Abolitionists
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Abolitionists. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in United States history, those who advocated the abolition of African slavery in the Southern States. Agitation became acute after the settlement of the war troubles of 1812- 1815. In 1833, the formation of a National Anti-Slavery Society took place in Philadelphia, and in 1848 of the Free Soil Party. The abolition movement was powerfully promoted by William Lloyd Garrison. arrison, who issued a newspaper, "The Garrison, Liberator," for the better dissemination of his views; and also by Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and others. The more extreme agitators among them denied the duty of obedience to the Constitution, since it contained the clause warranting the Fugitive Slave Law, and they denounced it as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." In practice they violated it by systematically assisting in the escape of runaway slaves. In Boston, Garrison was mobbed, and the abolition cause in the United States counted among its martyrs Elijah Lovejoy, shot in Alton, Ill., Ill., in 1837, and and John Brown, hanged in Virginia in 1859. In 1840, the abolitionists divided on the question of the formation of a political anti-slavery party, and the two wings remained active on separate lines to the end. It was largely due to the abolitionists that the War, when it came, was regarded by the North chiefly as an anti-slavery conflict, and they looked upon the Emancipation Proclamation as a vindication of this view.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
in American history, a name applied to those who urged the immediate and utter abolition of slavery. The term dates from the founding, in 1831, by William Lloyd Garrison, of a paper called The Liberator. The abolitionists were confined chiefly to the North. They were bitter in their denunciation of the fugitive slave law, and promoted the "underground railroad," through whose agency many slaves found their way to freedom. The abolitionists were at no time a political party or organization. Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner were conspicuous in the movement. John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry was regarded as the logical outcome of the methods advocated by the abolitionists. See Slavery; Taney ; Underground Railroad ; Brown ; Garrison ; Phillips ; Whittier ; Free Soil Party ; Civil War ; Confederacy
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Neither entry, in 1910 or 1921, names a single Black abolitionist: Collier's credits Garrison, Phillips and Sumner, while Aiton's adds only that the movement "was confined chiefly to the North." Modern scholarship puts Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Maria Stewart and William Still at the centre of the story, along with women organisers such as the Grimke sisters and Lucretia Mott, and treats escaping slaves themselves as the underground railroad's main agents rather than its cargo. The moral verdict has also flipped: in the era these volumes were written, mainstream American historians commonly dismissed abolitionists as reckless fanatics who provoked an avoidable war, whereas since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s they have generally been read as the war's moral vindication. Aiton's flat claim that they "were at no time a political party or organization" now sits awkwardly beside the Liberty Party of 1840 and the Free Soil Party that Collier's itself records.
Written for this edition, 2026.