William Lloyd Garrison

About the William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrisonwas an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Garrison promoted “no-governmentism” and rejected the inherent validity of the American government on the basis that its engagement in war, imperialism, and slavery made it corrupt and tyrannical. He initially opposed violence as a principle and advocated for Christian pacifism against evil; at the outbreak of the American Civil War, he abandoned his previous principles and embraced the armed struggle and the Lincoln administration. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society and promoted immediate and uncompensated, as opposed to gradual and compensated, emancipation of slaves in the United States.

Garrison was a typesetter, which aided him in running The Liberator, and when working on his own editorials for the paper, Garrison would set them in type without first writing them out on paper.: 57

Much like the martyred Elijah Lovejoy, a price was on Garrison’s head; he was burned in effigy and gallows were erected in front of his Boston office. Later on, Garrison would emerge as a leading advocate of women’s rights, which prompted a split in the abolitionist community. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the women’s suffrage movement.