The childhood that William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) experienced in Newburyport, Massachusetts, gave him both strong values and practical skills. His mother was very religious; after Garrison’s father abandoned the family in 1809, she placed her son in the home of a Baptist deacon for five years. Both mother and minister nurtured a strong sense of religious conviction in young William. At age 13, he became an apprentice at a local paper, where he developed a passion for journalism that led him to purchase the paper seven years later.

In Boston, where Garrison moved in 1828 after his Newburyport paper failed, he met Benjamin Lundy, publisher of the early abolitionist journal Genius of Emancipation. Lundy was a pacifist who supported sending slaves back to Africa through the American Colonization Society, and Garrison became his coeditor. After relocating to Baltimore, Garrison met and boarded with freed blacks who had once been enslaved. These interactions led him to reject the relocation of former slaves and embrace immediate emancipation and citizenship. He became more outspoken in his editorials and was jailed briefly for describing a slave trader as a “highway robber.” Upon his release, Garrison returned to Boston and launched his own paper, The Liberator, in 1831.

While the new paper’s motto was “Our country is the world—Our countrymen are mankind,” its supporters did not equally represent all people. Seventy-five percent of The Liberator’s early readers and supporters were freed blacks, just as most of the earlier efforts to end slavery had been led by southern slaves and northern former slaves and free blacks. For example, wealthy black businessman James Forten, who had organized the first Convention of Color in 1817, helped finance and raise money for the paper.

The Liberator drew upon a tradition of opposition to slavery promoted by others. This included the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, which was edited by Samuel E. Cornish, a prominent minister, as well as three important books published by black authors in 1829: Hope of Liberty by the poet George Moses Horton, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World by David Walker, and Ethiopian Manifesto by Robert A. Young. However, more than any of its predecessors, The Liberator’s unwavering opposition to slavery soon captured the attention of white northerners.

Garrison did not confine his efforts to The Liberator. He founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and, with Theodore Weld and brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, participated in founding the American Anti-Slavery Society a year later. Garrison and Arthur Tappan created what today would be called a media campaign by sending millions of anti-slavery publications throughout the United States. These efforts generated diverse opposition. The South responded to the pamphlets with violence and bounties, with the Georgia legislature and Mississippi slaveholders offering $5,000 and $20,000, respectively, for Garrison’s capture. There were also heated disagreements within the abolitionist movement. Garrison sought to elevate women in the cause, an effort rejected by Arthur Tappan and many other abolitionists, and Garrison’s belief in moral persuasion rather than political action led to the formation of a separate and more confrontational American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. Frustrations with the failure of religious leaders to join the abolitionist cause, and the potential for slavery to spread into newly acquired territories after the Great Compromise of 1850, ultimately brought Garrison to a more radical position. In 1854, in a public rally opposing the Fugitive Slave Law, he burned a copy of the United States Constitution.

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