GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD the American anti-slavery leader, was born in Newburyport (Mass.), on Dec. 1o, i8o5. His parents were from the British province of New Brunswick. The father, Abijah, a sea captain, drank heavily and deserted his home when William was a child, and it is not known whether he died at sea or on land. The mother, whose maiden name was Lloyd, is said to have been a woman of high character, charming in person and eminent for piety. She died in 1823. William had little education but made the most of his opportunities. He was set to learn the trade of a shoemaker, first at Newburyport, and then, after 1815, at Baltimore (Md.) . Then he was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker (at Haverhill, Mass.), but ran away. In Oct. 1818, when he was 14, he was in dentured to Ephraim W. Allen, proprietor of the Newburyport Herald, to learn the trade of a printer. He soon became an expert compositor, and after a time began to write anonymously for the Herald. His communications won the commendation of the editor, who had not at first the slightest suspicion that he was the author. He also wrote for other papers with equal success. His skill as a printer won for him the position of foreman, while his ability as a writer was so marked that the editor of the Herald, when tem porarily called away from his post, left the paper in his charge.
The printing-office afforded him an opportunity to increase his meagre education. He was enthusiastic about liberty; the struggle of the Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke enlisted his sympathy ; and at one time he seriously thought of entering the West Point academy and fitting himself for a soldier's career. His apprentice ship ended in 1826, when he began the publication of a new paper (actually the old one under a new name), the Free Press, in his native place. The paper, whose motto was "Our Country, our Whole Country, and nothing but our Country," was an intellectual force, but was too radical for Newburyport, and the enterprise failed. Garrison then event to Boston, where, after working for a time as a journeyman printer, he became the editor of the Na tional Philanthropist, the first journal established in America to promote the cause of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors; but a change in the proprietorship led to his withdrawal before the end of the year. In 1828 he established the Journal of the Times at Bennington (Vt.), to support the re-election of John Quincy Adams to the Presidency of the United States. This paper also died within a year. In Boston he had met Benjamin Lundy (q.v.), who had for years been preaching the abolition of slavery. Gar rison had been deeply moved by Lundy's appeals, and after going to Vermont he showed the deepest interest in the slavery question. Lundy was then publishing in Baltimore a small monthly paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, and he went to Benning ton and invited Garrison to join him in the editorship. His mis sion was successful.
Garrison first accepted Lundy's views of gradual emancipation, but soon changed to total and immediate freedom for slaves when he joined Lundy in Baltimore in 1829. Lundy believed that the negroes, on being emancipated, must be colonized somewhere beyond the limits of the United States; Garrison held that they should be emancipated on the soil of the country, with all the rights of freemen. Garrison saw that it would be idle to expose and denounce the evils of slavery, while responsibility for the sys tem was placed upon former generations, and the duty of abolish ing it transferred to an indefinite future. His demand for imme diate emancipation fell like a tocsin upon the ears of slaveholders. The Genius, when it became a vehicle for this dangerous doctrine, was feared and hated. Baltimore was then one of the centres of the domestic slave trade, and upon this traffic Garrison heaped the strongest denunciations. He was prosecuted for libel by the owner of a slave-carrying vessel, was fined $50, and, in default of pay ment, committed to gaol.
John G. Whittier interceded with Henry Clay to pay Garrison's fine and thus release him from prison. Clay responded favourably, but before he could act Arthur Tappan, a philanthropic merchant of New York, contributed the necessary sum and set the prisoner free after an incarceration of seven weeks. The partnership be tween Garrison and Lundy was then dissolved by mutual consent, and Garrison resolved to establish a paper of his own, in which he could advocate the doctrine of immediate emancipation and oppose the scheme of African colonization. He first proposed to establish his paper at Washington, in the midst of slavery, but on returning to New England and observing the state of public opinion there, he came to the conclusion that little could be done in the South while the non-slaveholding North was lending her influence for the sustenance of slavery. He determined, therefore, to publish his paper in Boston, and set himself to the task of awak ening an interest in the subject by lectures in some of the principal cities and towns of the North. In Boston, then a great cotton mart, he tried in vain to procure a church or vestry for the de livery of his lectures, until a body of infidels under the leadership of Abner Kneeland (1774-1844), proffered him the use of their small hall. He accepted it gratefully, and delivered (in Oct. 183o) three lectures, in which he unfolded his principles and plans.
On Jan. I, 1831, without capital and without a subscriber, he and his partner, Isaac Knapp , issued the first number of the Liberator, avowing their "determination to print it as long as they could subsist on bread and water, or their hands obtain employment." Its motto "Our country is the world—our country men are mankind," shows his changed viewpoint. The paper in addition to favouring abolition, attacked war, alcoholic liquors and tobacco, and assailed freemasonry, capital punishment, and imprisonment for debt. The editor, in his address to the public, uttered the words which have become memorable as embodying the whole purpose and spirit of his life : "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch —and I will be heard." For many months Garrison and his part ner made their bed on the floor of the room in which they printed their paper, and where Mayor Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, in compliance with the request of Governor Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, "ferreted them out." Otis decided, however, that the paper could not be suspended. In the same year (1831), $5,000 reward was offered for Garrison's arrest and conviction un der the laws of Georgia. The Liberator, though in constant finan cial difficulties, exerted a mighty influence, and lived to record not only President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation, but the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States for ever prohibiting slavery.
Garrison was a pacifist, and sought the abolition of slavery by moral means alone. He knew that the National Government had no power over the system in any State, though he thought it should bring its moral influence to bear in favour of abolition. His idea was to combine the moral influence of the North, and pour it through every open channel upon the South. To this end he made his appeal to the Northern churches and pulpits, beseeching them to bring the power of Christianity to bear against the slave system, and to advocate the rights of the slaves to immediate and uncon ditional freedom. When they did not respond, he denounced them, and by 184o had become very unorthodox. The first society or ganized under Garrison's auspices, and in accordance with his principles, was the New England anti-slavery society in Jan. 183 2. The same spring Garrison issued his Thoughts on African Coloni zation, in which he showed from official documents that the American colonization society was organized in the interest of slavery, and that in offering itself as a practical remedy for that system it -.vas guilty of deception. Garrison was deputed by the New England anti-slavery society to visit England for the purpose of counteracting the influence there of agents of the colonization society. He went in the spring of 1833, and was received with great cordiality by British abolitionists. He took home with him a "protest" against the American colonization society signed by Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, William Evans, S. Lushington, T. Fowell Buxton, James Cropper, Daniel O'Con nell and others.
Garrison's visit to England enraged the pro-slavery people, and when he returned in September with the "protest" against the colonization society, and announced that he had engaged the services of George Thompson as a lecturer against American slavery, there were fresh outbursts. The American anti-slavery society was organized in December of that year (1833) , the dec laration of its principles coming from Garrison's pen. The activ ities of this society and Thompson's lectures aroused such fury that, in the autumn of 1835, Thompson was compelled to return secretly to England. He had announced that he would address the women's anti-slavery society in Boston, and a mob gathered. Not finding him, it seized Garrison and dragged him through the streets until he was rescued, and protected in the gaol until he could leave the city in safety.
The abolitionists of the United States were a united body until when division occurred. Garrison countenanced the ac tivity of women in the cause, even appointing them as lecturing agents ; moreover, he believed in the political equality of the sexes, to which a strong party was opposed upon social and relig ious grounds. His attack on the churches caused dissent. Many believed that Garrison injured abolitionism by causing it to be associated in men's minds with these unpopular views on other subjects. These differences led to the organization of a new na tional anti-slavery society in 1840, and to the formation of the "Liberty Party" (q.v.) in politics (see BIRNEY, JAMES G.). The two societies sent their delegates to the world's anti-slavery con vention in London in 1840, and Garrison refused to take his seat in that body, because the women delegates from the United States were excluded. The discussions of the next few years served to make clearer than before that the Constitution of the United States supported slavery; and Garrison came to the conclusion that its pro-slavery clauses were immoral, and that it was there fore wrong to take an oath for its support. Because of this, Gar rison burned the Constitution, denouncing it as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." He chose as his motto, "No union with slaveholders," and thereafter worked for peaceful disunion. When in the Southern States seceded from the Union and took up arms against it, he saw clearly that slavery would perish in the struggle and that the Constitution would be purged of its pro-slavery clauses. He therefore ceased to advocate disunion, and devoted himself to hastening the inevitable event. His services at this period were recognized and honoured by Presi dent Lincoln and others in authority, and the whole country knew that the agitation which resulted in the abolition of slavery was largely due to his uncompromising spirit and indomitable courage.
In 1865 at the close of the war, he declared that, slavery being abolished, his career as an abolitionist was ended. He counselled a dissolution of the American anti-slavery society, insisting that it had become functus officiis, and that whatever needed to be done for the protection of the freedmen could best be accomplished by new associations formed for that purpose. The Liberator was discontinued at the end of the same year, after an existence of 35 years. He visited England for the second time in 1846, and again in 1867, when he was received with distinguished honours, public as well as private. In 1869 he became president of the Free Trade League, advocating the abolition of custom houses throughout the world. In 1877, he again visited England, and de clined every form of public recognition. He died in New York on May 24, 1879, in the 74th year of his age, and was buried in Boston, after a most impressive funeral service, four days later. In 1843 a small volume of his Sonnets and other Poems was pub lished, and in 1852 appeared a volume of Selections from his Writings and Speeches.
Garrison's son, WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1838-1909), was a prominent advocate of the single tax, free trade, woman's suf frage, and of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and an opponent of imperialism. Another son, WENDELL PHILLIPS GAR RISON was literary editor of the New York Nation from 1865 to 1906.
great authority on the life of Garrison is the thorough and candid work of his sons, W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; The Story of his Life told by his Children (4 vols., 1885-89). See Garrison: an Outline of his Life (1879), and William Lloyd Garrison and his Times (188o) by Oliver Johnson, a prominent abolitionist and intimate friend of Garrison. Goldwin Smith's The Moral Crusader; a Biographical Essay on William Lloyd Garrison (1892) is a brilliant sketch. J. J. Chapman's Garrison (1913) is valuable for its picture of the abolition movement ; Lindsay Swift, William Lloyd Garrison 0910, is a reliable biography though it is too eulogistic ; Edward Channing, A History of the United States (vol. v. and vi., 1905-25), and Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, A History of the United States since the Civil War (1917-26) give the relation of Garrison to the history of his time.