liberty and the pursuit of happiness
offices and other infrastructure of the North as the country entered the Industrial Age.
“ In this time, slavery is becoming central, as we understand today, to the national political economy,” said Manisha Sinha, a University of Connecticut history professor whose most recent book“ The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920,” was published in 2024.“ Slave-grown cotton is the largest export from the United States,” she said of the antebellum period.“ Its value exceeds the value of all other exports from the United States”
Harriet Tubman
This massive economic interest solidified the political power of slaveholders, effectively silencing any opposition. The nation’ s entire financial ecosystem was linked to the slave economy. This linkage solidified the political power of slaveholders. It also connected businesses like insurance, banking, and domestic and foreign trade financially to the South’ s slave economy.
History shows that since its beginning Black people resisted slavery in this country. There were hundreds of rebellions, insurrections and conspiracies against it. But Black resistance to slavery found new pathways in the 1820s and 1830s. Up until then, public narratives about“ the peculiar institution” of slavery all but omitted the voices of Black people while understating its cruelty and usually offering tortured justifications for maintaining the status quo.
In 1827, the publication of the nation’ s first Black newspaper, Freedom’ s Journal, finally brought authentic Black voices to the mainstage of that era’ s media. Published by Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish and Bowdoin College’ s first Black graduate, John Russwurm, they offered this explanation for creating their newspaper in a front-page editorial:
“ We wish to plead our own cause. Too long others have spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly … Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by Unnoticed.”
Thus, the Black press was born. It was quickly followed by other influential newspapers by Black writers and editors followed, including David Walker’ s Appeal, in 1829; The Colored American, also founded by Cornish in the 1830s, and eventually The North Star, published by Frederick Douglass, beginning in 1847.
Along with Harriet Tubman, Douglass was a central figure of this era. After escaping slavery in Maryland, Douglass became perhaps the most powerful voice of the push to end the enslavement of Blacks – a movement that, although it included sympathetic Whites, was led by Black activists.
Douglass’ rousing speeches energized the Black convention movement that started with an 1830 meeting of free Black people in Philadelphia. These gatherings served as public forums to discuss abolition and strategies to promote education and opportunity.
When White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison heard Douglass speak for the first time, at an 1841 antislavery convention in Nantucket, Massachusetts, he recalled his reaction in the preface he wrote to Douglass’ book,“ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.”
“ I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment,” Garrison wrote.“ As soon as he had taken his seat, filled with hope and admiration, I rose and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more
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