[1] On December 10, 1831, he was one of the cofounders of the Abolition Party, along with Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, Ellis Gray Loring, David Lee Child, Isaac Knapp, Robert B.

[6] Near the end of his life, Johnson recalled that it was a dark and frigid night, and the ground was covered with slush as they left the building, now called the African Meeting House, and "I doubt if any one of our number could have contributed $100 to the society's treasury without bankrupting himself.

I at once undeceived them, by telling them that I was an abolitionist; that I abhorred slavery as one of the worst of crimes and that I had been laboring, to the extent of my ability, for several years, to procure their emancipation.

I told them, also, that thousands of people in the northern States had associated together for the purpose of breaking their chains; and begged them to remember, for their consolation under the sore trials they were called suffer, that although the day of emancipation might not come in their time, some of their children would surely live to see it...They listened to me with an eagerness which showed how deeply they were interested in what I said; and the hearty 'God bless you,' which some of them uttered, while tears of gratitude filled their eyes, was more than enough to compensate me for all my labors in their behalf.

Among the group were several mothers, with infants in their arms, who told me, with deep emotion, that they had been sold away from husbands and children, whom they never expected to see again in this world.In 1862 Oliver Johnson met with Abraham Lincoln as the head of a delegation from the Religious Society of Progressive Friends with an "earnest demand" that he make some kind of emancipation proclamation in regards to the enslaved of the rebel states.