There were many arguments ranging from moral, legal, and utilitarian. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas argued that slavery went against the laws of nature, which they often expressed in religious language. In the opening lines of the first issue of Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator (January 1, 1831), Garrison writes " My name is LIBERATOR! I propose to hurl my shafts at freedom's deadliest foes! My task is hard-for I am charged to save Man from his brother!-to redeem the slave! Ye who may hear, and yet condemn my cause, say, shall the best of Nature's holy laws be trodden down? and shall her open veins flow but for cement to her offspring's chains?" Here, freedom and justice are tied to the natural law principles upon which the United States was founded: liberty and justice for all. Therefore, slavery was not only morally wrong, but an inherently un-American institution.

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Some abolitionists also tried to appeal to whites' rational self interest, rather than trying to convince them that slavery was wrong on moral grounds. For example, a North Carolinian abolitionist named Hinton Rowan Helper argued that the common white man in the South was oppressed by a small slave owning aristocracy because of slavery. Because of slavery, the Southern economy was slow to industrialize and many low-skill laboring jobs went to slaves, meaning there was a lack of jobs for poor whites. Of course, this argument isn't made today because it trivializes the experience of the true victims of slavery; African-Americans, not poor whites.