[2] According to prominent African-American abolitionist William Wells Brown "Few English gentlemen have done more to hasten the day of the slave’s liberation than Wilson Armistead".

[2] The Quaker meeting house was very close by in Water Lane, and in the words of Wilfred Allott the Armistead family had long been "faithful Friends".

In his introductions to both The Memoirs of James Logan (1851) and Life of Anthony Benezet (1867) Armistead refers to himself as a compiler[1] and he is recognised for this talent rather than author of original work.

[8] Like many quakers, there is also evidence that Armistead supported the temperance movement and in June 1854 he became a member of an auxiliary committee to the United Kingdom Alliance.

[10] In September 1853, he welcomed Harriet Beecher Stowe on behalf of the Association, acknowledging the impact of her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[5] In June 1850 Armistead visited the United States where he met notable African Americans including escaped slave and abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, Robert Morris, Macon Allen, both lawyers[5] and prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison,[2] as well as Ellen and William Craft, slaves from Macon, Georgia who had escaped to the North in 1848.

[13] On the same trip, in July 1850, he also describes an encounter on a train with Thomas H. Jones, a self-emancipated fugitive slave from Wilmington, North Carolina.

As head of the household, Wilson Armistead recorded his guests as “Fugitives from slavery in America, the land of their nativity”[15] which was covered extensively in the press of the day as an unusual act of abolitionist activism.

[2] In a strongly worded article on 12 April 1851, the Leeds Mercury reported on "a remarkable return in the census", and the 'disgrace' that "America's own born citizens are driven to seek refuge in a foreign clime from the man-stealer, and from the horrors of slavery.

[20] During this time, as treasurer of the Leeds Freedmen's Aid Association, he was occupied raising money to support the thousands of freed slaves "suddenly cast upon their own resources by the American war"[21] and in February 1866 was able to send a remittance of £1,000 to the secretary of the Eastern Department of the American Freedmen's Aid Commission in New York,[22] a sum that "exceeded the expectation of the most sanguine".