Editorial commentary
The address from which this excerpt is drawn was delivered to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, an international gathering of abolitionist activists held in London in 1840 and subsequent years. The convention was a central institutional venue for the international abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.
Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895) was the most prominent African-American political figure of the nineteenth century. He escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, became a leading voice of the antebellum abolitionist movement, served as a diplomatic appointee in the post-Civil War federal government, and produced three autobiographies across his long career — the 1845 Narrative, the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, and the 1881 Life and Times (revised and expanded 1892). His political writing and oratory remain foundational reference points for the American political tradition.
The convention's institutional context was the post-1833 period — the period after British emancipation of the enslaved population of the British West Indies — in which the British abolitionist movement was attempting to extend the pattern of British emancipation to the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and other Atlantic societies in which slavery remained a constitutional and economic institution.
The 1840 convention is also remembered for a specific incident: the refusal of the convention's organizing committee to seat the American women delegates — Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others — who had traveled to London as part of the American delegation. Stanton and Mott's subsequent commitment to women's-rights organizing — the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention is often traced to conversations between them in London — is one of the institutional consequences.
The address operates within the political-engagement orientation of the abolitionist movement, treating the question of how international pressure could be brought to bear on the political institutions of the slaveholding states as a tractable strategic question. The eventual abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, in Cuba in 1886, and in Brazil in 1888 was achieved through specific political and military instruments. The international abolitionist movement developed institutional templates — international conventions, transnational organizing, legal-advocacy networks — that subsequent international human-rights movements would draw on.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
I appeal on behalf of four millions of men, women, and children who are chattels in the Southern States of America. Not for one moment during the past two hundred years has the coloured race upon American soil been free from oppression. To many of you, I doubt not, the subject of slavery is, if not altogether unknown, but indistinctly understood; for the American newspapers, with very few exceptions, will not tell you the truth of what is taking place there.
The slave woman is a victim to the unbridled lust of her master, and her children are by law his property and his slaves. I appeal on behalf of these my outraged sisters — I appeal on behalf of these defenceless children. I ask Englishmen and Englishwomen to remember that 'the wretched in this world must look on every freeman as a friend.'
Give them, then, your sympathy, and let your moral influence be brought to bear upon this question; and let us together so act, that we may, at no distant period, look upon American slavery as among the things that were.
Editorial commentary
The address from which this excerpt is drawn was delivered to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, an international gathering of abolitionist activists held in London in 1840 and subsequent years. The convention was a central institutional venue for the international abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.
Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895) was the most prominent African-American political figure of the nineteenth century. He escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, became a leading voice of the antebellum abolitionist movement, served as a diplomatic appointee in the post-Civil War federal government, and produced three autobiographies across his long career — the 1845 Narrative, the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, and the 1881 Life and Times (revised and expanded 1892). His political writing and oratory remain foundational reference points for the American political tradition.
The convention's institutional context was the post-1833 period — the period after British emancipation of the enslaved population of the British West Indies — in which the British abolitionist movement was attempting to extend the pattern of British emancipation to the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and other Atlantic societies in which slavery remained a constitutional and economic institution.
The 1840 convention is also remembered for a specific incident: the refusal of the convention's organizing committee to seat the American women delegates — Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others — who had traveled to London as part of the American delegation. Stanton and Mott's subsequent commitment to women's-rights organizing — the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention is often traced to conversations between them in London — is one of the institutional consequences.
The address operates within the political-engagement orientation of the abolitionist movement, treating the question of how international pressure could be brought to bear on the political institutions of the slaveholding states as a tractable strategic question. The eventual abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, in Cuba in 1886, and in Brazil in 1888 was achieved through specific political and military instruments. The international abolitionist movement developed institutional templates — international conventions, transnational organizing, legal-advocacy networks — that subsequent international human-rights movements would draw on.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.