🌅 How Mass Media Took Abolitionism Mainstream

SOURCE

National Museum of American History

WHAT TO KNOW

• The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was an abolitionist movement founded in the 1830s that played a key role in spreading anti-slavery sentiment throughout middle-class society in the North before the Civil War. Unlike earlier abolitionist movements, the AASS advocated for the immediate and uncompensated end of slavery, and made moral persuasion the primary focus in its fight rather than political action. By 1840, the society had grown to include some 1,600 auxiliary organizations and totaled between 100,000 and 200,000 members.

WHY IT MATTERS

• From the outset, the AASS understood the importance of establishing the facts of slavery, leveraging statistical tables, charts, and calculations to quantify the institution’s immorality. The society also recognized the need to reach a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it created one of the first national mass media markets by churning out numerous almanacs, narratives, gift books, broadsides, and visual works that argued for the abolition of slavery and illustrated its incongruencies with the notions of liberty, freedom, and equality espoused by not only the nation’s founding document, but its leading religious and moral institutions, as well.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The AASS was born after opposition in the 1820s and 1830s to one of the country’s then well-known abolitionist movements, the American Colonization Society (ACS). Like the AASS, the ACS was composed of predominantly white members. However, unlike the AASS, the ACS argued for a slower, more gradual end of slavery that prioritized state rights and supported the migration of freed people to Africa. Its policy of gradualism gave rise to the radical “immediatist” approach of the AASS and other organizations.