Hey everyone, welcome to the 10th episode of our Civil War podcast. My name is Rich, and right there is Tracy.

Hello y'all, welcome to the podcast. So last week we took a look at some pro-slavery arguments that were used in the Antibellum South to justify their peculiar institution. And as promised, we'll use this episode to take a look at the flip side of that coin. That is the significance of the abolitionist movement in the North.

And just a framework discussion of the abolitionist movement will lead off with a quote by Frederick Douglass. He said,

I expose slavery in this country because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to him the light of truth is death.

That quote could have been the mission statement for abolitionists in the pre-civil war era. You remember we mentioned Frederick Douglass back in the very first episode of the podcast.

He was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, probably in the year 1818. Frederick Douglass spent his early years living with his maternal grandmother only seeing his mother a handful of times before her death when he was around 10 years old.

All Douglass knew of his father was that he was a white man. During his childhood years, Douglass was exposed to the miseries and degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand severe whippings and spending a lot of time cold and hungry.

When he was about eight, Frederick Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Ald. Ald's wife, Sarah, in defiance of a ban on teaching slaves to read and write, taught Douglass the alphabet.

When Hugh Ald put a stop to his wife's lessons, Douglass determined to educate himself and so he continued to learn from white children and others in the neighborhood.

Douglass spent seven relatively comfortable years in Baltimore before being returned to the country where he was eventually sent to work for Edward Covey who had a reputation as a slave breaker.

Covey's constant brutal abuse nearly did break the 16-year-old Douglass, but eventually Douglass fought back. That pivotal incident is depicted compellingly in Douglass's first autobiography.

After losing that physical confrontation with Douglass, Covey never beat him again.

Douglass tried to escape from slavery twice before he succeeded. In September 1838, while he was working in a Baltimore shipyard, Douglass was assisted in his final attempt by Anna Murray, a free black woman with whom he'd fallen in love.

On September 3, by train and steamboat, Douglass made his way to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York City in less than 24 hours.

Once he'd arrived, Douglass sent for Anna Murray to meet him. She did, and they married on September 15, 1838, and then settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a flourishing free black community.

At New Bedford, Douglass joined a black church and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. Frederick Douglass found abolitionists to be a small but vocal minority in the north.

Before we go any farther, we should probably stress that, despite what southerners believed, abolitionists were in fact ever only a small minority in the north.

Remember we said in the last episode that by today's standards, most people are the north, where what we would consider racist.

And even those in the north, who had anti-slavery sentiments, such as Abraham Lincoln, they still readily acknowledged that slavery had a constitutional right to exist in the south.

They thought the best the north could do was to quarantine slavery in its existing areas by preventing it spread into the new western territories.

So the point is that abolitionists were small but vocal minority, and were really quite radical in their desire to abolish slavery entirely immediately.

Right. Calling for immediate emancipation set abolitionists apart from those with more moderate anti-slavery sentiments.

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