Question

The anti-slavery movement began in the northern/southern/ eastern states of the United States of America.

Answer 1

Explanation:

Abolitionism (or the Anti-Slavery Movement) in the United States of America was the movement which sought to end slavery in the United States immediately, active both before and during the American Civil War. In the Americas and western Europe, abolitionism was a movement which sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and set slaves free. In the 18th century, enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and English Quakers and some Evangelical denominations condemned slavery as un-Christian. At that time, most slaves were Africans, but thousands of Native Americans were also enslaved. In the 18th century, as many as six million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them on British ships to North America. The colony of Georgia originally prohibited slavery.

Between 1780 and 1804 all Northern states, beginning with An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery from Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation abolishing slavery, sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified a constitution that declared all men equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on this principle brought an end to slavery in the state. In Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts as not applicable to Africans or African Americans. All the states banned the international slave trade by 1790. South Carolina did so in 1787 but in 1803 reversed itself.[2] During the ensuing decades, the abolitionist movement grew in Northern states, and Congress regulated the expansion of slavery as new states were admitted to the Union. The United States federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808 and made slavery unconstitutional in 1865 as a result of the American Civil War.

Historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional and total abolition of slavery in the United States". He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President during the Civil War, or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery.[3]