On a visit to Philadelphia in the fall of 1841, a friend handed the African American abolitionist William H. Johnson a recently printed “Human Right[s] Circular” and asked for a response. The document had apparently called for a World’s Human Rights Convention, news the Pennsylvania abolitionist received with great enthusiasm. In his public reaction, published in The Liberator and addressed to fellow abolitionist Henry C. Wright, the circular’s probable author, Johnson claimed that such a convention was long overdue. “If the anti-slavery cause had been productive of no other good,” he wrote, “it has led to the inquiry of the nature of all those various relations of human beings, commonly known by the name of human rights.” Despite exciting “a deep and abiding interest,” these inquiries had, until now, been “very limited,” Johnson admitted, and he believed it was time to make the “equality of human rights… a great central, practical truth, and not a mere rhetorical flourish.” Such a “complex subject,” he told his friend and colleague, “was worthy the attention of the world.”
Much to Johnson’s dismay, the World’s Human Rights Convention went off like a lead balloon. It turns out that organizing a global conference designed to fight slavery and end oppression across the globe was harder than it first seemed, especially considering that its chief organizers were a penurious team of self-published writers, reformers, and itinerant speakers. As a result, the convention lived and died in a matter of months. The movement, well, moved, quickly setting its sights on new projects and ideas. Historians have thus only ever seen the World’s Human Rights Convention as a minor footnote within the history of a movement that never lacked for idealism and never stopped arguing long enough to pull off something of that order and magnitude. Yet even if only the germ of an idea, the planning of the World’s Human Rights Convention deserves pausing over, for it is perhaps the earliest expression of human rights thinking in American history.
Understanding the convention requires understanding the abolitionist imagination from whence it came. Henry C. Wright, the mastermind behind it all, was many things: pacifist, anarchist, feminist, utopian. He was also a Garrisonian. So-named because of their leader and bespectacled editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, Garrisonains were the most radical anti-slavery faction of all. Their abolitionism was not “gradual”; it was “immediatist.” They were not just anti-slavery; they believed in racial equality. And as a rule, most Garrisonains were not just religious; they were Christian perfectionists, whose activism aimed at revolutionizing hearts and minds as much as ending slavery.
Most notably, to be a Garrisonian also meant hewing to a strict no-voting stance.