Gamaliel Bailey

Table of Contents

Introduction References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Gamaliel Bailey

American journalist

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Quick Facts

Born:: December 3, 1807, Mount Holly, New Jersey, U.S.

Died:: June 5, 1859, at sea en route to Europe (aged 51)

See all related content

Gamaliel Bailey (born December 3, 1807, Mount Holly, New Jersey, U.S.—died June 5, 1859, at sea en route to Europe) was a journalist and a leader of the abolition movement prior to the American Civil War.

Bailey graduated from the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1827; in 1834 he was a lecturer on physiology at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Lane Seminary debates on slavery stirred him to become an ardent abolitionist. In 1836 he joined James G. Birney in editing the Cincinnati Philanthropist, the first antislavery organ in the west. Later, as sole proprietor, he persisted in airing his views even though his printing office was repeatedly wrecked by proslavery mobs. In 1843 he launched a daily paper, the Herald.

In January 1847 Bailey became editor of The National Era, established in Washington, D.C., by the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. With its considerable circulation, this paper exerted a strong political and moral influence. Among its contributors were Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Parker; in its pages Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a serial in 1851–52.

Bailey died while making a voyage to Europe for his health.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

abolitionism

Table of Contents

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images & Videos

How the Whitney Plantation teaches the history of slavery

See how European influence in West Africa led to the mass exportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas

The remarkable resilience of enslaved people in colonial America

How the Underground Railroad helped enslaved people find freedom

What we can learn from Frederick Douglass today

Know about slavery, human trafficking, and the elements of human trafficking

For Students

Abolitionism Key Facts

Abolitionism Timeline

Causes and Effects of Abolitionism

abolitionism

European and American social movement

Also known as: abolition movement, antislavery movement

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Mar 18, 2025 • Article History

Also called:: abolition movement

Key People:: William Lloyd Garrison; Anna Murray Douglass; John Newton; Frederick Douglass; Horace Greeley

Related Topics:: slavery; social movement; personal-liberty laws

See all related content

abolitionism, (c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. The intensification of slavery as a system, which followed Portuguese trafficking of enslaved Africans beginning in the 15th century, was driven by the European colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the plantation economy generated an immense demand for low-cost labour. Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated total of 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. The brutality of slavery, made increasingly visible by the scale of its practice, sparked a reaction that insisted on its abolition altogether.

Origin of the abolition movement

The abolition movement began with criticism by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment of slavery’s violation of the “rights of man.” Quaker and other, evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, because slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804. But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the massive plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America. Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans into the British colonies and the United States. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, these forces succeeded in getting the slave trade to the British colonies abolished in 1807. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves that same year, though widespread smuggling continued until about 1862.

Antislavery forces then concentrated on winning the emancipation of those populations already in slavery. They were triumphant when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in French possessions 10 years later.

Gamaliel Bailey

Britannica Chatbot

abolitionism

Britannica Chatbot