Penguin Encyclopedia of American History

AAbington School District v. Schempp (1963), 8-1 decision of the *Warren Court overturning a Pennsylvania law that required morning Bible reading in the state's public schools. The Court ruled that the law breached the wall of separation between church and state that had been erected by the religion clauses-the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses-of the First Amendment. As Justice Tom Clark explained: "[T]he Establishment Clause has been directly considered by this Court eight times in the past score of years and, with only one Justice dissenting on the point, it has consistently held that the clause withdrew all legislative power respecting religious belief or the expression thereof. The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution. That is to say that to withstand the strictures of the Establishment Clause there must be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion. The Free Exercise Clause, likewise considered many times here, withdraws from legislative power, state and federal, the exertion of any restraint on the free exercise of religion. Its purpose is to secure religious liberty in the individual by prohibiting any invasions thereof by civil authority." The one justice who dissented in this and similar cases, Potter Stewart, argued that the Court was not manifesting neutrality toward religion but hostility (see *Church-State Relations). >Abolitionists (1830-70), advocates of immediate emancipation of slaves and their integration into American society. Most antislavery people were not abolitionists. The "free-soilers" sought to prevent the extension of slavery into new regions, generally believing that slavery, confined to the states where it then existed, would eventually die out. The colonizationists (see *Colonization) coupled emancipation with deportation in the widely shared belief that the white and black races could not live together. After 1830, most Southerners were violently opposed to emancipation and most Northerners to racial equality and integration. Both abhorred abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Gradualist emancipation sentiment had been strong in both North and South from the American Revolution until 1830. Thereafter the South effectively suppressed such views and the North acquiesced, Northern capitalists being implicated in Southern slave-based prosperity and Northern working people being unwilling to compete with free black labor. But a wave of religious revivalism in the 1820s planted the seeds of an abolitionist movement in men-and especially women-who came to see slavery as sinful. In the early 1830s a number of able propagandists, clergymen, and philanthropists took up the cause, among them William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Sarah and Angelica Grimke, Theodore Dwight Weld, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Arthur and Lewis Tappan. *Free blacks were numerous in the movement-including such prominent lecturers as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth-but they were denied positions of leadership. The American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, spawned branches throughout the North. Membership peaked in 1840 at about 200,000, the majority of them women. The abolitionists engaged in propaganda through churches and public meetings, the press (see *Liberator, The), and petitions to Congress (see *Gag Rules). They were met by hostility, ranging from the burning of abolitionist literature taken from the mails in the South to mob violence in the North culminating in the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. In 1840 the movement split, Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society continuing to pursue nonviolent but uncompromising "moral suasion." GarRosenbaum, Robert A. is the author of 'Penguin Encyclopedia of American History' with ISBN 9780670031993 and ISBN 0670031992.