USH - William Lloyd Garrison - Church

William Lloyd Garrison was born on December 12, 1805 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and died on May 24, 1879 at the age of 74. He was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. His father, being a merchant sailing master, was greatly affected by the Embargo Act passed in 1807, banning the United States from trading with any other foreign country. The family thus fell on hard times, the situation worsening when Garrison’s father abandoned the family in 1808. This forced them to beg for food, and also caused young William to have to work – although he was only three years old – by selling homemade molasses candy and delivering wood.

In 1818 (aged 13), he had already endured several difficult apprenticeships. He then began to work for the Newburyport Herald as a writer and an editor. This job, and subsequent jobs in the newspaper industry, gave him the talents that he would so skillfully employ when he later published his own paper.

At the age of 25, he officially joined the Abolition movement by joining the American Colonization Society, an organization that allegedly believed that free blacks should emigrate to a territory on the west coast of Africa, ostensibly to promote their freedom and happiness. However, the fact later emerged that few members supported this idea. Most people in the society merely wished to reduce the number of free blacks in the country in order to help preserve the institution of slavery.

Disgusted by this, Garrison rejected their programs and, on January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of his own anti-slavery newspaper, the Liberator. Through his work in this newspaper, and in other publications, he advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves. At this time in the 1830s, this view was extremely unpopular. Even northerners who were against slavery found this a preposterous idea. What would they do with all the newly freed slaves? It wasn’t believed that they could actually peacefully and quietly enter American society. However, Garrison believed that they could assimilate. He believed that, in time, all blacks would be equal in every way to the country’s white citizens. After all, he believed, they, too, were Americans and entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Although the Liberator had a very small circulation his approach to emancipation stressed nonviolence and passive resistance, something that did attract him a following. Known as a radical abolitionist, Garrison nonetheless is known as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, one of the first organizations dedicated to promoting immediate emancipation.