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Home Tips > Tips By Category > Tips you can implement daily Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy.
In the early 19th century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in reaction to Congress’ passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of slave codes in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a crusading journalist from Massachusetts, who founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America’s antislavery activists.
Antislavery northerners—many of them free blacks—had begun helping fugitive slaves escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. Known as the Underground Railroad, the organization gained real momentum in the 1830s and eventually helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom.
Harriet Tubman, its most celebrated —conductor,” was a former slave who married a free black man and escaped from Maryland to Philadelphia in 1849. On numerous risky trips south, she helped some 300 other slaves escape before serving as a scout and spy for Union forces in South Carolina during the Civil War.
The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North; it also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro–slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.
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