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The Western Anti-Slavery Society (ca. 1842-1861) was an Ohio-based organization dedicated to the abolition of slavery in the United States. Although the buying and selling of slaves in Ohio was outlawed in the state’s founding constitution (1802), making Ohio a “free state,” enslaved persons who travelled to Ohio with their enslavers were not automatically freed until a state constitutional amendment closed this loophole in 1851. The status of neighbouring Kentucky as a “slave state” meant slavery and abolition were pertinent issues in Ohio even though the state itself was putatively free. The abolition work done by Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Society led, in 1835, to the founding of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society (OSASS) in Zanesville, Ohio. The Society published a newspaper advocating for abolition, but was not interested in the wider political activities (including women’s rights) of the eastern-based American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS, headed by William Lloyd Garrison) with which it was affiliated, and in 1840 disaffiliated from the AASS. In 1842 the OSASS considered reaffiliating itself the AASS but deliberated for so long that an impatient group of members broke off and formed their own Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society. The new society brought in abolitionist speakers, started an abolitionist newspaper (the Anti-Slavery Bugle), affiliated with the AASS, and soon changed its name to the Western Anti-Slavery Society (WASS). Membership peaked in 1847 and by 1860 the WASS had run out of money, but kept going with the help of donations from abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster. The final issue of the Anti-Slavery Bugle was published on 4 May 1861. Several weeks earlier, on 12 April 1861, the American Civil War had begun, transforming the rhetorical and legislative battles between free states and slave states into an actual war, in which Ohio fought on the Union side. On 1 January 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all enslaved persons within the breakaway Confederate States of America to be henceforth free – thus accomplishing, at least nominally, the abolitionists’ goal.

Sources: “Western Anti-Slavery Society,” Encyclopedia of African-American History 1619-1895, ed. by Paul Finkelman (Oxford University Press, 2009, online).