Excerpt from "Declaration of Sentiments"
Published in The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writing, 1963

Edited by Louis Ruchames

With the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, a new government based on what Americans believed were the natural rights of human beings was created. Those rights had a number of dimensions, but they all reduced to a single idea: freedom. And yet when Americans looked around them, they saw that many people were not free.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States became increasingly divided over the question of slavery. To wealthy Southern plantation owners, slavery was believed to be necessary for their economic survival. The invention of the cotton gin, a machine for separating cotton fibers from seeds, had made cotton highly profitable. Along with...