author
Charles (Abolitionist) Stearns
A restless antislavery writer and activist, he moved from New England reform circles to Bleeding Kansas and later to the postwar South. His books mix moral argument, political outrage, and firsthand experience from some of the most turbulent corners of 19th-century America.
1 Audiobook
The Way to Abolish Slavery
by Charles (Abolitionist) Stearns
About the author
Born in 1818 and dying in 1899, Charles Stearns is remembered as an American farmer and abolitionist. He wrote fiercely against slavery, including The Fugitive Slave Law of the United States, Shown to Be Unconstitutional, Impolitic, Inhuman, and Diabolical and The Way to Abolish Slavery, works that show how directly he engaged with the moral and political battles of his time.
Stearns was more than a pamphleteer. Sources connected with The Black Man of the South and the Rebels describe him as a white antislavery activist from Massachusetts who took part in the antislavery struggle in Bleeding Kansas, spent time in Colorado Territory during the Civil War, and later moved to Georgia with an idealistic plan to educate and employ formerly enslaved people.
That combination of activism and writing gives his work its particular energy. Rather than speaking from a distance, he wrote as someone who had followed the slavery question into conflict zones, and his books remain useful for readers interested in abolitionist thought, Reconstruction, and the religious intensity that often shaped reform writing in 19th-century America.