Town Hall Reax

 At the Town Hall meeting, there was both fun and useful information shared. The lives of abolitionists and people who fought against slavery taught me a lot about American society. I did find it interesting that there weren't any reasons or supporters of slavery. This Town Hall meeting felt more like an anti-slavery gathering, where people shared their stories and talked about how they had worked their whole lives to end slavery.

A lot of the speakers talked about some kind of "Society," and many of them were founders. The Free African Society was started by Richard Allen. The Philadelphia Antislavery Society was co-founded by Lucretia Mott. The Fall River Antislavery Society was started by Elizabeth Buffum Chace. The New England Antislavery Society and the American Antislavery Society were both started by William Lloyd Garrison. I had never heard of societies and I didn't fully understand how important they were to the movement to end slavery. Even smaller groups of people lived in societies like the Female Antislavery Society, where Abby Keller Foster was the secretary, which was made up of only women. 

Reading and learning were very important in the fight to end slavery. For Black people who are free or have fled. When it comes to this, the story of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper is very strong. She was very sure that schooling was the best way to end slavery. She was born in Baltimore as a free woman and went on to become a poet and essayist. Some of her most famous lines are, "True equality is not divisible." People can't just get it and not get it from other people.Frederick Douglass's life is another great example of this type of attack. He was born into slavery but taught himself to read, fled, and went on to become one of the most famous and prolific speakers in the country.

Even though many people chose to fight through education and writing books, some liked to be very direct and radical. Through their works, Nat Turner's Rebellion and John Brown's Bleeding Kansas, these two people show how violently people tried to end slavery. Even though one was a slave and the other was a free white man, they both thought they were sent by God to end slavery right away, no matter how violent it had to be. As their first act, they both killed slave owners. Nat Turner even killed the slave owner's family and children. They were both caught quickly and hanged to death, but they showed the country how violent the fight over slavery would become in the present.