ed in the Atlantic region and on the frontier (Wiltse, 1961). Before the 1830s, the popular imagination about abolitionism was that it should be gradualist rather than immediate, though that did not prevent slavery proponents from resisting antislavery efforts, particularly in the Suth. Under the influence of the revivalist movement and the Second Great Awakening, which had shown that souls could be redeemed through prayer and temperance, the abolitionist sought to similarly purge American society of its deepest moral affliction. The fact that the call for immediate abolition was in part due to emotionalistic religious convictions may account for the "frozen hostility" of abolitionists that later greeted Abraham Lincoln's efforts on behalf of slaves (Donald, 1956, pp. 25, 21).
Thus the cultural environment in which the OSP was established in 1829, the first successful "foundation," as Davis calls it (1990, p. 99), of an order comprising black nuns in the US. Four ethnically Haitian francophone women living in Baltimore as refugees from a slave rebellio
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