Militant opponents of slavery in 19th‐century USA. In the first two decades of the 19th century, there was only a handful of individual abolitionists, but thereafter, fired by religious revivalism, the abolition movement became a strong political force. Prominent as writers and orators were the Boston newspaper‐owner William Lloyd Garrison, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose anti‐slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 1.5 million copies within a year of its publication in 1852), and the ex‐slave Frederick Douglass. The abolitionist cause at first found little support in Congress or the main political parties, except among a few individuals such as Charles Sumner, but it played an increasing part in precipitating the political division that led to the American Civil War.