Garrison, William Lloyd

By: Sean Patrick Adams, Diane L. Barnes

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Garrison, William Lloyd

Sex:  Male

Born:  Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States
10 December 1805

Died:  New York, New York, United States
24 May 1879

Activity/Profession:  Abolitionist, Newspaper Editor / Publisher

(b. 10 December 1805; d. 24 May 1879),
antislavery activist and editor.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to a family of modest means. After an apprenticeship with a local printer, he set out to found his own newspaper and became one of the nation's most vocal moral reformers. Garrison tried his hand at editing newspapers in Massachusetts and Vermont, but his radical critique of electoral politics and his air of moral superiority were unpopular with readers. After a series of failed ventures, in 1829 he accepted an offer to work on a Baltimore-based antislavery newspaper, theGenius of Universal Emancipation, edited by Benjamin Lundy. In 1830 Garrison drew national notoriety when he was convicted of libel for an editorial denouncing a wealthy merchant's participation in the slave trade. He refused on principle to pay the fine and was jailed for forty-nine days. Garrison used the time to propagate the idea that he had been imprisoned for his antislavery beliefs. He issued press releases and wrote a pamphlet detailing his trial and conviction and supporting the principles of a free press. During his incarceration he reflected on the direction of his life, finding his true calling in the abolition of slavery. “A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws,” he declared. “I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights, and I should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrunk from that duty or danger.”

William Lloyd Garrison, c. 1854. Underneath this portrait was his signature, with these words: “I am in earnest. I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”

Library of Congress.

view larger image

Banner of Immediate Abolition

Upon release from the Baltimore jail, Garrison returned to New England, settling in Boston, where he would reside for the remainder of his career. Although earlier he had supported gradual means to end slavery, after 1830 he became America's strongest voice for immediate, complete, and uncompensated abolition. In 1831 he launched the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that served as a rallying point for immediatism. Through this publication, the failed editor finally found success as subscription lists grew thanks to the support of northern free blacks and reform-minded whites in the Northeast. The following year Garrison helped form the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which became dedicated to immediate abolition. By the time he wrote a widely read pamphlet, Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), which criticized the American Colonization Society as a racist delusion, Garrison was well positioned as the national leader in the growing antislavery movement.

Garrison's impact upon the abolition community was firmly cemented when he authored the Declaration of Sentiments for the newly founded American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. This biracial, gender-inclusive organization became the national voice for the immediate abolition movement. The group held annual conventions, launched petition campaigns, employed lecture agents sent into the field to gain “converts” to the immediatist cause, and published its own newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Garrison had just returned from a lecture tour of Great Britain and was energized by the enthusiastic reception his ideas met there. In the Declaration of Sentiments he wrote that “the right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. … Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of the law—and to the common advantages of society.” He added: “It is piracy to buy or steal a native African, and subject him to servitude. Surely the sin is as great to enslave an AMERICAN as an AFRICAN.”

Toward a Garrisonian Vision

As a committed advocate of nonviolence, Garrison based his antislavery activism on a program of “moral suasion,” relying on tactics such as editorials, pamphlets, petition campaigns, and lectures to challenge the moral sensibilities of Americans. The expectation was that the program would alter public opinion, persuade slaveholders to free their bondpeople on moral grounds, and right the wrongs caused by racial prejudice.

It was not always a popular movement. Abolitionists often faced angry mobs, and sometimes violence erupted. In 1835 Garrison fell victim to such behavior when he was attacked by an antiabolitionist mob in Boston and dragged down the street on a rope. A month earlier, antiabolitionists had tried to intimidate him by erecting a gallows, complete with noose, outside his home. Garrison's immediatism faced other obstacles in the 1830s. The U.S. House of Representatives enacted a “gag rule” to prevent the reading of antislavery petitions, a main immediatist tactic, on the House floor. Leaders in established religious orders denounced not slavery, as Garrison hoped, but the abolitionists. Across many southern states the mail was censored to prevent abolitionist literature from reaching the populace.

Disheartened by these setbacks in the movement, by 1837 Garrison developed an even more radical view of the world. He adopted a form of political anarchy, demanding that his followers reject political participation in what he regarded as the corrupt U.S. government headed by a proslavery Constitution. He argued that religious perfectionism must be found outside the established religious denominations and rejected scripture as “superstition” in conflict with the “pure religion of Jesus's perfect example.”

“No Union with Slaveholders”

The future abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass became aware of William Lloyd Garrison almost as soon as Douglass escaped slavery in 1838. Settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass soon became a subscriber to the Liberator, noting that Garrison's newspaper “took its place with me next to the Bible.” The pair shared the platform at the 1841 Nantucket antislavery convention where Douglass first told the story of his enslavement, and the young fugitive was soon employed alongside Garrison as an antislavery lecturer. The following year Garrison said of Douglass, “I could not help thinking how incomparably superior was this ‘chattel,’ in all the great qualities of the soul, to any warrior whose deeds are recorded on the page of history; and that here was a remarkable instance of Christian magnanimity, and martyr-like devotion to the cause of humanity” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass). Garrison and Douglass traveled together on the lecture circuit throughout the 1840s, although their relationship became strained by the end of the decade.

At the same time that Garrison cultivated his strong relationship with Douglass, he also broadened his interests in other causes, eventually causing a major split in the antislavery movement. Women's rights, for example, captured Garrison's attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Female participation in the abolitionist movement was strong, yet often segregated, with women relegated to second-class status. Allying himself with feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Garrison pushed for gender equality within the abolitionist movement and in American society as a whole by supporting the antislavery lecturer and women's rights advocate Abby Kelley's bid to serve on the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. Garrison also promoted racial equality beyond the abolition of slavery and began to attack racism in the North as well as in the South. These ideas were controversial, of course, but Garrison's strong will and the national platform of the Liberator served to publicize these causes as well as that of antislavery.

Perhaps the most controversial and divisive element of Garrison's immediate abolitionism was his attitude toward political action. He believed that the American political system, with its inevitable compromises and half-measures, would water down abolitionism. Since neither political party could be trusted to deliver the abolitionist agenda coherently, he argued, truly committed activists should shun political action. Garrison disapproved of the formation of the Liberty Party in 1840 and discouraged his readers from supporting change through the political system. Two years later he took an even stronger position against political action when he argued that the Constitution of the United States was, in fact, “a covenant with death—an agreement with hell” because of its accommodation of slavery. This condemnation of the Constitution led to a call for free states to secede from the United States in order to separate themselves from the moral abomination of the American slave system. The masthead of the Liberator reflected his position; it read, “No Union with Slaveholders.” Such calls divided the abolitionist movement even further, and when Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in 1854, he alienated many moderate and conservative adherents to the antislavery cause.

At the same time that Garrison's view of abolitionism grew more radical, his relationship with Frederick Douglass suffered on both the professional and the personal levels. Garrison was deeply offended in 1847 when Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, to begin publication of his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star. Garrison reacted in a paternalistic faction, joining other Boston-based abolitionists in denouncing Douglass's effort in an unattractively racist manner. Tension escalated in 1851 when Douglass announced, at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, that he would no longer support the idea of nonparticipation in politics. In 1853 Douglass questioned the racial politics of the Garrisonians and openly wondered whether blacks were welcome among the ranks of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison responded with personal attacks on Douglass and on the white business manager of Frederick Douglass' Paper (successor to the North Star), the British reformer Julia Griffiths. At one point Garrison even referred to Griffiths as Douglass's “Delilah,” implying that she was behind Douglass's change of position. The relationship between the most prominent white and black abolitionists remained strained through the Civil War years.

Although he was known for years as one of the most strident voices for racial equality and an uncompromising critic of American politics, Garrison moderated his views somewhat during the Civil War years. His staunch anti-Union views began to wane with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, and he eventually denounced southern secession. Garrison supported emancipation as a war goal, the recruitment of black soldiers, and a constitutional amendment to ban slavery forever. His paternalistic nature, however, colored his views on the role of African Americans in civic life. Garrison supported equal rights among the races in the North, but he equivocated when it came to bestowing the franchise upon former slaves. He argued that the franchise was not a right but a privilege and that African Americans must prove their moral worthiness before they were extended the vote.

Garrison's career with the American Anti-Slavery Society ended, unsurprisingly, with controversy. His disagreement with the society's other prominent leader, Wendell Phillips, on the nature of the reconstruction effort intensified in the latter years of the Civil War. After the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, Garrison believed that most of the abolitionist agenda had been accomplished and that the American Anti-Slavery Society was no longer necessary. He ended publication of the Liberator in 1865 and moved that the society be disbanded. When members disagreed with his interpretation, Garrison resigned from the presidency, leaving the Phillips faction in control of the organization. For most of the latter 1860s and the 1870s Garrison focused on the needs of his family. He sporadically commented on issues such as women's rights and temperance, but the energy and vigor that he had brought to the abolitionist movement was long gone. He died in New York and is buried in Boston.

See also Abolitionism; American Anti-Slavery Society; American Colonization Society; Antislavery Movement; Antislavery Press; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Colonization; Douglass, Frederick; Emancipation; Feminist Movement; Foster, Abby Kelley; Frederick Douglass' Paper; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Garrisonian Abolitionists; Grimké, Angelina; Grimké, Sarah; Liberty Party; Lundy, Benjamin; Moral Suasion; Mott, Lucretia Coffin; Nonresistance; North Star; Perfectionism; Phillips, Wendell; Racism; Reform; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Thirteenth Amendment; and Voting Rights.

processed xml | source xml