ABSTRACT
Frederick Douglass was so much a part of the Abolition movement from 1838 to the final overthrow of slavery in the United States, that his career will be the better understood after a brief review of the condition of the country as affected by the evil during those years. The results of Whitney's invention of the cotton gin were such as to check the current of sentiment in favour of emancipation, which had found expression in the sayings of Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and other Revolutionary leaders. On July 4, 1834, an anti-slavery meeting in New York was made the occasion of a frightful riot. At Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1835, an anti-slavery speaker, Rev. O. Scott, son of an ex-governor, was forcibly prevented from delivering a lecture, and his notes were torn up. A call was issued for a national anti-slavery convention, to be held in Philadelphia in 1833, for the purpose of forming a National Anti-Slavery Society.
