<P> During and immediately following the American Revolution, Northern states, beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation during the next two decades abolishing slavery, sometimes by gradual emancipation . Massachusetts ratified a constitution that declared all men equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on this principle brought an end to slavery in the state . In other states, such as Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts as not applicable to Africans . During the ensuing decades, the abolitionist movement grew in Northern states, and Congress regulated the expansion of slavery as new states were admitted to the Union . Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807 and abolished slavery in the British Empire in 1833 . The United States criminalized the international slave trade in 1808 and made slavery unconstitutional in 1865 as a result of the American Civil War . </P> <P> Historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional and total abolition of slavery in the United States ." He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President during the Civil War, or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery . </P> <P> The first Americans who made a public protest against slavery were the Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania . Soon after, in April 1688, Quakers in the same town wrote a two - page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends . The Quaker establishment never took action . The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was an unusually early, clear and forceful argument against slavery and initiated the spirit that finally led to the end of slavery in the Society of Friends (1776) and in the state of Pennsylvania (1780). The Quaker Quarterly Meeting of Chester, Pennsylvania, made its first protest in 1711 . Within a few decades the entire slave trade was under attack, being opposed by such leaders as William Burling, Benjamin Lay, Ralph Sandiford, William Southby, and John Woolman . </P> <P> Slavery was banned in the Province of Georgia soon after its founding in 1733 . The colony's founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, fended off repeated attempts by South Carolina merchants and land speculators to introduce slavery to the colony . In 1739, he wrote to the Georgia Trustees urging them to hold firm: "If we allow slaves we act against the very principles by which we associated together, which was to relieve the distresses . Whereas, now we should occasion the misery of thousands in Africa, by setting men upon using arts to buy and bring into perpetual slavery the poor people who now live there free ." The struggle between Georgia and South Carolina led to the first debates in Parliament over the issue of slavery, occurring between 1740 and 1742 . </P>

Who started the first antislavery movement in what would become the united states