ABOLITIONISTS, the extreme section of the anti-slavery party in the United States, who advocated immediate sweeping away by the national government of Southern slavery, without regard to constitutional guarantees, vested interests, or political facts; this section and its nickname date from about 1835. Grad ual abolition had been the desire of many of the best men even of the South; and till after the War of 1812 there was no prejudice against the freest expression of opinion on the sub ject. But the effects of Whitney's cotton-gin were now beginning to be felt in making the slave system for the time enormously profit able; and the Missouri Compromise, with the insistence of the South thereafter that States should be admitted only in pairs, one slave and one free, showed that the time of apathy had gone by. The new zeal of the South in up holding, increasing and justifying the system was met by a new intensity of the North in opposing it, though for a long time confined to a small band of agitators. In 1833 the National Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Philadel phia; in 1831 William Lloyd Garrison had founded the Liberator, a weekly continued till 1866, filled from the first with the fiercest de nunciation not only of the system but of all connected with it; and a brilliant band of ora tors, philanthropists and growing political forces,— Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Gerrit Smith and women like Lucretia ,Mott,— kept the public mind on the alert and furnished a monotonous moral to the course of political events which the people might not otherwise have drawn so readily. There were grades
even among these; and the extremists denied the duty of obeying the United States Consti tution, since it contained the clause warranting the Fugitive Slave Law, which was denounced as covenant with death and an agreement with hell." In practice they violated it system atically by assisting in the escape of runaway slaves, through the machinery known as the "Underground Railroad,)) concealing them from pursuit and forwarding them from stage to stage till they reached Canada. But in 1840 the abolitionists divided on the question of the formation of a political anti-slavery party, and the two wings remained active on separate lines to the end. It was largely due to the abolitionists that the Civil War, when it came, was regarded by the North chiefly as an anti slavery conflict, and they looked upon the Emancipation Proclamation as a vindication of this view. See ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY; LIBER TY PARTY ; SLAVERY ; UNITED STATES - CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR.