appreciation. >> with a clod of hallowed dirt. >> we hope you stay and chat and have a bit more wine and conversation. buy a book and have it signed. thank you all for coming. >> thank you. [ applause ] this monday, watch american history tv in prime time on c-span 3 with a look at the 34th president, dwight david eisenhower. then at 8:00, architect frank gehry. then at 9:00, the president's granddaughter, susan eisenhower.

then at 10:30 p.m., a film about president eisenhower produced by the u.s. army. each week, you can watch classes at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern. this week, ohio state university history professor joan cashin looks at the women's rights movements. this class is from the course of jeffersonian.

>> it has as it's goal the abolition of slavery. the full and complete emancipation of all slaves. this is different. this is different from earlier occasional criticisms of slavery by other americans. there had always been a few people here and there since the revolution who would occasionally speak out against slavery. a quaker, for example, in new jersey, in the 1820s, wrote some essayss wrote that gradual emancipation would be good state by state. this is different. these are team calling for the absolute and full and complete end to slavery. every slave in the united states immediately. the people who are very active in this movement are devout protestants. blacks and whites.

men and women. people from all parts of the united states. we must always remember this is a small number of people. this was never a mainstream movement or never a mass moveme movement. students from our perspective today and we look back at this, of course, slavery should end. of course, slavery should be abolished. the last country to abolished slavery was saudi arabia in 1962. not 1862. to say these things in the 1830s and '40s and '50s took a lot of courage and guts. this is not mainstream opinion. this is going against mainstream opinion. these people are at the cutting edge of reform.

these people are in the vanguard of range. they are saying things that are quite controversial. they get a lot of criticism and opposition as we will see from all over the united states. not just from states with big slave populations, but even in free states and slavery states that had been abolished. there was a lot of criticism. we must remember that the past is different from the present. we must remember the spectrum of political opinion is completely different from what it is today. many of the presidents are, themselves, slave owners. the president of the united states in the 1830s was a very wealthy slave owner, arew jackson. we talked about that at an earlier lecture. jackson said they were dangerous. they were incendiaries.

they were trying to harm the united states. they were trying to harm american society. so, this is something that is a hard fight for abolisionsts. this fight takes place in many different societies. it is a hard fight everywhere. everywhere slave owners fight back. everywhere, slave owners try to counter these criticisms and try to preserve slavery. we will be talking about that in a few minutes. the individuals who get caught up in the movement, the people who lead the movement, there are a lot of people involved with the historical figures.

we can quote a civil rights activists from the 1950s and 1950s about what kind of person would be leading it. i would like to quote a nice phrase from andrew young who was a black political activist and friend of martin luther king. he was with king when he was assassinat assassinated. he served as congress member and mayor. he has held a long career. he said the kind of people who were attracted to the civil rights movement of the 20th century were what he called creative lly maladjusted. people who did in the want to accept the status quo. who thought segregation was wrong and they were credative about it. they wanted to change the status quo. that is a very nice phrase. it really applies in many

respects to the abolitionists. let's talk about the newspaper editors. one in boston. his name was william lloyd garrison. william lloyd garrison was a native of massachusetts. he was a white man. he was from a working class background. his father abandoned the family when he was young. william had to go out to work. he started supporting himself when he was very young. he went into the printing business. he was a printer and he worked for several newspapers. he, for a while, worked for a paper in baltimore. he saw slavery up close and personal in the state of maryland. he was horrified by what he saw. he went back to boston and decided that he was going to open his own newspaper and he was going devote it completely

to abolishing slavery. does anyone know the name of the paper? >> "liberator." >> good. right. "the liberator." >> he founded it in 1831. garrison did the whole thing himself. he wrote many of the articles. he did the actual printing of the paper. this is really is creation and the language in "the liberator" was very blunt. very direct. garrison doesn't hold anything back. he said in his very first issue, he said and i quote, he said that i will be as harsh as truth, as uncompromising of justice, i will not retreat, i will be heard. he said that the united states

constitution was quote, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. you don't hear that in the 19th century or today. a covenant with death and agreement with hell. he is saying this because he says it is a pro-slavery constitution. he says the constitution protects slavery. his language is very blunt. he is very straight forward in his journalism throughout his career. a person, garrison, was very mild mannered and quiet spoken. people who met him would often be surprised with the contrast between his personality and the things he said in his paper. he is completely dedicated to what he is doing. he believes with his newspaper he can change public opinion. he doesn't want to go into politics. he sees american politics is corrupt. he will try to sway public

opinion by using his newspaper. he goes out on the lecture circuit. he was not a great orator. he was a great journalism. his newspaper stays in business until the end of the civil war. not all abolitionists were white. most were portrayed as all white. it was not all white. there were some black abolitionists like david walker. he is from wilmington, north carolina. his mother was a free black woman. he came to the north in the 1820s and he settled in boston. he ran a clothing store in the town's black business district.

he was a devout churchgoer. so was garrison. he knows the bible very well. so was david walker. he is an active member of the methodist church. he is always sympathetic to working-class black people in boston and he is also willing to help fugitive slaves. a fugitive slave showed up at his house and walker would help them. he published a book "entitled to the colored citizens of the world." this is when the word "colored" was used by black people. it doesn't have the negative connotation it has today. in this book, walker calls on black people to assist and lead the black community. he believed in the american work ethic and he believes in the individual ambition. he believes in protestant

values. he says that black people have to work hard to better themselves and to better the black community. but he also denounces slavery. he said it was a crime. he said it went way back in history. he knew quite a lot about history all the way back to ancient egypt. he criticized thomas jefferson. he said that violence might be necessary to end slavery. he said one day god would punish whites for the sin of slavery. this is a book that is just as blunt as garrison's newspaper. it reached a large audience. it reached a large audience in the black population in the north. it was also carried into the south by black travelers and sometimes black sailors who would go from port to port and carry copies with them.

so it reaches quite a large audience. the very next year walker died. he died in 1830. he died suddenly the year after the publication of his book. what do you think the rumor was? just take a guess. that he had been killed. that he dies so suddenly and he is an early middle age. he is not an older man. historians believe that for a long time. now we think he probably died of tuberculosis because a lot of people in boston got tuberculosis and died of the disease. a recent biographer found a newspaper which said he died of

tb. frederick douglass read that book and he said it had a powerful impact on him. some abolitionists are not only white, but they are also southerners. there are a small amount of white people in the south disagreed. a man in kentucky named cassius clay. this is a name from the ancient world. his father or mother, apparently read the history of the ancient world and gave their son cassius clay. cassius clay is the son of a slave owner. he grew up outside of lexington. he has a comfortable upbringing. he is a college graduate. when he was a young man, he inherited his father's estate

and 17 slaves. he also married a young woman who was from the slave-owning elite in kentucky. even when he was in his late teens and early 20s, he made comments in writing and sometimes in public that were anti-slavery. he starts to say things like, one day slavery should end. he says it should end soon. then he says no truly patriotic person could support slavery. he got active in the anti-slavery movement. he gives anti-slavery speeches in kentucky and also in other places in the ohio river valley. he starts printing his newspaper called "the true american." emphasizing patriotism. a true patriot would be

anti-slavery. and as you might imagine, a man in kentucky saying this is going to get criticism. you know, not just verbal criticism. one time a mob broke into his newspaper office and destroyed his press. and cassius clay started to get death threats. he is very determined. he is someone who is very strong willed. he will not back down. although he never emancipated his own slaves. it seems to be the case that his in laws threatened him. his wife's family, apparently, he had a bad relationship with his wife's family. that was true throughout the marriage. it seems to be the case his wife's family threatened him if he decided to free his own slaves. so he didn't. of course, his critics said he was a hypocrite. clay said in his old age it was

a mistake. he was embarrassed about it. he didn't free his own slaves even as he is calling for emancipation. nonethele nonetheless, he goes out on the lecture circuit and faced audiences in kentucky which was a slave state, that were quite hostile. clay was a religious man and knew the bible well. he said most of the time his justification and protection was the constitution. he said the constitution gave him the right to say what he thought about slavery. when he would walk into a room to give a lecture to an audience, he would often hold up a copy of the constitution. he would say this is my protection. then pull a gun out of his bag and hold it up and say this is my protection. he would put the gun down right

there on the table so everybody in the room knew that mr. clay was armed. he carried a gun with him everywhere he went because he got death threats on a regular basis because of his criticisms of slavery. he said later that he was never actually assaulted during a l k lecture. he got many death threats. one day when he was walking down a country road near his house in kentucky in the 1850s, a stranger ran up to him and stabbed him. clay was seriously injured, but he recovered and he continued on his anti-slavery mission. in 1851, he ran for governor of kentucky on the emancipation ticket. he did not win. he got about 5,000 votes. he begins to get more of a profile outside of kentucky.

he is invited to give lectures in other parts of the country in the free states. he spoke to a large crowd in springfield, illinois and guess who was in the audience? >> abraham lincoln. >> he heard him speak. he remembered clay. when lincoln became president in 1860, he gave clay a diplomatic appointment, the ambassador to russia. not the most diplomatic appointment to the core, that would be ambassador to england. that was still political favor for somebody who was a long-time out spoken critic of slavery. clay said later his service in russia mostly consisted of going to parties and drinking a lot and listening to conversations

between russian aristocrats and thinking about what the czar was intervening with the war. he came back to the united states and became more conservative as he got older, but still remained very defiant. became more and more reclusive and died on his farm in 1903. now, some abolitionists were from the south and ex-slaves. the most famous was a man from maryland and his name was? frederick douglass. frederick douglass spelled his name with two "ss." frederick douglass. he was born in the 1880s in

maryland. his father died or deserted the family before he was born. he was owned by a family named anthony. the surname anthony. the anthonys were slave owners in maryland and the city of baltimore as well. frederick douglass' mother died when he was young and he was raised by his grandmother. he was fond and close to his cousins and siblings on the different anthony plantations. dougl douglass said slavery was quite harsh. he witnessed the master flogging of his aunt. he witnessed other relatives and friends being severely punished. he got a very interesting reprieve. he was sent to baltimore to work for a relative of the anthony

family. when he was in baltimore, he learned how to read. the wife of the man he worked for taught him to read. a white woman taught him to read. she thought a slave should be able to read the bible. she was a devout christian. she thought a slave should be able to read the bible although this was illegal in many parts of the south. this was considered dangerous and unacceptable. nonetheless frederick douglass becomes literate because this white woman teaches him how to read. once he learns how to read, he reads everything. he is a very curious and inquisitive little boy. then he gets sent back to the countryside. he gets sent back and a relative died and he was passed with the inheritance from another member of the family and he is working

in the family. he hates it. he is known as a difficult slave. he is perceived by the master as a defiant and difficult young man. by the time he was about 20, he decided he was going to escape. he was going to run away. in 1830, he did get away. he got -- was married to a free black woman and he got his wife to make for him an outfit that sailors wore. sailors had distinctive clothing. if you saw a man or woman walking down the streets of baltimore, you could tell he was a sailor. his wife made a sailor's outfit for him. he passed himself off as a free black man working on the ship. he made it to new york and got off at the dock. standing there and looking disoriented. a black man came up to him and said it is not safe here.

you should keep going. keep moving. why don't you go to boston. it is safer there. a black man intuitive that douglass was a fugitive. he got a job working in a small town outside of boston. almost immediately within a year or two of settling in new england, he gives his first public talk against slavery. douglass turns out to be a compelling public figure and speaker. he is very tall. he is a tall, powerful man. he had a baritone voice. he spoke with great conviction. of course, he is talking about personal experience. he is talking about things happen to him. the punishments he got. the punishments that were inflicted on his relatives and friends. he talked about the slave trade which separated family members from each other. and even though he is a very

compelling and inspiring speaker, he still got heckled and jeered at and pelted with garbage and rotten eggs. some people even said he couldn't be an ex-slave. he was too smart and too articulate to actually have ever been a slave. he published an auto biography to prove he was a slave in 1845. in his book, he talks about the things he was talking about in the lectures. the dehumanizing effects of slavery. how slaves are badly treated. he talks about the corrupting influence that slavery has on white people. even white men who are trying to be good masters can sometimes behave with great cruelty. of course, now that he has a public profile and now he is a

published author, his friends are afraid that the anthony family might hire a slave catcher and try to find him. he traveled around the british isles. he gave public speeches and he comes back to the united states and his friends raise money, approximately $700 to pay off the anthony family. to pay them the value that frederick has as a slave. as a slave, he is worth money to the anthony family. then he is really free. he doesn't have to look over his shoulder. he founded a newspaper in rochester, new york and called it "the north star." the newspaper that he ran himself. he was also interested in other causes.

he was interested in the women's rights movements. he was an early supporter of women's suffrage when that was a radical idea. he also talked about segregation in the north. he talked about the fact in the north many public facilities were closed to black people or they had to sit in the back or sit in the special section. believe it or not, segregation started in the early 19th century north. it spread to the south, but it is a creation of the north. hotels are segregated and most hotels are closed to black people. state of massachusetts, which was one of the few states that allowed black people to vote, nevertheless, did not allow black children to go to public schools. four states in the midwest did not allow black people to own

property. ohio, indiana, illinois and michigan. douglass is very outspoken about the prejudice that he witnesses and experiences as a free man in the north. in the 1850s, he began to change his mind about the methods of abolition. up until that time, he and others were hoping that they could change public opinion. they could persuade people. in the 1850s, he thinks violence may be necessary. maybe that is the way to end slavery. in 1860, he supports lincoln. not with tremendous enthusiasm. lincoln was not an out and out abolitionist as we will discuss later on in the course. lincoln said the expansion of slavery has got to stop.

no more new slave states in the trans mississippi west. he is the only anti-slavery candidate and douglass supports him for that reason. he is a life-long republican. it was the republican party that brought about emancipation. he held several local offices as a republican after the war. he lives a very long time. dies in the 1890s. now as i mentioned a moment ago, giving public lectures against slavery can be dangerous. frederick douglass, found this out. he would travel with somebody. when he was in a small town in indiana in 1843, douglass was very badly injured. he was attacked by a mob of white people. this was pendleton,