11/20/2022 0 Comments William lloyd garrisonEleven days later, Garrison published the final issue of the Liberator, number 1820. True to his word, Garrison never ceased issuing the weekly newspaper until he witnessed the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery on December 18, 1865. In his inaugural issue on January 1, 1831, Garrison audaciously proclaimed: “I am in earnest- I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Most of his subscribers were blacks, but copies were passed from hand to hand among both races throughout the East Coast. While the relationship between Lundy and his younger partner remained cordial, Garrison returned to Boston where he founded his own antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, which was dedicated to attacking slavery and racial prejudice, and whose principal financial backer at the time was James Forten, a successful black sailmaker and civic leader in Philadelphia. In 1830 Garrison’s uncompromising stance and unrelenting critique both landed him in prison for libel and threatened the financial stability of the Genius, but the month and a half he spent in jail only steeled his resolve and during this time he began to style himself a prophet and martyr for the emerging radical abolitionist cause. Garrison and other radicals demanded an immediate end to slavery and refused to make any deals with slave-holders, whom they considered both unjust and sinful. William lloyd garrison free#While Lundy’s editorials continued to endorse the notion of gradual emancipation and financial compensation for slaveholders, Garrison increasingly promoted the “immediatism” most fully articulated by the English Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick and shared by many of the young printer’s free African American neighbors in Baltimore. In 1829, upon Lundy’s invitation, Garrison left Boston for Baltimore to help edit the Quaker’s antislavery paper.Īs the new co-editor of the Genius, Garrison pushed the newspaper in a more radical direction. It was at this point that Garrison met a tireless and unassuming Quaker saddlemaker by the name of Benjamin Lundy who was in Boston to raise money for his Baltimore-based newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, a oneman outfit dedicated to the gradual abolition of slavery. Steering clear of drink, which had enslaved both his father and elder brother, Garrison began editing the National Philanthropist, a temperance newspaper that he infused with the sort of intemperate language and sense of urgency that raised hackles among an older generation of genteel reformers. In 1826 Garrison moved to Boston where he fell in with a group of young evangelical reformers who found meaning above the muck and mire of partisan politics by endeavoring to remake the world through their benevolent and philanthropic enterprises. Possessed of his mother’s evangelical piety, his era’s Romantic sensibility, and his newfound skills as a printer, Garrison set out to make his mark. Garrison discovered that he possessed an insatiable appetite for the books on hand at Allen’s press, from the Bible to the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Hannah More, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron. William lloyd garrison series#After receiving a common school education, the young Garrison struggled unsuccessfully with a series of apprenticeships and clerkships in both Massachusetts and Maryland when the editor of the Federalist Newburyport Herald, Ephraim Allen, agreed to take him under his wing at the age of thirteen. Unable to find work and ultimately turning to drink, Garrison’s father abandoned his wife and children, and the family struggled to make ends meet. THE MAKING OF A RADICAL ABOLITIONISTīorn the third and youngest child of a devout evangelical Baptist mother and mariner father, the young Garrison grew up in a region economically devastated by the 1807 Jeffersonian Embargo against trade with Europe. Both the Liberator and the AAS were dedicated to the eradication of racial prejudice and the immediate emancipation of slaves. Garrison also co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in 1833, which he led for many years. Garrison was the founder and editor of the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that he published weekly, without fail, from 1831 until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery. CONDEMNING THE RACIAL POLITICS OF COLONIZATIONīorn in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on December 12, 1805, William Lloyd Garrison would eventually become the leading white radical abolitionist and critic of racial prejudice of the antebellum era.
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