Susan B. Anthony

When we think of Susan B. Anthony today, we immediately picture her lifelong battle for women's suffrage. But before she became the face of the women's rights movement, Anthony was a fierce abolitionist who dedicated years to fighting the institution of slavery.

According to the National Women's History Museum, in 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, traveling across New York state to deliver speeches, organize meetings, and distribute anti-slavery pamphlets. The National Park Service notes that after her family moved to Rochester, New York in 1845, they became deeply involved in the antislavery movement, with Quakers

Susan B. Anthony

meeting at their farm nearly every Sunday alongside luminaries like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Her circa 1859 speech "Make the Slave's Case Our Own" reveals the moral passion and rhetorical power she brought to this cause. In it, she challenged her audiences to truly imagine themselves in the position of the enslaved, asking them to feel "that it is our own backs that are bared to the slave driver's lash" and "our own children, that are ruthlessly torn from our yearning mother hearts."

Anthony didn't just appeal to emotions—she systematically dismantled the justifications white Americans used to rationalize slavery. She confronted the racist assumption that enslaved people were somehow different from white people and therefore could endure conditions that would be "torture worse than death" to others. With biting irony, she attacked the argument that enslaved people were better off in America than in Africa, calling it out as the moral hypocrisy it was.

Perhaps most courageously, Anthony refused to let Northern audiences off the hook. She insisted that Northerners were "bound up with the slave-holder in his guilt" through their support of the Constitution, which protected slavery and required citizens to return fugitive slaves. As GovInfo documents, Anthony helped fugitive slaves escape and held anti-slavery rallies, putting her principles into direct action.

At the heart of Anthony's anti-slavery work was a simple but radical idea: the failure to recognize the full humanity of enslaved people was what kept them in chains. This insight would later inform her women's rights activism, as she drew explicit parallels between the oppression of enslaved people and the subjugation of women. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum preserves her legacy as both an abolitionist and suffragist, showing how these struggles were interconnected in her mind.

Anthony's commitment to abolition wasn't without personal cost. She faced hostile crowds and threats during her speaking tours. Yet she persisted, driven by an unwavering moral conviction that slavery was America's greatest sin.

Understanding Anthony's abolitionist work gives us a fuller picture of her life and philosophy. She didn't see various forms of oppression as separate issues but as interconnected struggles for human dignity and equal rights. Her fight against slavery laid the groundwork for her later suffrage work, demonstrating that true equality required dismantling all systems that denied people their fundamental humanity.

AI disclosure: I used Claude AI to smooth the text of Susan B. Anthony writing's and speeches, and format it in a readable way. I then edited the ai generated text. I added photos, links, and captions.