The Freedom Sympathizers and Fighters

As early as 1786, organizations had been founded to protest the practice of slavery in the United States. For instance, the Pennsylvania Abolition society, whose members included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, was one of the many abolitionist groups that assisted fugitive slaves in their attempts to find freedom in the Free States. People who contributed to the cause of emancipation or freeing of slaves were called "abolitionists."

The most famous of them all is John Brown who was hanged for seizing "the government arsenal at Harper's Ferry,Virginia, in the hope of igniting a general uprising of slaves" in 1859 (Blockson, 14). Native Americans such as the Ottawa Indians, Seminoles, and Shinnecocks also joined the movement to freedom. Of course, there were many African American themselves who persevered and risked persecution for this cause. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas and William Still are just few of the African Americans who led the road to freedom. Other important people in American history who were Abolitionists include Thaddeus Stevens, Alan Pinkerton, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Lloyd Garrison.