Garrison, William Lloyd, 1805–79, American abolitionist, b. Newburyport, Mass. He supplemented his limited schooling with newspaper work and in 1829 went to Baltimore to aid Benjamin Lundy Lundy, Benjamin, 1789–1839, American abolitionist, b. Sussex co., N.J., of Quaker parentage. A pioneer in the antislavery movement, Lundy founded (1815) the Union Humane Society while operating a saddlery in Ohio.
..... Click the link for more information. in publishing the Genius of Universal Emancipation. This led (1830) to his imprisonment for seven weeks for libel. On Jan. 1, 1831, he published the first number of the Liberator, a paper that he continued for 35 years (to Dec. 29, 1865), until after the Thirteenth Amendment had been adopted. In the Liberator, Garrison took an uncompromising stand for immediate and complete abolition of slavery. Though its circulation was never over 3,000, the paper became famous for its startling and quotable language. Garrison relied wholly upon moral persuasion, believing in the use of neither force nor the ballot to gain his end. His language antagonized many. In 1835 he was physically attacked in Boston by a mob composed of seemingly respectable people, and thereby won a valuable convert to his cause in Wendell Phillips Phillips, Wendell, 1811–84, American reformer and orator, b. Boston, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1831; LL.B., 1834). He was admitted to the bar in 1834 but, having sufficient income of his own, he abandoned his law practice to devote his life to fighting for sound
..... Click the link for more information. . Garrison opposed the work of the American Colonization Society American Colonization Society, organized Dec., 1816–Jan., 1817, at Washington, D.C., to transport free blacks from the United States and settle them in Africa.
..... Click the link for more information. in his Thoughts on African Colonization (1832). He was active in organizing (1831) the New England Anti-Slavery Society and (1833) the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was president (1843–65). Garrison also crusaded for other reforms that he united with abolitionism, notably woman suffrage and prohibition. He went so far as to advocate Northern secession from the Union because the Constitution, which Garrison characterized as "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell," permitted slavery. He burned the Constitution publicly at an abolitionist meeting in Framingham, Mass., on July 4, 1854, and opposed the Civil War until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation Emancipation Proclamation, in U.S. history, the executive order abolishing slavery in the Confederate States of America.

Desire for Such a Proclamation

..... Click the link for more information. . Garrison's preeminence in the antislavery cause has been characterized as a "New England myth," some arguing that while Garrison attracted attention, the effective fight against slavery was carried on by lesser known, more realistic men (see abolitionists abolitionists, in U.S. history, particularly in the three decades before the Civil War, members of the movement that agitated for the compulsory emancipation of the slaves.
..... Click the link for more information. ). Garrison, a difficult personality, was not himself a good organizer.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by W. M. Merrill (1971); William Lloyd Garrison … His Life Told by His Children (4 vol., 1885–89, repr. 1969); biographies by W. M. Merrill (1963), J. L. Thomas (1963), A. H. Grimké (1891, repr. 1969); study by A. S. Kraditor (1969); H. Mayer, All On Fire (1998).

Garrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison.

(credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Dec. 10/12, 1805, Newburyport, Mass., U.S.—died May 24, 1879, New York, N.Y.) U.S. journalist and abolitionist. He was editor of the National Philanthropist (Boston) newspaper in 1828 and the Journal of the Times (Bennington, Vt.) in 1828–29, both dedicated to moral reform. In 1829 he and Benjamin Lundy edited the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In 1831 he founded The Liberator, which became the most radical of the antislavery journals. In 1833 he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1837 he renounced church and state and embraced the doctrines of Christian “perfectionism,” which combined abolition, women's rights, and nonresistance with the biblical injunction to “come out” from a corrupt society by refusing to obey its laws and support its institutions. His radical blend of pacifism and anarchism precipitated a crisis in the Anti-Slavery Society, a majority of whose members chose to secede when he and his followers voted a series of resolutions admitting women (1840). In the two decades between the schism of 1840 and the American Civil War, Garrison's influence waned as his radicalism increased. Through The Liberator he denounced the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision and hailed John Brown's raid. During the Civil War he forswore pacifism to support Pres. Abraham Lincoln and welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865 he retired but continued to press for women's suffrage, temperance, and free trade.

Garrison, William Lloyd (1805–79) journalist, abolitionist, social activist; born in Newburyport, Mass. With little formal education, he was a printer by trade who became editor of several small New England papers (1824–28). Turning his attention away from temperance to slavery, in Boston (1829) he delivered the first of his innumerable and inflammatory public addresses against slavery; later that year he joined Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore to help edit the Genius of Universal Emancipation. If not the first abolitionist, Garrison was one of the earliest to demand the "immediate and complete emancipation" of slaves. Founder/editor of The Liberator (1831–65), he continued his uncompromising attacks on slavery despite threats and harassment from pro-slavery opponents and often disagreement and dismay from other less absolute abolitionists. Cofounder and agent for the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1831) and its president (1841–63), he favored a peaceful separation of the North and South. To dramatize his contempt for the U.S. Constitution's acceptance of slavery, he publicly burned a copy in Framingham, Mass. (1854), but as a pacifist he opposed the actions of John Brown and others who supported violence. With the end of the Civil War and slavery, he turned his passions and energies to crusading for such reforms as prohibition, the plight of Native Americans, and, above all, women's rights. In 1840, when the world's antislavery convention met in London, he had refused to attend sessions because women were excluded.