he women's rights movement with the more militant feminist leadership pursuing its political and economic goals separately from the black suffrage movement and the established political parties for approximately two decades after 1870.
Emergence of Emancipation as a War Aim
During the first half of the 19th century, by which time all of the northern states had abolished slavery, Brock says that in the North, "large numbers of Americans were deeply moved by the injustice done to the slaves" in the South. However, successive compromises in the 1850s over the extensions of slavery into new territories had prevented the intense sectional rivalry between North and South from spilling over into war. A relatively small number of Northerners, the abolitionists, who Sorin says never exceeded one per cent of the population, were (after the early 1830s) in favor of immediate abolition of slavery in the South.
The abolitionists drew their leadership from editors like William Garrison, founder of the militant newspaper, The Liberator, and the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s, members of the evangelical Protestant clergy, in which Quakers in particular were prominent, and various assorted reformers. As passions between North and South intensified in the 1850s over the Underground Railway which spirited runaway slaves to freedom and attempts by slaveowners and slave catchers to require northern states to return them under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the fighting in Bloody Kansas and John Brown's provocative raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, many abolitionists turned to incandescent rhetoric and some financed political violence. According to Gerteis, for the abolitionists, "the fight against slavery pitted right against wrong, civilization against barbarism, liberty against despotism."
There was a much larger group of anti-slavery people in the North, whose numbers grew as what William Seward called in 1858 the "...