The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act

Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist and Womens rights activist. Her journals, fiction and domestic manuals reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. She at times shocked her audience, as she tried to take on issues of both m ... Read more

Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist and Womens rights activist. Her journals, fiction and domestic manuals reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. She at times shocked her audience, as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories. After reading the writing of William Lloyd Garrison, she and her husband became ardent abolitionists. Her book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, was published in 1831. In it, she argued from a historical, political, economic, legal, but especially, a moral standpoint for the immediate emancipation of all slaves without compensation to the slaveholders. She is believed to be the first white person to author a book in support of that policy. The book was the first anti-slavery work printed in America in book form, and she followed it up with several smaller works on the same subject. This edition of The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and pictures of famous abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more. Less