Biography of William Lloyd Garrison


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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, a distinguished abolitionist, the acknowledged leader of the advocates of immediate emancipation in the United States, was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805. Before he was twenty years old, he had acquired no inconsiderable reputation by the articles which he contributed to the Salem Gazette and other newspapers. He became, in 1826, the conductor of a paper of his own, the Free Press, published at Newburyport; it was, however, unsuccessful, and was soon discontinued. In 1829, he became joint-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, an anti-slavery journal published in Baltimore. On the 1st of January, 1831, Garrison issued in Boston, the first number of the Liberator, an anti-slavery paper, with which his fame became indissolubly associated. The unsparing, not to say virulent denunciation, with which Garrison assailed the institution of slavery, and all those voluntarily, however remotely, connected with it, was not long in arousing attention in every part of the country; while it excited in the Southern States, the utmost exasperation. Almost every day brought him letters from the South, containing threats of violence, and even assassination. At length, the legislature of Georgia went so far as to offer $5,000 to anyone who should arrest and prosecute him to conviction under the laws of that state. Meanwhile, he was repeatedly mobbed at home, and his life was more than once in the utmost peril even in Boston. But nothing could turn him from his course. Subsequently there was some abatement in the tone of the Liberator, but Garrison did not, in a single material point, modify his views in regard to slavery until its abolition was effected in 1865. The early severity of his denunciations, as his friends allege, with some show of reason, was necessary, in order to arouse the conscience of the nation from its apathy respecting the wrongs done to the African race. It would be, perhaps, less easy to excuse the unsparing invective with which Mr. Garrison so often assailed those friends of emancipation who thought it right to pursue a different course from his own. It is proper to remark that Mr. Garrison and his devoted followers always disclaimed any purpose of exciting the slaves to assert their own freedom by force. They professed to rely solely on arguments and "moral suasion," addressed to the conscience. They were also non-resistants, and not only refused to hold any office in the federal republic, but were conscientious even against voting for such an office, for they considered this would be an indirect acknowledgement of the rightfulness of a government supported by military power, and contaminated by a compromise with slavery. In 1865, after the total abolition of slavery in the United States, his friends presented him with $30,000 as a memorial of his services. He died in New York, May 24th, 1879.