Lifting as We Climb: Chapters 1–2

Though many people in the United States, including slaveholders, were aware of the brutality of the institution, for slaveholders, the economic benefits far outweighed the moral conundrum that it presented.

These men, many of whom were Quakers, developed a strategic plan: They created anti-slavery organizations and published newspapers, like the Genius of Emancipation and the Liberator, and delivered speeches and lectures to turn public opinion against slavery, encourage plantation owners to free the people they’d enslaved, and help craft laws that preserved and protected the rights of formerly enslaved people.

In 1850, Southern states began threatening to secede from the United States because enslaved people continued to escape and flee to Northern states that welcomed them and protected them from slave catchers.

In order to quell this uprising, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky encouraged Congress to pass another law that required all states to permit the capture and return of free people to their former plantations.

“It is true, the wail of the captive sometimes came to my ear in the midst of my happiness, and caused my heart to bleed for his wrongs: but, alas! the impression was as evanescent as the early cloud and morning dew,” Douglass said during a June 1832 speech delivered at the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia.

Douglass had an epiphany: She couldn’t pretend slavery wasn’t a thriving industry below the line that separated Pennsylvania and other free states from the horrors taking place in the South.

She realized that freedom was precarious. It could be easily snatched away from her, her family, and the Black people she encountered every day.

Members of the association wanted to use their “endeavors to enlighten the understanding, to cultivate the talents entrusted to our keeping, that by so doing, we may in a great measure, break down the strong barrier of prejudice.”

However, only white woman abolitionists were invited to the meeting, and they were relegated to the sidelines.

However, only white woman abolitionists were invited to the meeting, and they were relegated to the sidelines.

Eventually, Harper became a member of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), and she spent the latter portion of her life fighting to gain the right to vote for all women.

“Whether it was wise or unwise, the government has exchanged the fetters on his wrist for the ballot in his right hand, and men cannot vitiate his vote by fraud, or intimidate the voter by violence, without being untrue to the genius and spirit of our government, and bringing demoralization into their own political life and ranks.”

“Whether it was wise or unwise, the government has exchanged the fetters on his wrist for the ballot in his right hand, and men cannot vitiate his vote by fraud, or intimidate the voter by violence, without being untrue to the genius and spirit of our government, and bringing demoralization into their own political life and ranks.”

When Sarah Mapps Douglass and her mother learned that an anti-slavery society for women was being formed, there was no way they’d miss a chance to attend. They headed to the school for the inaugural meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS).

They generally didn’t attend the same schools or churches, and most of the time, they weren’t even buried in the same graveyards, but from the beginning, Black women were integral members of the PFASS.

Each of the Forten women was formidable in her own right.

The harrowing stories of enslaved women should have been the linchpin of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society’s ongoing campaign to persuade the federal government to pass an anti-slavery amendment.

The harrowing stories of enslaved women should have been the linchpin of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society’s ongoing campaign to persuade the federal government to pass an anti-slavery amendment.

The devoted members of the PFASS continued their efforts to avoid purchasing and using products procured by slave labor.

That’s when Truth and Dumont came to an agreement: He would free her before July 4, 1827, “if she would do well and be faithful.” However, when that time came, Dumont reneged on his promise and blamed Truth’s hand injury, which made her work more slowly.

Her speeches riled up too many people and were considered too radical.

It reminded her too much of her troubled and turbulent past: After being orphaned at the age of five, she’d been forced to become a minister’s indentured servant.

She attended teas, ironed her husband’s shirts, and got dressed up when they needed to attend neighborhood events. It was a mundane, humdrum life, but it was hers until James died in 1829 and her entire world was turned upside down.

She attended teas, ironed her husband’s shirts, and got dressed up when they needed to attend neighborhood events. It was a mundane, humdrum life, but it was hers until James died in 1829 and her entire world was turned upside down.

Stewart was left penniless since the executors of her husband’s estate refused to grant her his military pension or his inheritance.

Grew replied to the letter, saying that having an executive committee was “expedient and desirable” and that each female anti-slavery society should send delegates to New York City in May 1837 for a convention.

It was an unprecedented national convention of women in the United States.

They declared it “the duty of woman, and the province of woman, to plead her cause of the oppressed in our land and to do all that she can by her voice, and her pen, and her purse, and the influence of her example, to overthrow the horrible system of American slavery.”

When these women returned from the convention to their respective states after three days, their abolitionist fervor was heightened.

When these women returned from the convention to their respective states after three days, their abolitionist fervor was heightened.

Although there were one hundred female anti-slavery societies in the United States by this time, some founding members of the AASS were staunchly opposed to bringing woman abolitionists to London.

We should not be surprised if she should so far forget the true dignity of womanhood in her intractable zeal for what she terms ‘principle,’ as to attempt to take her seat as a delegate in the ‘World’s Anti-Slavery Convention.’

If she does, and mutual distrust, heart-burnings, and confusion result from such a step, upon her and her advisors will rest the tremendous onus of putting back the day of the slave’s redemption.

While part of that can be attributed to the racism that ran rampant in some anti-slavery societies, the decision not to attend also came from the delicate social expectations that Black woman abolitionists had to navigate.

"We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love... if possible, forever erased from our statute-books."

Though Black women and their specific needs weren’t considered or represented during the convention, its organizers still proposed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document similar to the Declaration of Independence, which declared that “all men and women are created equal,” and that women should have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration of Sentiments included a ninth and controversial resolution, added by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the twilight before the convention ended: “That it is the duty of women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”

Still, Stanton, Mott, and other organizers were prepared for backlash as news of the declaration and the suffrage resolution circulated through the press, rippling far beyond Seneca Falls.

The convention was an opportunity to garner more support and “to secure for [woman] political, legal, and social equality with man, until her proper sphere is determined, by what alone should determine it, her Powers and Capacities, strengthened and refined by an education in accordance with her nature.”

Truth’s work brought her into the company of white abolitionists, including Mott and Stanton, who considered her an equal and themselves an ally to Truth’s cause. That level of solidarity didn’t last.