Abolitionists

Campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. In Britain William Wilberforce founded the movement that ended the West Indian slave trade in 1807. The 1833 Anti-Slavery Act abolished slavery in the British empire, with profound effects upon events in the West Indies and southern Africa. American abolitionists included W. L. Garrison, ex-slave Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, implemented after the American Civil War.