American Anti-Slavery Society in the context of "Susan B. Anthony"

The Liberty Party was an abolitionist political party in the United States before the American Civil War. The party experienced its greatest activity during the 1840s, while remnants persisted as late as 1860. It supported James G. Birney in the presidential elections of 1840 and 1844. Others who attained prominence as leaders of the Liberty Party included Gerrit Smith, Salmon P. Chase, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, and William Goodell. They attempted to work within the federal system created by the United States Constitution to diminish the political influence of the Slave Power and advance the cause of universal emancipation and an integrated, egalitarian society.

In the late 1830s, the antislavery movement in the United States was divided between Garrisonian abolitionists, who advocated nonresistance and anti-clericalism and opposed any involvement in electoral politics, and Anti-Garrisonians, who increasingly argued for the necessity of direct political action and the formation of an anti-slavery third party. At a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1840, the Anti-Garrisonians broke away from the Old Organization to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The New Organization included many political abolitionists who gathered in upstate New York to organize the Liberty Party ahead of the 1840 elections. They rejected the Garrisonian singular emphasis on moral suasion and asserted that abolitionists should oppose slavery by all available means, including by coordinating at the ballot box.

William Lloyd Garrison (December 10, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. He supported the rights of women and in the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the women's suffrage movement.

Garrison promoted "no-governmentism", also known as "anarchism", and rejected the inherent validity of the American government on the basis that its engagement in war, imperialism, and slavery made it corrupt and tyrannical. His belief in individual sovereignty, and critique of coercive authority have been recognized as a precursor to certain strands of modern libertarian thought. He initially opposed violence as a principle and advocated for Christian pacifism against evil; however, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, he recognized the necessity of armed struggle as a means to achieve the abolition of slavery and supported the Lincoln administration's efforts to end the institution. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society and promoted immediate and uncompensated, as opposed to gradual and compensated, emancipation of slaves in the United States.

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society split off from the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. The key issue was whether women could participate in abolitionist organizations; this Society was opposed.

The origin of the split, according to Lewis Tappan, was William Lloyd Garrison's 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 to create "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 as a "slave compact" that should be replaced.

Moral suasion is an appeal to morality, in order to influence or change behavior. A famous example is the attempt by William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society to end slavery in the United States by arguing that the practice was morally wrong. In economics, moral suasion is more specifically defined as "the attempt to coerce private economic activity via governmental exhortation in directions not already defined or dictated by existing statute law." The "moral" aspect comes from the pressure for "moral responsibility" to operate in a way that is consistent with furthering the good of the economy. Moral suasion in this narrower sense is also sometimes known as jawboning. In rhetoric, moral suasion is closely aligned with Aristotle's concept of pathos, which is one of the three modes of persuasion and describes an appeal to the moral principles of the audience.

The American Equal Rights Association (AERA) was formed in 1866 in the United States. According to its constitution, its purpose was "to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex."Some of the more prominent reform activists of that time were members, including women and men, blacks and whites.

The AERA was created by the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, which transformed itself into the new organization. Leaders of the women's movement had earlier suggested the creation of a similar equal rights organization through a merger of their movement with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but that organization did not accept their proposal.