Town Hall Reflection

The Town Hall meeting was not only entertaining, but also an educational experience. I learned much about the social climate of America through the lives of abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates. One thing I did find interesting though, was the lack of any pro-slavery arguments or advocates. This Town Hall meeting was much more akin to an anti-slavery convention where people shared their testimony and life's work towards the abolishment of slavery.

Many of the speakers' testimonies mentioned some type of a "Society," many of them being founders. Richard Allen was a founder of the Free African Society; Lucretia Mott co-founded the Philadelphia Antislavery Society; Elizabeth Buffum Chace founded the Fall River Antislavery Society; William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Antislavery Society and co-founded the American Antislavery Society, and the list goes on. This concept of societies was entirely foreign to me before I began my research and I didn't fully grasp how big of a part they played in the movement towards abolition. There were even smaller subsections of societies. For example, all female ones, such as the Female Antislavery Society, which Abby Keller Foster served as the secretary for. 

Education and literature was a powerful force in the fight for abolition. Especially for free or escaped Blacks. The story of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper is an exceptionally powerful one on this front. She was a strong advocate for education being the way to destroy slavery. Born a free woman in Baltimore, she grew to become a poet and essayist with very striking quotes such as "True equality is not divisible. It can not only be given to some and not to others."Another great example of this method of attack is the life of Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery, who taught himself how to read, escaped slavery, and became one of the country's most prolific and well-respected speakers.

Though education and writing books was certainly many's method of attack, some preferred to take a very direct and radical approach. Nat Turner and John Brown are the two illustrations of a violent approach to abolition, through Nat Turner's Rebellion and Bleeding Kansas. Both of these men, though one a slave and the other a free white man, believed themselves to be an agent of God, sent to put an immediate end to the abominable act of slavery, regardless of the violence it took to reach that result. Both of their first actions was to kill slave owners, though Nat Turner went as far as to kill the slave owner's family as well. Both were caught rather swiftly and put to death by hanging, but they gave the country a preview of how bloody the fight over slavery would get in the future.