To the Public

William Lloyd Garrison was born on December 10, 1805. He was a prominent abolitionist and journalist, best known as the founder of The Liberator, a weekly anti-slavery newspaper published in Boston beginning on January 1, 1831. The newspaper ran until December 29, 1865, when it ceased publication after the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery. The influence of The Liberator continues to be felt; the magazine was transformed, though without Garrison’s direct involvement, into The Nation magazine, which is still published today.

Garrison’s father abandoned his family in 1808, causing great financial hardship. Garrison received only a rudimentary education and, at age 13, was apprenticed as a printer to a local Newburyport, Massachusetts, newspaper. Thus began his long career in journalism, which included work with such periodicals as the Newburyport Herald, the National Philanthropist, the Baltimore Genius of Universal Emancipation, and the New York Independent. In addition to his work with the press, Garrison became well-known as an orator, a prominent occupation in 19th-century America, and he traveled widely espousing his anti-slavery ideas as well as his positions on moral questions such as women’s rights, temperance, and criminal justice reform.

Garrison’s relationship to these causes, which many of his era considered radical, blossomed in the 1820s. In 1828 he met Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker journalist who sparked Garrison’s intense beliefs in abolitionism. By 1829, Garrison and Lundy had become co-editors of the weekly Genius of Universal Emancipation. As editor of Genius, Garrison was tried and convicted in a Baltimore court of libeling Newburyport ship owner Francis Todd. Garrison claimed in an editorial that Todd was engaged in illegal slave trading. Garrison lost the case, and unable to pay the fines levied against him, spent seven weeks in prison until allies could raise the money necessary to free him.

Garrison’s views garnered him fame but also placed him in danger. His uncompromising abolitionism led him to co-found the New England Anti-Slavery Society and help launch the career of perhaps the most important American abolitionist of all, Frederick Douglass. Garrison was also a prominent and early supporter of women’s rights, decades before women gained the right to vote.

Garrison’s positions were so out of the mainstream that in 1835 he was attacked by a mob during an anti-slavery meeting and dragged through the streets of Boston with a noose around his neck. Always suspicious of compromise over slavery, Garrison further enraged the public by burning a copy of the United States Constitution at a speech in 1854. As the Civil War approached in 1860-1861, Garrison believed that secession of slave states from the Union would be a moral cleansing of the country rather than a crime against it.

Though Garrison believed his work as an abolitionist was completed by the 13th Amendment, he instilled in his children and grandchildren a commitment to activism. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. advocated against the Chinese Exclusion Act. His daughter, Fanny Villard, was a noted advocate for women’s suffrage and, along with her son Oswald Garrison Villard, became a co-founder of the NAACP. William Lloyd Garrison died on May 24, 1879.