ABSTRACT
Abolition seemed suddenly to burst upon the public in the 1830's, but this was only because a new and more radical ingredient had been added to older antislavery elements. One abolitionist discovered, when visiting Cincinnati in 1834, that of its almost three thousand Negroes 75 per cent had "worked out their own freedom," and that of some thirty families he visited one week half were saving formidable sums of money to purchase relatives. Thus, during a period of population growth when the number of Negro slaves was increasing by half a million each decade, the forces of abolition were undermanned and ineffective. Most important of all such figures was John Rankin, whose Letters on Slavery, addressed to his brother, a Virginia merchant, constituted a landmark in American abolition. In Boston, Lundy met William Lloyd Garrison, who though only twenty-one years of age, was the veteran editor of two reform publications.
