Abolitionist, in American politics, specifically a member of the anti-slavery party, which dates from 1829, when a handful of enthusiasts rallied around the stalwart figure of William Lloyd Garrison in a fierce crusade against slave-owners as criminals. In 1831, Garrison founded the first Abolitionist paper, The Liberator. In 1832 the New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Boston, and in 1833 the growth of abolition sentiment led to the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, with Beriah Green as its president and John G. Whittier as one of the secretaries. In 1840 the Abolitionists divided into two wings, one favoring abolition through constitutional amendment, the other, with Wendell Phillips as its chief spokesman, denouncing the constitution as a bulwark of slavery. Anti-slavery sentiment grew faster than the party which claimed to be its exponent. Before the war no large number of citizens, even in the North, were avowed Abolitionists, though after the war a majority of Northerners proudly insisted that they had always been Abolitionists. And in truth they could point back to the fact that Abolitonist was a term of contempt which the Democrats usually applied to all Republicans, and which the men of the South applied indiscriminately to all Northerners who were not Democrats. The word itself, even, in connection with slave-emancipation, was not a new one. In England and all her colonies it had been familiarly applied to the anti-slavery agitators led by Wilberforce and had been accepted by them. Thus, T. Clarkson says, "Many looked upon the Abolitionists as monsters" ("Slave Trade," ii. 212, 1790). In America also the term had been in use to denote the opponents of slavery who began an intermittent protest even before the Revolution; but as a party name it belongs distinctively to the movement of which Garrison was the first apostle.