⁴ This call for the abrogation of pro-slavery law serves as a signpost of the deeper radicalism of Garrisonian abolitionism.

It might seem that the “immediate and general emancipation” the Garrisonians demanded could only have been effected by an act of the U.S. government. Yet the AASS founding statement conceded that no federal abolition power existed under the Constitution. The federal government, in the early Garrisonian view, possessed limited powers of prohibition relative to the slave trade and to the existence of slavery in federal territories, but in other respects the Constitution bore a “criminal” relation to slavery, enabling and protecting it. ⁵ Over time, however, this early ambivalence resolved into a conviction that the Constitution was a thoroughly and irredeemably pro-slavery instrument—in the words of the prophet Isaiah that Garrison regularly deployed, a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell.”⁶ In his editorial, “The American Union,” Garrison summarized the indictment:

To secure the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, it was agreed, first, that the African slave trade . . . should for at least twenty years be prose- cuted as a national interest under the American flag, and protected by the national arm;—secondly, that a slaveholding oligarchy, created by allowing three-fifths of the slave population to be represented by their taskmaster, should be allowed a permanent seat in Congress;—thirdly, that the slave system should be secured against internal revolt and external invasion, by the united physical force of the country;—fourthly, that not a foot of national territory should be granted, on which the panting fugitive from Slavery might stand, and be safe from his pursuers—thus making every citizen a slave-hunter and a slave-catcher. ⁷

From this conviction of constitutional evil, Garrisonians characteristically drew radical practical inferences. Some concluded that conscience forbade individual political action under the Constitution, on the grounds that any such action would constitute a tacit endorsement of its legitimacy; the Garrisonian Henry C. Wright declared that if he could emancipate every slave in the country by casting a single vote, he would refuse to cast that vote.⁸ However, what became the signature position of Garrisonian abolitionism appeared at the level of collective action, as Garrison called for non-slaveholding states to nullify the Constitution by seceding from the Union. “Henceforth,” he concluded, “the watchword of every uncompromising abolitionist, of every friend of God and liberty, must be . . .‘no union with slaveholders!’”⁹

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