American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society facts for kids
The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society split off from the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 over, according to Lewis Tappan, was William Lloyd Garrisons goals of " 'making an experiment upon the public' by foisting a host of radical issues upon the society." Lewis Tappan and his brother, Arthur, aimed for "a new organization that, in his draft, would foreswear any effort 'to break up existing organizations in church or state' and would only 'give impetus to the usual forms of social action.' " Tappan renounced Garrisonian efforts to reveal the federal Constitution ws a "slave compact" that should be replaced. Within two years of the 1840 Society schism over the appointment of Abby Kelley to the Society business committee and efforts to wed abolition with first-wave feminism (and, to a lesser extent, over the roles of African-American leaders), the Tappan brothers, Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Cornish, Edward Beecher, John Greenleaf Whittier, James G. Birney, Theodore S. Wright, Amos A. Phelps, and their adherents had seceded from the American Anti-Slavery Society to form their "new organization."
Members of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society held, first, that first-wave feminismad diverted attention from the abolitionist cause; and, second, derivative topics on gender should maintain distinctions from said cause. This Society soon developed its own factionalism between those for (such as Birney), and those against, a national abolitionist political party. Six African-American men also seceded to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, principally due to a potential conflation of female leadership with white feminism in the American Anti-Slavery Society. The formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association and ethno-racial arguments by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her weekly The Revolution substantiated these fears, to a certain degree, for a number of these men. Six black women did become NWSA members after Reconstruction.
