The movement to end slavery was never one group with one plan. It was many people, and they did not always get along. Looking at how they handled their differences can help animal advocates today.

Two kinds of reformers

Early on, organized antislavery work was mostly about gradual or conditional emancipation, and Garrison himself began by backing colonization and gradual abolition. He changed his mind after reading the Black writers David Walker and James Forten. In Britain, Wilberforce and Clarkson were called gradualists. A young Quaker widow, Elizabeth Heyrick, argued for immediate abolition, pointing out that British shoppers fueled the cruelty by buying its sugar. Within the Anti-Slavery Society she won the day, and the group shifted to immediatism by 1830. The writer who tells her story calls the whole effort a relay race, with each generation passing the baton.

Did they fight each other?

Yes, sometimes bitterly. Heyrick annoyed Wilberforce enough that he called on abolitionists to ignore her. The American society split in 1840. Yet her arguments needed the groundwork the gradualists had laid. They were running the same race.

Enslavers who woke up

Robert Carter III is the best-known example. He inherited over 65,000 acres and almost 300 enslaved people, and by his own later conviction he freed over 500 in stages, the largest single manumission before the Civil War. What changed him? He joined an anti-slavery Baptist church and found the treatment of enslaved people disturbing. It was a faith community and his own conscience, not a single speech. His family opposed him. After his death, heirs challenged the deed, but the court upheld it in 1808.

The Quakers show how change spreads one conversation at a time. John Woolman stayed with slaveholding Quaker families and argued the case one family at a time. A decade after his death, the Yearly Meeting urged members to free enslaved people and pay them for their work, and by 1784 Quakers who held people in slavery were disowned. By 1790, it appears that no Friends in the United States owned slaves. Even then, few Virginia Quakers sought to end slavery for the whole state, and they focused on clearing their own members’ consciences.

Freed people were rarely compensated. The Quaker call to pay people for their work was unusual. When Britain ended slavery in 1833, the money went to the owners, not to the freed people.

Kind owners were still owners

Naturalist John Bartram’s enslaved workers were treated better than usual and sat at the table with the family. That was real kindness. It still was not freedom. Better treatment helps, and it is not where the story ends.

Where the comparison falls short

Enslaved people were not silent. They led, wrote, spoke and organized. Frederick Douglass, David Walker and James Forten shaped the movement. Animals cannot speak for themselves, so those of us who speak for them carry a heavy responsibility to be humble. People and animals are not the same, and no comparison is perfect. What carries over is how reformers behave: how they treat each other, and how they reach a conscience that is not yet awake.

What I take from this

• Patient persuasion and bold demands both did their part.
• Conversations that invite a change of heart worked better than attacks.
• Welfare gains can be steps toward abolition, if we keep walking.

In Part 2, I look at where this is happening today.

This article was written at the peaceful Living Springs Log House on 14.75 acres in the Arkansas Ozarks (livingspringsloghouse.com). The land is now for sale, and part of the money raised from the sale will fund the Animal Earth Alliance van and the finishing building project at All Beings Sanctuary.

Written together with Claude. The ideas, the historical question, and the connection to today’s movement came from Patricia. Claude helped research and expand the history and write it up.