Reformer At the age of 25, Garrison joined the anti-slavery movement, later crediting the 1826 book of
Presbyterian Reverend John Rankin,
Letters on Slavery, for attracting him to join the cause. For a brief time, he became associated with the
American Colonization Society, an organization that promoted the "resettlement" of free blacks to a territory (now known as
Liberia) on the west coast of Africa. Although some of the members of the society encouraged granting freedom to enslaved people, others considered relocation a means to reduce the number of already free blacks in the United States. Southern members thought reducing the threat of free blacks in society would help preserve the institution of slavery. By late 1829–1830, "Garrison rejected colonization, publicly apologized for his error, and then, as was typical of him, he censured all who were committed to it." He stated that anti-colonialism activist and fellow abolitionist
William J. Watkins had influenced his view on "colonization".
Genius of Universal Emancipation '' In 1829, Garrison began writing for and became co-editor with
Benjamin Lundy of the
Quaker newspaper
Genius of Universal Emancipation, published at that time in
Baltimore, Maryland. With his experience as a printer and newspaper editor, Garrison changed the layout of the paper and handled other production issues. Lundy was freed to spend more time touring as an anti-slavery speaker. Garrison initially shared Lundy's gradualist views, but while working for the
Genius, he became convinced of the need to demand immediate and complete emancipation. Lundy and Garrison continued to work together on the paper despite their differing views. Each signed his editorials. Garrison introduced "The Black List", a column devoted to printing short reports of "the barbarities of slaverykidnappings, whippings, murders". For instance, Garrison reported that Francis Todd, a shipper from Garrison's hometown of
Newburyport, Massachusetts, was involved in the domestic
slave trade, and that he had recently had slaves shipped from Baltimore to
New Orleans in the
coastwise trade on his ship the
Francis. (This was completely legal. An expanded domestic trade, "breeding" slaves in
Maryland and
Virginia for shipment south, replaced the importation of African slaves, prohibited in 1808; see Slavery in the United States#Slave trade.) Todd filed a suit for libel in Maryland against both Garrison and Lundy; he thought to gain support from pro-slavery courts. Garrison was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of $50 and court costs; charges against Lundy were dropped because he had been traveling when the story was printed. Garrison refused to pay the fine and was sentenced to a jail term of six months. He was released after seven weeks when the anti-slavery philanthropist
Arthur Tappan paid his fine. Garrison decided to leave Maryland, and he and Lundy amicably parted ways.
The Liberator In 1831, Garrison, fully aware of the press as a means to bring about political change, returned to New England, where he co-founded a weekly anti-slavery newspaper,
The Liberator, with his friend
Isaac Knapp. In the first issue, Garrison stated: Paid subscriptions to
The Liberator were always fewer than its circulation. In 1834, it had two thousand subscribers, three-fourths of whom were black people. Benefactors paid to have the newspaper distributed free of charge to state legislators, governor's mansions, Congress, and the White House. Although Garrison rejected violence as a means for ending slavery, his critics saw him as a dangerous fanatic because he demanded immediate and total emancipation, without
compensation to the slave owners.
Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia just seven months after
The Liberator started publication fueled the outcry against Garrison in the South. A North Carolina grand jury indicted him for distributing incendiary material, and the Georgia Legislature offered a $5,000 reward () for his capture and conveyance to the state for trial. Knapp parted from
The Liberator in 1840. Later in 1845, when Garrison published a eulogy for his former partner and friend, he revealed that Knapp "was led by adversity and business mismanagement, to put the cup of intoxication to his lips", forcing the co-authors to part. Among the anti-slavery essays and poems that Garrison published in
The Liberator was an article in 1856 by a 14-year-old
Anna Elizabeth Dickinson.
The Liberator gradually gained a large following in the Northern states. It printed or reprinted many reports, letters, and news stories, serving as a type of
community bulletin board for the abolition movement. By 1861 it had subscribers across the North, as well as in England, Scotland, and Canada. After the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery by the
Thirteenth Amendment, Garrison published the last issue (number 1,820) on December 29, 1865, writing a "Valedictory" column. After reviewing his long career in journalism and the cause of abolitionism, he wrote:
Garrison and Knapp, printers and publishers Organization and reaction In addition to publishing
The Liberator, Garrison spearheaded the organization of a new movement to demand the total abolition of slavery in the United States. By January 1832, he had attracted enough followers to organize the
New-England Anti-Slavery Society which, by the following summer, had dozens of affiliates and several thousand members. In December 1833, abolitionists from ten states founded the
American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Although the New England society reorganized in 1835 as the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, enabling state societies to form in the other New England states, it remained the hub of anti-slavery agitation throughout the antebellum period. Many affiliates were organized by women who responded to Garrison's appeals for women to take an active part in the abolition movement. The largest of these was the
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which raised funds to support
The Liberator, publish anti-slavery pamphlets, and conduct anti-slavery petition drives. The purpose of the American Anti-Slavery Society was the conversion of all Americans to the philosophy that "Slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God" and that "duty, safety, and best interests of all concerned, require its
immediate abandonment without expatriation". The threat posed by anti-slavery organizations and their activity drew violent reactions from slave interests in both the Southern and Northern states, with mobs breaking up anti-slavery meetings, assaulting lecturers, ransacking anti-slavery offices, burning postal sacks of anti-slavery pamphlets, and destroying anti-slavery presses. Healthy bounties were offered in Southern states for the capture of Garrison, "dead or alive". On October 21, 1835, "an assemblage of fifteen hundred or two thousand highly respectable gentlemen", as they were described in the
Boston Commercial Gazette, surrounded the building housing Boston's anti-slavery offices, where Garrison had agreed to address a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society after the fiery British abolitionist
George Thompson was unable to keep his engagement with them. Mayor
Theodore Lyman persuaded the women to leave the building, but when the mob learned that Thompson was not within, they began yelling for Garrison. Lyman was a staunch anti-abolitionist but wanted to avoid bloodshed and suggested Garrison escape by a back window while Lyman told the crowd Garrison was gone. The mob spotted and apprehended Garrison, tied a rope around his waist, and pulled him through the streets toward
Boston Common, calling for
tar and feathers. The mayor intervened and Garrison was taken to the
Leverett Street Jail for protection. Gallows were erected in front of his house, and he was
burned in effigy. and Sarah's "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Condition of Woman"and Garrison published them first in
The Liberator and then in book form. Instead of surrendering to appeals for him to retreat on the "woman question", Garrison announced in December 1837 that
The Liberator would support "the rights of woman to their utmost extent". The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society appointed women to leadership positions and hired Abby Kelley as the first of several female field agents. In 1840, Garrison's promotion of woman's rights within the anti-slavery movement was one of the issues that caused some abolitionists, including New York brothers
Arthur Tappan and
Lewis Tappan, to leave the American Anti-Slavery Society and form the
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which did not admit women. In June of that same year, when the
World Anti-Slavery Convention meeting in London refused to seat America's women delegates, Garrison,
Charles Lenox Remond,
Nathaniel P. Rogers, and William Adams refused to take their seats as delegates as well and joined the women in the spectators' gallery. The controversy introduced the woman's rights question not only to England but also to future woman's rights leader
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who attended the convention as a spectator, accompanying her delegate-husband,
Henry B. Stanton. Although Henry Stanton had cooperated in the Tappans' failed attempt to wrest leadership of the AASS from Garrison, he was part of another group of abolitionists unhappy with Garrison's influencethose who disagreed with Garrison's insistence that because the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document, abolitionists should not participate in politics and government. A growing number of abolitionists, including Stanton,
Gerrit Smith,
Charles Turner Torrey, and
Amos A. Phelps, wanted to form an anti-slavery political party and seek a political solution to slavery. They withdrew from the AASS in 1840, formed the
Liberty Party, and nominated
James G. Birney for president. By the end of 1840, Garrison announced the formation of a third new organization, the
Friends of Universal Reform, with sponsors and founding members including prominent reformers
Maria Chapman,
Abby Kelley Foster,
Oliver Johnson, and
Amos Bronson Alcott (father of
Louisa May Alcott). Although some members of the Liberty Party supported women's rights, including
women's suffrage, Garrison's
Liberator continued to be the leading advocate of woman's rights throughout the 1840s, publishing editorials, speeches, legislative reports, and other developments concerning the subject. In February 1849, Garrison's name headed the women's suffrage petition sent to the Massachusetts legislature, the first such petition sent to any American legislature, and he supported the subsequent annual suffrage petition campaigns organized by Lucy Stone and Wendell Phillips. Garrison took a leading role in the May 30, 1850, meeting that called the first National Woman's Rights Convention, saying in his address to that meeting that the new movement should make securing the ballot to women its primary goal. At the national convention held in Worcester the following October, Garrison was appointed to the National Woman's Rights Central Committee, which served as the movement's executive committee, charged with carrying out programs adopted by the conventions, raising funds, printing proceedings and tracts, and organizing annual conventions.
Controversy In 1849, Garrison became involved in one of Boston's most notable trials of the time.
Washington Goode, a black seaman, had been sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow black mariner, Thomas Harding. In
The Liberator Garrison argued that the verdict relied on "circumstantial evidence of the most flimsy character ..." and feared that the determination of the government to uphold its decision to execute Goode was based on race. As all other death sentences since 1836 in Boston had been commuted, Garrison concluded that Goode would be the last person executed in Boston for a capital offense writing, "Let it not be said that the last man Massachusetts bore to hang was a colored man!" The events in
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, followed by Brown's
trial and execution, were closely followed in
The Liberator. Garrison had Brown's last speech, in court, printed as a broadside, available in the
Liberator office. and
Wendell Phillips, seated at table,
daguerreotype, c. 1850–1851 Garrison's outspoken anti-slavery views repeatedly put him in danger. Besides his imprisonment in Baltimore and the price placed on his head by the state of
Georgia, he was the object of vituperation and frequent death threats. On the eve of the Civil War, a sermon preached in a Universalist chapel in
Brooklyn, New York, denounced "the bloodthirsty sentiments of Garrison and his school; and did not wonder that the feeling of the South was exasperated, taking as they did, the insane and bloody ravings of the Garrisonian traitors for the fairly expressed opinions of the North."
After abolition File:Mr. Wm. Lloyd Garrison - DPLA - 3767a7d663a98924d1fcad8ac7f613aa (page 1).jpg|alt=Photograph of William Lloyd Garrison; an annotation in pencil reads "Mr. Lloyd Garrison W"|left|thumb|upright|Wm. Lloyd Garrison, [c. 1859–1870]. Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library After the United States abolished slavery, Garrison announced in May 1865 that he would resign the presidency of the
American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and offered a resolution declaring victory in the struggle against slavery and dissolving the society. The resolution prompted a sharp debate, however, led by his long-time friend
Wendell Phillips, who argued that the mission of the AASS was not fully completed until black Southerners gained full political and civil equality. Garrison maintained that while complete civil equality was vitally important, the special task of the AASS was at an end, and that the new task would best be handled by new organizations and new leadership. With his long-time allies deeply divided, however, he was unable to muster the support he needed to carry the resolution, and it was defeated 118–48. Declaring that his "vocation as an Abolitionist, thank God, has ended", Garrison resigned the presidency and declined an appeal to continue. Returning home to
Boston, he withdrew completely from the AASS and ended publication of
The Liberator at the end of 1865. With Wendell Phillips at its head, the AASS continued to operate for five more years, until the ratification of the
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted voting rights to black men.(According to
Henry Mayer, Garrison was hurt by the rejection and remained peeved for years; "as the cycle came around, always managed to tell someone that he was
not going to the next set of [AASS] meetings".) After his withdrawal from AASS and ending
The Liberator, Garrison continued to participate in public reform movements. He supported the causes of
civil rights for
blacks and woman's rights, particularly the campaign for suffrage. He contributed columns on
Reconstruction and civil rights for
The Independent. In 1870, he became an associate editor of the women's suffrage newspaper, the ''Woman's Journal'', along with
Mary Livermore,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Lucy Stone, and
Henry B. Blackwell. He served as president of both the
American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. He was a major figure in New England's woman suffrage campaigns during the 1870s. In 1873, he healed his long estrangements from
Frederick Douglass and
Wendell Phillips, affectionately reuniting with them on the platform at an AWSA rally organized by Abby Kelly Foster and Lucy Stone on the one-hundredth anniversary of the
Boston Tea Party. When
Charles Sumner died in 1874, some Republicans suggested Garrison as a possible successor to his Senate seat; Garrison declined on grounds of his moral opposition to taking office.
Antisemitism Garrison called the
ancient Jews an exclusivist people "whose feet ran to evil" and suggested that the
Jewish diaspora was the result of their own "egotism and self-complacency". When the Jewish-American sheriff and writer
Mordecai Manuel Noah defended slavery, Garrison attacked Noah as "the miscreant Jew" and "the enemy of Christ and liberty". On other occasions, Garrison described Noah as a "Shylock" and as "the lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross". However, Garrison acknowledged prejudice against Jews in Europe, which he compared to prejudice against African Americans, and opposed a proposed amendment to the
Constitution of the United States affirming the divinity of Jesus Christ on the basis of religious freedom, writing that "no one can fail to see that the Jew, Unitarian, or Deist could not worship in his own way, as an American citizen, precisely because the Constitution, under which his citizenship exists, would make faith in the New Testament and the divinity of Jesus Christ a national creed". ==Later life and death==