Abolitionism is a world-wide movement to end human slavery.

In Western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. The slave system aroused little protest until the 17th century when Quaker and evangelical religious groups condemned it as un-Christian and the 18th century, when rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment criticized it for violating the rights of man. Though anti-slavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century, they had little immediate effect on the centers of slavery: the West Indies, South America, and the Southern United States. The Somersett's case in 1772 that emancipated slaves in England, helped launch the movement to abolish slavery. Pennsylvania passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780. Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. Britain abolished slavery throughout the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the French colonies abolished it 15 years later, while slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Abolitionism in the West was preceded by the New Laws of the Indies in 1542, in which Emperor Charles V declared free all Native American slaves, abolishing slavery of these races, and declaring them citizens of the Empire with full rights. The move was inspired by writings of the Spanish monk Bartolome de las Casas and the School of Salamanca. Spanish settlers replaced the Native American slaves with enslaved laborers brought from Africa and thus did not abolish slavery altogether.

In Eastern Europe, abolitionism has played out in movements to end the enslavement of the Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia and to emancipate the serfs in Russia.

In East Asia, abolitionism was evidenced in, for instance, the writings of Yu Hyongwon, a 17th-century Korean Confucian scholar who wrote extensively against slave-holding in 17th-century Korea.

Today, child and adult slavery and forced labour are illegal in most countries, as well as being against international law. Because slavery still exists, however, with an estimated 27 million people enslaved worldwide, a new international abolitionist movement has recently emerged.

Abolitionism was a political movement that sought to abolish the practice of slavery and the worldwide slave trade.

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• Abolitionism proposes to destroy the right and extinguish the principle of self-grovernment for which our forefathers waged a seven years' bloody war, and upon which our whole system of free government is founded.
  • Stephen Douglas

• The Abolitionst…must see that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and suasion.
  • Robert E. Lee

• The delegates of the annual conference are decidedly opposed to modern Abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slave states of the union.
  • Methodist Episcopal Church: General Conference, Cincinnati, May, 1836 After they had driven out most of the Abolitionists. Not long after the Church split over slavery.

"In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade." John Wesley founder of the Methodist Church.[1]

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