On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln, a presidential candidate who had yet to win the Republican nomination, accepted an invitation to speak to the Young Men’s Republican Union at Cooper Union Hall before a capacity crowd of 1,500. Lincoln used the occasion to outline his … Read More(1860) Abraham Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address”
On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a racially mixed group of eighteen men in an attack on the U.S. Government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of initiating a general uprising of enslaved people in Virginia and the rest of the South. … Read More(1859) John Brown, “Address to the Virginia Court at Charles Town, Virginia”
On April 23, 1839, Peter Paul Simmons gave an address before the African Clarkson Association of New York City. He challenged the then standard call for moral uplift and reform among African Americans and instead called for black Americans to employ more aggressive strategies and … Read More(1839) Peter Paul Simmons, “We Must Remain Active”
By the early 1830s Philadelphia resident Sarah Mapps. Douglas had emerged as one of the few black women who spoke in public to support the anti-slavery cause. In the summer of 1832 she addressed the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia, urging her listeners to focus … Read More(1832) Sarah Mapps Douglas Urges Support for the Anti-Slavery Cause
Philadelphia Dentist John S. Rock would eventually become a medical doctor and attorney who in 1865 would become the first African American lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. In 1850, however, he was also an abolitionist and civil rights activist. … Read More(1850) John S. Rock, “Address to the Citizens of New Jersey”
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) was arguably the most famous of the 19th Century black women orators. Born into slavery in New York and freed in 1827 under the state’s gradual emancipation law, she dedicated her life to abolition and equal rights for women and men. … Read More(1851) Sojourner Truth “Ar’nt I a Woman?“
Although history has rendered Abraham Lincoln the Great Emancipator, his dedication to the anti-slavery cause was questioned by many abolitionists during his first presidential campaign of 1860. H. Ford Douglas, a Virginia-born fugitive slave who lived in Illinois in 1860, correctly saw Lincoln as an … Read More(1860) H. Ford Douglas, “I Do Not Believe in the Antislavery of Abraham Lincoln”
Mary Ann Shadd (1823-1893) was born into an affluent free black family in Wilmington, Delaware. Nonetheless after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Shadd joined thousands of other African Americans in emigrating to Canada. She briefly taught the children of the emigrants … Read More(1858) Mary Ann Shadd, “Break Every Yoke and Let The Oppressed Go Free”
Schoolteacher, dentist, physician, lawyer, graduate of the American Medical College in Philadelphia, member of the Massachusetts bar, proficient in Greek and Latin, Dr. John S. Rock was unequivocally one of the most distinguished African American leaders to emerge in the United States during the antebellum … Read More(1858) John S. Rock, “I Will Sink or Swim with My Race”
By 1857 “Bleeding Kansas’ and the Dred Scott Decision had intensified sectional tensions over slavery and moved the nation closer to civil war. Against that backdrop, Charles Lenox Remond, on July 10, 1857, addressed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society where he joined a growing chorus of … Read More(1857) Charles Lenox Remond, “An Anti-Slavery Discourse”
