William Lloyd Garrison

Abijah Garrison brought his family to Newburyport in 1806 and was gone by 1808, out of work after the Embargo Act killed American shipping. His wife, Frances Maria Lloyd, began calling their youngest son by her own family name. The boy sold homemade lemonade and hauled wood, and at 13 was bound over for seven years as an apprentice compositor at the Newburyport Herald. He learned to compose his arguments standing at the type case, in metal, without writing them out first, and he thought that way for the rest of his life. At 24, editing an antislavery paper in Baltimore, he named a Newburyport shipper who was carrying enslaved people to New Orleans, lost the libel suit, refused to pay, and spent seven weeks in jail.

He ran the weekly for 35 years and stopped only when the Thirteenth Amendment made it unnecessary — 1,820 issues, the last dated December 29, 1865. Paid subscriptions always trailed readership, and in 1834 three-quarters of the paying subscribers were Black. Around the paper he built machinery: a New England society in 1832, a national one the year after, and the women's auxiliaries that raised the money. Georgia put 5,000 dollars on his head. BriefHistory has the newspaper, the movement it made and the fights it caused. This page is about the man left over when the work was finished.

In May 1865 he asked the American Anti-Slavery Society to declare victory and dissolve itself. Wendell Phillips, his oldest ally, answered that Black southerners had won neither the ballot nor civil equality, and the room agreed with Phillips, 118 to 48. Garrison resigned the presidency anyway, went home to Boston, and shut the paper. His biographer Henry Mayer records that the rebuff stung for years. The severity he aimed at slaveholders he aimed elsewhere too. He wrote that the ancient Jews were a people whose feet ran to evil and that their dispersion grew out of their own self-complacency, and when the Jewish editor Mordecai Manuel Noah defended slavery Garrison called him the miscreant Jew and a lineal descendant of the men who nailed Jesus to the cross.

He died just before midnight on May 24, 1879, at his daughter's house in New York, of kidney disease. He had asked for hymns and could not sing, so his children sang while he beat time with his hands and feet. Boston flew its flags at half-staff for the funeral. Frederick Douglass, who had broken with him in 1855 and made it up in 1873, told a Washington congregation that the glory of the man was that he could stand alone with the truth and calmly await the result. Leo Tolstoy published a short life of him in 1904 and pulled his Christian anarchism into his own. Boston set a memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue mall.

William Lloyd Garrison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Liberator company
  Founded with Isaac Knapp and published in Boston without a break for 35 years 1831
• New-England Anti-Slavery Society company
  Organized out of the paper's readership 1832
• Thoughts on African Colonization book
  His public recantation of the colonization scheme, 236 pages of it 1832
• American Anti-Slavery Society company
  Founded by abolitionists from 10 states 1833
• Sonnets and Other Poems book
  Printed by his former colleague Oliver Johnson 1843
• Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison book
  The mid-career collection, made while the fight was still on 1852

• 1818 aged ~13 Apprenticed at 13 to the Newburyport Herald as a compositor A seven-year term. He began writing for the paper under the pen name Aristides.
• 1830 aged ~25 Jailed in Baltimore after losing a libel suit brought by a slave-trading shipper He refused to pay the 50-dollar fine. Arthur Tappan paid it after seven weeks.
• January 1, 1831 aged 25 First issue of The Liberator
• September 4, 1834 aged 28 Marries Helen Eliza Benson Seven children. Two died young.
• October 21, 1835 aged 29 A Boston mob drags him through the streets by a rope The mayor got him into the Leverett Street jail for his own protection.
• July 4, 1854 aged 48 Burns a copy of the Constitution in public A covenant with death, he called it, for what it conceded to slavery.
• May 1865 aged 59 Loses the vote to dissolve the American Anti-Slavery Society, 118 to 48 Wendell Phillips argued the work was not done. Garrison resigned and went home.
• December 29, 1865 aged 60 Publishes the last issue of The Liberator
• May 24, 1879 aged 73 Dies at his daughter's house in New York

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. broke with
• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. printed his last speech
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. met at the 1840 London convention
• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. allied on suffrage
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. supported
• Nat Turner 1800–1831
  Led the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion that prompted harsher slave codes across the South. blamed for inciting him