William Lloyd
Garrison
William
Lloyd Garrison, (b. December 10/12,
1805, Newburyport, Massachusetts,
U.S.—d. May 24, 1879, New York, New
York), American journalistic crusader
who published a newspaper, The Liberator
(1831–65), and helped lead the
successful abolitionist campaign against
slavery in the United States.
Garrison was the son of an itinerant
seaman who subsequently deserted his
family. The son grew up in an atmosphere
of declining New England Federalism and
lively Christian benevolence—twin
sources of the abolition movement, which
he joined at age 25. As editor of the
National Philanthropist (Boston) in 1828
and the Journal of the Times
(Bennington, Vermont) in 1828–29, he
served his apprenticeship in the moral
reform cause. In 1829, with a pioneer
abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, he became
co-editor of the Genius of Universal
Emancipation in Baltimore; he also
served a short term in jail for libeling
a Newburyport merchant who was engaged
in the coastal slave trade. Released in
June 1830, Garrison returned to Boston
and, a year later, established The
Liberator, which became known as the
most uncompromising of American
antislavery journals. In the first issue
of The Liberator he stated his views on
slavery vehemently: “I do not wish to
think, or speak, or write, with
moderation . . . . I am in earnest—I
will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I
will not retreat a single inch—AND I
WILL BE HEARD.”
Like
most of the abolitionists he recruited,
Garrison was a convert from the American
Colonization Society, which advocated
the return of free blacks to Africa, to
the principle of “immediate
emancipation,” borrowed from English
abolitionists. “Immediatism,” however
variously it was interpreted by American
reformers, condemned slavery as a
national sin, called for emancipation at
the earliest possible moment, and
proposed schemes for incorporating the
freedmen into American society. Through
The Liberator, which circulated widely
both in England and the United States,
Garrison soon achieved recognition as
the most radical of American antislavery
advocates. In 1832 he founded the New
England Anti-Slavery Society, the first
immediatist society in the country, and
in 1833 he helped organize the American
Anti-Slavery Society, writing its
Declaration of Sentiments and serving as
its first corresponding secretary. It
was primarily as an editorialist,
however, excoriating slave owners and
their moderate opponents alike, that he
became known and feared. “If those who
deserve the lash feel it and wince at
it,” he wrote in explaining his refusal
to alter his harsh tone, “I shall be
assured that I am striking the right
persons in the right place.”
In
1837, in the wake of financial panic and
the failure of abolitionist campaigns to
gain support in the North, Garrison
renounced church and state and embraced
doctrines of Christian “perfectionism,”
which combined abolition, women’s
rights, and nonresistance, in the
biblical injunction to “come out” from a
corrupt society by refusing to obey its
laws and support its institutions. From
this blend of pacifism and anarchism
came the Garrisonian principle of “No
Union With Slaveholders,” formulated in
1844 as a demand for peaceful Northern
secession from a slaveholding South.
By 1840
Garrison’s increasingly personal
definition of the slavery problem had
precipitated a crisis within the
American Anti-Slavery Society, a
majority of whose members disapproved of
both the participation of women and
Garrison’s no-government theories.
Dissension reached a climax in 1840,
when the Garrisonians voted a series of
resolutions admitting women and thus
forced their conservative opponents to
secede and form the rival American and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Later that
year a group of politically minded
abolitionists also deserted Garrison’s
standard and founded the Liberty Party.
Thus, 1840 witnessed the disruption of
the national organization and left
Garrison in control of a relative
handful of followers loyal to his
“come-outer” doctrine but deprived of
the support of new antislavery converts
and of the Northern reform community at
large.
In the
two decades between the schism of 1840
and the Civil War, Garrison’s influence
waned as his radicalism increased. The
decade before the war saw his opposition
to slavery and to the federal government
reach its peak: The Liberator denounced
the Compromise of 1850, condemned the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, damned the Dred
Scott decision, and hailed John Brown’s
raid as “God’s method of dealing
retribution upon the head of the
tyrant.” In 1854 Garrison publicly
burned a copy of the Constitution at an
abolitionist rally in Framingham,
Massachusetts. Three years later he held
an abortive secessionist convention in
Worcester, Massachusetts.
The
Civil War forced Garrison to choose
between his pacifist beliefs and
emancipation. Placing freedom for the
slave foremost, he supported Abraham
Lincoln faithfully and in 1863 welcomed
the Emancipation Proclamation as the
fulfillment of all his hopes.
Emancipation brought to the surface the
latent conservatism in his program for
the freedmen, whose political rights he
was not prepared to guarantee
immediately. In 1865 he attempted
without success to dissolve the American
Anti-Slavery Society and then resigned.
In December 1865 he published the last
issue of The Liberator and announced
that “my vocation as an abolitionist is
ended.” He spent his last 14 years in
retirement from public affairs,
regularly supporting the Republican
Party and continuing to champion
temperance, women’s rights, pacifism,
and free trade. “It is enough for me,”
he explained in justifying his refusal
to participate in radical egalitarian
politics, “that every yoke is broken,
and every bondman set free.”
John L. Thomas
