Garrison, William Lloyd

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Garrison, William Lloyd 1805–1879

CONDEMNING THE RACIAL POLITICS OF COLONIZATION

Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on December 12, 1805, William Lloyd Garrison would eventually become the leading white radical abolitionist and critic of racial prejudice of the antebellum era. Garrison was the founder and editor of the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that he published weekly, without fail, from 1831 until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery. Garrison also co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in 1833, which he led for many years. Both the Liberator and the AAS were dedicated to the eradication of racial prejudice and the immediate emancipation of slaves.

THE MAKING OF A RADICAL ABOLITIONIST

Born the third and youngest child of a devout evangelical Baptist mother and mariner father, the young Garrison grew up in a region economically devastated by the 1807 Jeffersonian Embargo against trade with Europe. Unable to find work and ultimately turning to drink, Garrison’s father abandoned his wife and children, and the family struggled to make ends meet. After receiving a common school education, the young Garrison struggled unsuccessfully with a series of apprenticeships and clerkships in both Massachusetts and Maryland when the editor of the Federalist Newburyport Herald, Ephraim Allen, agreed to take him under his wing at the age of thirteen. Garrison discovered that he possessed an insatiable appetite for the books on hand at Allen’s press, from the Bible to the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Hannah More, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron. Possessed of his mother’s evangelical piety, his era’s Romantic sensibility, and his newfound skills as a printer, Garrison set out to make his mark.

In 1826 Garrison moved to Boston where he fell in with a group of young evangelical reformers who found meaning above the muck and mire of partisan politics by endeavoring to remake the world through their benevolent and philanthropic enterprises. Steering clear of drink, which had enslaved both his father and elder brother, Garrison began editing the National Philanthropist, a temperance newspaper that he infused with the sort of intemperate language and sense of urgency that raised hackles among an older generation of genteel reformers. It was at this point that Garrison met a tireless and unassuming Quaker saddlemaker by the name of Benjamin Lundy who was in Boston to raise money for his Baltimore-based newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, a oneman outfit dedicated to the gradual abolition of slavery. In 1829, upon Lundy’s invitation, Garrison left Boston for Baltimore to help edit the Quaker’s antislavery paper.

As the new co-editor of the Genius, Garrison pushed the newspaper in a more radical direction. While Lundy’s editorials continued to endorse the notion of gradual emancipation and financial compensation for slaveholders, Garrison increasingly promoted the “immediatism” most fully articulated by the English Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick and shared by many of the young printer’s free African American neighbors in Baltimore. Garrison and other radicals demanded an immediate end to slavery and refused to make any deals with slave-holders, whom they considered both unjust and sinful.

In 1830 Garrison’s uncompromising stance and unrelenting critique both landed him in prison for libel and threatened the financial stability of the Genius, but the month and a half he spent in jail only steeled his resolve and during this time he began to style himself a prophet and martyr for the emerging radical abolitionist cause. While the relationship between Lundy and his younger partner remained cordial, Garrison returned to Boston where he founded his own antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, which was dedicated to attacking slavery and racial prejudice, and whose principal financial backer at the time was James Forten, a successful black sailmaker and civic leader in Philadelphia. In his inaugural issue on January 1, 1831, Garrison audaciously proclaimed: “I am in earnest— I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Most of his subscribers were blacks, but copies were passed from hand to hand among both races throughout the East Coast. True to his word, Garrison never ceased issuing the weekly newspaper until he witnessed the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery on December 18, 1865. Eleven days later, Garrison published the final issue of the Liberator, number 1820.

CONDEMNING THE RACIAL POLITICS OF COLONIZATION

In order to unleash the transforming power of radical abolitionism, Garrison believed that he first needed to debunk the dominant but misguided black “colonization” program that had won the support of many of the nation’s leading politicians, ministers, and philanthropists. Deportation of free blacks was promoted through the American Colonization Society (ACS) with chapters in the North and South. Blacks in Baltimore, the erudite William Watkins among them, convinced Garrison of the impracticality, the immorality, and most significantly, the racial prejudice of colonization. Garrison pointed out that free black emigration would leave the remaining slave population bereft of their closest allies. Most importantly, colonization plans rested upon the premise that America could not absorb free blacks. In short, despite the antislavery motives of some colonizationists, Garrison argued that their program was functionally proslavery. In his lengthy pamphlet, Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), Garrison also reprinted the speeches and resolutions of free blacks who had condemned the racial prejudice implicit in the ACS program, thereby providing blacks with a larger audience for their views.

AN ABOLITIONIST CAREER

As a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, and the larger American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) the following year, Garrison embraced what might be called a politics of moral suasion. He believed that a radical transformation in public opinion regarding slavery and racial prejudice was necessary before politicians and their parties could be convinced to act justly. Garrison lambasted not only the rabidly anti-black prejudice of most working-class Democrats, but also the racial politics of the members of the Free Soil and Republican Parties, who not only sought to keep the Western territories free of slavery, but of blacks as well.

Garrison advocated not only for equality among the races, but for equality among the sexes as well, a position that ultimately led to a split in the abolitionist movement. Garrison’s support of women’s rights prompted more cautious abolitionists, including the evangelical New York philanthropists Arthur and Lewis Tappan and the antislavery presidential aspirant James G. Birney, to organize a breakaway organization called the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFAS) in 1840.

In the 1840s and 1850s Garrison came to see the U.S. Constitution as profoundly proslavery, going so far as to call it a “covenant with death,” and burning the document before a large crowd. Thinking of government as inherently authoritarian, he publicly advocated a philosophy of “nonresistance,” or non-participation in the institutional aspects of politics, which also meant a rejection of voting. He also preferred disunion to a continued union with slaveholding Southerners. But as the Civil War came, he worked to transform the bloody conflict between the states into a struggle for the liberation of enslaved African Americans.

POST-EMANCIPATION CAREER

In 1865 Garrison resigned from the presidency of the AAS, and called for the dissolution of the antislavery organization. He parted company with the organization, but continued to devote himself to the promotion of black civil rights, women’s suffrage, and temperance. Garrison died in 1879, three years after the death of his wife, and was survived by his five children.

SEE ALSO Abolition Movement.