SECTION 3: The Antislavery Movement
▲ Slaves toil at backbreaking labor in this illustration from an 1836 geography textbook.
WITNESS HISTORY 
AUDIO
The Evils of Slavery
In 1845, Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, described his childhood in his autobiography. His powerful words gave many Americans their first understanding of—and compassion for—the lives of enslaved people in the South:
“I never saw my mother … more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. She [worked] about twelve miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to the contrary—a permission which they seldom get…. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day…. She died when I was about seven years old…. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.”
—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Objectives
- Describe the lives of enslaved and free African Americans in the 1800s.
- Identify the leaders and tactics of the abolition movement.
- Summarize the opposition to abolition.
Terms and People
- freedman
- Nat Turner
- abolition movement
- William Lloyd Garrison
- Frederick Douglass
- Gag Rule
NoteTaking
Reading Skill: Summarize Summarize what life was like for African Americans in the 1800s in a chart.
Why It Matters During the period of reform that swept the United States in the early and middle 1800s, reformers tried to improve life through campaigns to help children, families, and disadvantaged adults. Soon, reformers also set out to help another group of exploited people: enslaved African Americans in the South. Section Focus Question: How did reformers try to help enslaved people?
Life Under Slavery
Slavery, an American institution since colonial times, expanded across the South in the early 1800s with the growth of cotton farming. By 1830, from Maryland to Texas, some 2 million Africans and African Americans were held as slaves in the United States. About one third of these people were children under ten years of age. All of them struggled in their lives of captivity, knowing that they were at the mercy of slaveholders.
Suffering Cruel Treatment
Most of these unfortunate men, women, and children labored from dawn to dusk at backbreaking tasks—cultivating fields of cotton, loading freight onto ships, or preparing meals in scorching hot kitchens. Their “overseers” maintained brutal work routines by punishing people physically with
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