Abolitionism
Within the context of American history, abolitionism refers to the movement to end slavery. Slavery persisted until 1864, when the Civil War ended and President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was followed by a series of Constitutional Amendments, revealing the extensive impact the movement had on contemporary American life (Walters, 1984). Brown (2006) notes that the American abolitionist movement had an even broader and more global effect because it influenced British domestic policy regarding the morality of slavery. Whereas slavery was primarily viewed for its economic benefits in the United States, slavery lacked this core dimension in the Old World and thus it became easier to promote abolitionism there from a purely moral standpoint (Brown, 2006). In the United States, it would require a bloody Civil War and the imposition of enlightened moral values on the bigoted South. Although abolitionism did make substantial and measurable progress in the United States, it did take decades and did not have as rapid an effect as it should have. Even after slavery was abolished, racism continued to infect the American consciousness and prevent the upward social mobility of African-Americans, the freed slaves.
Modern equivalents of abolitionism are evident in the high-profile efforts to end modern slavery in the form of global human trafficking. Slavery has always entailed global human trafficking; this was as true for the trans-Atlantic slave trade as it is for the current slave trade of women. Women are regularly purchased from poor communities around the world and sold into sex slavery and organizations like The Project to End Human Trafficking are therefore modern abolitionists. The same core ideas that were relevant to American abolitionism in the nineteenth century are applicable to the global projects to end human trafficking. For example, a human rights-based approach rooted in common sense morality underwrites both incarnations of the abolitionist movement.
References
Brown, C.L. (2006). Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. UNC Press.
The Project to End Human Trafficking (2013). Website retrieved: http://www.endhumantrafficking.org/
Walters, R.G. (1984). The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830. New York: Norton.
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