Garrison, William Lloyd

Garrison, William Lloyd (1805–1879), abolitionist.Born in poverty in Newburyport, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison rose to international prominence by demanding the immediate abolition of American slavery and insisting that all persons enjoy equal rights. Reflecting his mother's piety and willpower, Garrison first embraced the religious imperative of “immediate emancipation” in 1830. He launched his antislavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston a year later, and in 1833 was a principal founder of the American Anti‐Slavery Society (AASS). For the next three decades, Garrison remained the nation's most visible and radical abolitionist. He urged churches, political parties, and the government itself to sever all ties with the South and its unchristian labor system. His fiery language, in speeches and in The Liberator, stirred both passionate support and fierce opposition not only in the South but across the North. Even in abolitionist circles, his endorsement of women's rights, religious perfectionism, pacifism, and political disunion proved divisive, and his opponents left the AASS after 1840 to found competing organizations. Yet his opposition to racism won him strong support among northern free blacks, particularly in New England, and in this respect his activities prefigured the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Garrison opposed armed resistance to slavery, favoring “moral suasion” instead, yet his agitation sharply heightened the estrangement between North and South.

Once the Civil War began, Garrison supported the government he had long condemned, pushed abolition as a central war aim, and urged the enlistment of black soldiers. With passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery, Garrison terminated The Liberator and turned to woman suffrage, temperance, Indian rights, and other reforms, leading to criticism that he had abandoned the freedmen just as their struggle for full civil rights had begun. Yet his unrelenting agitation and moral vision gives Garrison a preeminent position among those who challenged slavery and racism in the Antebellum Era.
See also African Americans; Brown, John; Temperance and Prohibition; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

James Brewer Stewart , William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation, 1992.
Henry Mayer , All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Emancipation of Slavery, 1998.

James Brewer Stewart