PRINCETON — The recent PBS series, “The Abolitionists,” focused on two of the most famous activists in the struggle to abolish American slavery, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Both these radical anti-slavery leaders, one black and one white, took their cause to the people of Princeton in the 1850s and 1860s.

A former slave, Frederick Douglass became the most well-known African-American of the 19th century. Owen Lovejoy was largely responsible for his visit to Princeton in 1853 to address the Illinois state convention of the Free Democratic Party, which met at Lovejoy’s Hampshire Colony Congregational Church on Oct. 25 and 26. Douglass and Lovejoy had helped found the organization the previous year in their continuing attempt to sustain a national anti-slavery party.

Both Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the abolitionist newspaper, “The Liberator,” stood for immediate emancipation. They had worked together in the abolitionist movement in the early 1840s but parted ways over strategy. Garrison’s approach for decades was moral persuasion – trying to convince Southern slaveholders to repent and free their slaves. He believed the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and thus the U.S. government was tainted from the start.