Born in 1805 the son of a merchant sailor, William Lloyd Garrison came from humble beginnings as his family began to struggle for money when he was young due to the Embargo Act of 1807. He was forced to take up many apprenticeships as he grew older to provide for his family after his father left them. Garrison began work for The Newburyport Herald as a writer and editor in 1818, giving him the experience he needed to start his own paper.
Originally a supporter of colonization, as Garrison grew older he changed his views. At the age of 25, Garrison joined the abolition movement. He worked as the co-editor of an anti-slavery newspaper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation started by Benjamin Lundy. He went on to publish the first issue of his own newspaper on January 1st, 1831: The Liberator.
The Liberator is considered to be the most well-known and widely spread anti-slavery newspaper of the antebellum period and the Civil War.
Garrison published the paper in Boston, Massachusetts, where he voiced his opinion honestly and forcefully. He was criticized for his opinion pieces and even imprisoned for a short amount of time over what he wrote. No matter what he would not be silenced.
Garrison was even tied up and dragged through the town with the threat of being lynched and a reward of $4000 was placed on beheading him solely because of his views. His intense abolitionist arguments quickly gathered support and hate.
Garrison’s main goal was to shift the beliefs of those involved in purchasing and owning slaves.
His first issue of the paper included his own personal statement as follows: “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
The Liberator would not have been as successful as it was if it had not been for the free African Americans who subscribed, making up over seventy-five percent of the paper’s readers. Garrison’s condemnation of the Constitution was incredibly controversial as he was decades ahead of most other northern white abolitionists due to the fact that he constantly demanded the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people and restoring the natural rights of all slaves.
In 1854, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the United States Constitution due to the belief that it promoted slavery. Garrison was actually the one to discover the young and newly escaped Frederick Douglass in 1841 and encouraged him to speak about his experiences.
The two parted ways and the friendship did not end amicably as Douglass began to change his views concerning the Constitution and Garrison's message.
The Liberator officially ended its run in 1865 with 1,820 issues when the Civil War ended. At the end of the paper’s run, Garrison stated, “my vocation as an abolitionist is ended.”
William Lloyd Garrison lived long enough to see Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, and thirty-four years after the first issue of The Liberator, Garrison was able to experience the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery. He then turned his attention to women’s suffrage, pacifism, and condemning the post-Reconstruction actions of southern states against African Americans.
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