| William Lloyd Garrison |
|
1805-1879, abolitionist leader.
Garrison rose from an impoverished childhood in Newburyport, Massachusetts,
to national prominence as an advocate of the immediate abolition of slavery.
Trained as a printer, Garrison was converted to "the cause of the slave" by
Quaker Benjamin Lundy in 1828. A deeply religious Baptist, Garrison
denounced slaveholding as an abomination in God's sight and demanded
immediate, unqualified emancipation. After being jailed for libeling a slave
trader, Garrison first published his famous Liberator in Boston on
January 1, 1831. The Liberator through 1865 served as Garrison's
personal vehicle for waging war against both slavery and his many critics,
including abolitionists who questioned his zealous approach.
Garrison was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. He wrote its Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded immediate emancipation and racial equality. The society took a nonviolent approach based on "moral suasion" - an appeal to the religious conscience of Americans. In the early 1830s Garrison developed an alliance with Great Britain's highly successful abolitionist movement. By the mid-1830s, he had gained a reputation for his scathingly denunciatory style and moral absolutism. He and his coworkers became the target of violence and political repression. Mobs broke up abolitionist meetings, and Andrew Jackson's administration did nothing when southerners removed antislavery materials from the federal mails. But this repression, in turn, brought publicity and sympathy to the abolitionist cause. In the late 1830s, as the issue of slavery's westward expansion divided the nation's politicians, the American Anti-Slavery Society split over issues raised by Garrison's leadership. Many abolitionists objected to his growing advocacy of women's rights, Christian nonresistance, and a theology of Christian perfectionism. He, in turn, rejected the ideas put forward by many of his opponents that women should not be given political equality within the movement, and that abolitionists should become active in electoral politics. In 1840, after Garrison's opponents failed to purge him and his supporters from the American Anti-Slavery Society, they seceded to form their own organizations, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty party. From 1840 until 1865, Garrison retained control of a society much reduced in numbers but with women as full participants. By 1843, he had led the society to adopt the doctrine of "No Union with Slaveholders," insisting that abolitionists peacefully renounce their moral allegiances to an allegedly proslavery U.S. Constitution and political system. Concurrently, he and many of his followers cultivated a strident anticlericalism, condemning all religious denominations and ordained clergy as apologists for slaveholding. As leader of an unpopular minority of agitators, Garrison's measurable impact on the nation's politics was probably negligible in the 1840s and 1850s, and his symbolic status as the embodiment of abolitionist extremism and idealism continued to grow. But when the Civil War broke out, Garrison foreswore his disunionist pacifism and was soon hailed in the North as a prophet whose warnings had been confirmed by events. A supporter of President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party, Garrison parted company during the war with many of his colleagues, led by Wendell Phillips, who insisted that true emancipation of the slave required legal guarantees of suffrage and full civil rights. In 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment secured the formal abolition of slavery, Garrison declared that his crusade had concluded in triumph and resigned from the American Anti-Slavery Society. The society carried on until 1870 under Phillips's direction.
|