New Richmond: Where Abolition Found Its Voice

New Richmond, Ohio, on the Ohio River in Clermont County, was one of the earliest centers of organized abolitionism in the United States. Despite its location directly across from slaveholding Kentucky, or perhaps because of it, the town became a hotbed of antislavery activity by the eighteen thirties. Its Presbyterian and Baptist churches passed resolutions denouncing slavery in eighteen thirty-four.

Two years later, James G. Birney, a native of Kentucky who had freed his own enslaved people and converted to the abolitionist cause, launched his famous antislavery newspaper, The Philanthropist, here in New Richmond in eighteen thirty-six before moving it to Cincinnati. The town was among the first stops on the Underground Railroad for freedom-seekers crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky, and its riverfront park has been designated a site on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.