Thesis

THESIS

30 years before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lydia Maria Child addressed her fellow Northerners in An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. She urged them to break through the barrier of their racial prejudice, and direct their efforts toward the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal rights for African Americans. While An Appeal reached only several thousand readers directly, it had a formative influence on leading antislavery figures Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These men continued her work, helping to transform the prevailing Northern view about slavery and making emancipation possible.


Lydia Maria Child, photograph. [Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.]

Frontispiece of An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, ​​​​​​​1833.