Abolitionist Society Convention
In class, we will be reenacting a 1850s Abolitionist Society Convention meeting. Each student will select a leader of the abolitionist movement. Your assignment is to research your leader and complete the questions and charts. On the day of the convention you will role-play the leader and participate in the discussion. You will be graded on the worksheet questions, the chart, and your participation in the discussion. Standard 2 will be assessed.
In your research, you want to answer the following questions and take notes on the information you find. All the information that you gather will help you when you portray the abolitionist at the convention. The information will help you understand the role your leader played in the abolition movement.
1. Describe your up bringing and how it related to how and why you became an abolitionist? Where were you born (North or South)? What was your social status at birth (enslaved, free, upper class, etc.)?
2. Describe your education and religious tradition as they relate to your fight against slavery.
3. By what primary means did you work for the cause? What other strategies did you support?
4. For which publication did you write, publish, or contribute?
5. What anti-slavery organizations did you found or work for?
6. What difficulties did you face from inside (disagreements, leadership style) or outside the movement (heckling, social isolation, violence, etc.)?
7. What kind of impact did you make on ending slavery, or people's opinions about the imperative to end slavery?
8. What other reforms or movements did you support (temperance, women's rights, public education, etc.)?
9. Look at the list of the other abolitionists in our class. Do any of them figure in your biography? When and where did you encounter them? Did you agree with them at all times or did you part ways on certain issues?
10. Sources/Bibliography (MLA style) (author. title. publishing company, place of publication, and date of publication.)
-Consideration of a proposal to create a political party that shall run candidates advocating the immediate abolition of slavery throughout these States.
-Consideration of a proposal that we support a movement sponsored by one Henry David Thoreau to cease paying our taxes to this Government of Slave Owners, even if we must go to jail as a consequence.
-Consideration of proposal that our organization fight for the emancipation of the enslaved - Negro and Women - with equal vigor and immediacy.
-Consideration of a proposal that the Northern free states secede from the Union because the U.S. Constitution has been from its inception a pro-slavery document.
-Consideration of a proposal sent to us in secret by a free Negro who is currently planning to seize a federal arsenal in an unspecified border state by armed force. His intentions are to create a general slave uprising within that state which will free that state. He wishes to know if we will: A)Send him money to aid his cause. B) Send him men among you ready to fight.
After consideration of these proposals and a vote on the same, the meeting shall be adjourned.