“Everyone who comes into the world should do something to repair its moral desolation, and to restore its pristine loveliness; and he who does not assist, but slumbers away his life in idleness, defeats one great purpose of his creation” … WLG, from the Baltimore Jail, April, 1830
William Lloyd Garrison, the driving force behind the 19th century moral crusade to end slavery, was a journalist – a newspaper writer, editor, publisher. Let that sink in for a minute. He was that combination of prophetic voice, organizer, and foot soldier well suited to push the abolitionist movement for three decades, as Martin Luther King would be the right man to push forward the movement of mass protest for civil rights in 1955.
“Abolition” – abolish slavery, that “institution” by which, in the 1820s, approximately 2 million African American men, women, and children were held in absolute bondage, property of their owners and treated as property, subject to being bought and sold as needed, and subject to abuse outside of the normal bounds of criminal acts that applied to individuals who were not slaves. The earliest know formal antislavery resolution originated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. The first American Anti-slavery society was also founded in Pennsylvania in 1775. But as of 1830, the “institution,” as it was called, encountered only slight resistance and in fact the number of slaves would double in number from the 1820s to the 1860s.
William Lloyd Garrison, born December 10, 1805, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, grew up without his absentee father and with a mother who of necessity moved around to follow work that was available. The Garrison’s struggled in poverty and leaned on the community; the father left the family in Garrison’s early childhood, falling prey to alcoholism and economic hard times; an older brother failed in every endeavor, but mother and younger son persevered. Grounded in the Baptist (1) faith of his mother and the Farnham and Bartlett families that helped raise him, Garrison landed providentially in a newspaper apprenticeship opportunity at the age of 12. (Mayer, 23) “Apprenticeship” sounds more glamorous than the role entailed, being apparently one of the dirtiest, smelliest and most laborious types of work that a young man could engage in. But Garrison found his gift and his calling. The combination of an environment marked by religious and social activism and Garrison’s personal spiritual convictions led him to believe that he was destined to make a difference in the world. The newspaper would be his mouthpiece.
Garrison had no formal education, but was strongly encouraged in the value of literature by the families around him, and along with the Bible, hymns, and preaching, this would become his education. Shakespeare, Milton, Felicia Hermans, Thomas Moore, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott – these were his teachers. (Mayer, 27-28) Public preaching was a leading venue for the propagation of moral inspiration and debate around the issues of the day, and when Garrison moved to Boston in 1826 at the age of 21, he made the most of his opportunity to hear the premier orators of his day.
By 1828, Garrison had been editor of two newspapers and would author a third before embarking on what would become his most significant professional endeavor – publication of The Liberator beginning in January of 1831. In undertaking publication of The Liberator along with his other activist endeavors, Garrison was essentially taking up the mantle of Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker who had founded the newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1821. Lundy, grieved by witnessing the Slave Trade on the Ohio River, vowed … “to break at least one link of the oppressive chain.” 1816, Lundy sold his business to become a witness and a prophet, in the Quaker tradition, on behalf of emancipation and the Golden Rule. (Mayer, 52) By the late 1820s, Lundy is said to have travelled to 19 of the 24 states and logged 12,000 miles, crisscrossing the country with his antislavery message. (Mayer, 53) Lundy exhibited a moral passion that passed on to Garrison and came to characterize the movement. (2)
Garrison had established himself as a writer and orator in the years preceding the founding of The Liberator. In 1830, Garrison was arrested and accused of libel for vilifying a slave owner in The Genius. He was found guilty and jailed on 4/17/30, and served 49 days of his sentence until the remainder of his fine was paid by the New York philanthropist Arthur Tappan. Garrison’s incarceration galvanized his sense of purpose and his confidence that he must more than ever speak boldly for his cause. From the Baltimore Jail, Garrison wrote … “Everyone who comes into the world should do something to repair its moral desolation, and to restore its pristine loveliness; and he who does not assist, but slumbers away his life in idleness, defeats one great purpose of his creation.… It is my shame that I have done so little for the people of color. A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights, and should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrunk from that duty or danger.” (Mayer, 93-94)
By the end of 1830, Garrison solidified his plans for a new newspaper based on African rights as a voice for the antislavery cause. His long time friend Isaac Knapp volunteered to help with the venture as co-publisher. They settled upon Boston as the home for the paper and set up shop in Merchant’s Hall at the corner of Congress and Water streets. The Liberator would run continuously until 1865.(3) From the beginning, Garrison wrote in a first person style, and was bold and relentless in his attacks on the institution of slavery, expounding a moral, religious and patriotic message with unprecedented vigor. “Let all the enemies of the persecuted Blacks tremble … On the subject of slavery, I do not wish to write with moderation, I will not excuse, I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” (Mayer, 112)
Significant in Garrison’s education and circle of influence was his personal interaction with free blacks in Boston, then later in Baltimore (which had a 25% Black population in the 1830s) and again upon return to Boston. In fact, the early significant financial support for The Liberator came from free Blacks including James Forten of Philadelphia, who sent a donation which paid the first significant expense that came due for the publication. Other funds from a committee of Black Boston leaders who took up collections in support. A significant number of Black subscribers to The Liberator in its first year proved a sustaining force. (Mayer, 116)
In the first half of the 1830s, the abolitionist message of immediate emancipation with citizenship status took shape, in a larger context in which much of the northern anti-slavery sentiment was strongly focused on colonization, and gradualism. Garrison and like minded advocates promoted a message of immediate abolition and African rights, not return to Africa but a new vision of America for black and white (Ref: American Colonization Society, 1826) (Mayer, 71-72, 99-103) These differences were significant and deep, for the religious establishment in Boston and much of the north not only did not embrace but in fact actively opposed and resented the aggressive message of the abolitionists.
The movement was promoted through local abolition societies and traveling tours of speakers who appeared at assemblies in churches and town halls. Lerner describes the coming together of different strands in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, an umbrella organization which would grow eventually to 2,000 societies and approximately 200,000 members.
The movement was essentially a moral and religious movement rather than a legal or political one. “Our measures shall be the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption, the destruction of error by the potency of truth, the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love, the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance. Their intention was to use “moral suasion” to convert slaveholders to the cause of abolition. Along with Christian moral principles, the movement included appeal to the nation’s founding principles. “Garrison emphasized his reliance on the Declaration of Independence and a nonsectarian intention to enlist all religions and parties in “the great cause of human rights … to strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” (Meyer, 110)
The slavery issue excited intense emotion in opposing factions. The rhetorical strategy demonstrated in The Liberator of boldly challenging the institution of slavery and challenging the religious and moral ground upon which slave owners stood inflamed the debate. From 1831 onward, southern, as well as many northern newspapers, legislative bodies, and even prominent ministers and institutional expressions of the church attempted silence the meddlesome and passionate abolitionists. Along the way, and for decades, Garrison and other leaders and benefactors of the movement would be beaten, burned in effigy, and subject of bounties from multiple southern states. Homes of some abolitionists were set on fire. During one stay in New York City, he witnessed an excited mob charge across town from one meeting hall to another with the purpose of confronting an anti-slavery rally, only to find that the participants had exited the back of the building. In 1835, Garrison was kidnapped in his own shop by a lynch mob. He was rescued from the crowd by two men took him to the city authorities, essentially to be placed under protective arrest. His commitment to the cause only grew.(4)
To be continued.
Notes:
(1) It’s overly simplistic to refer to Garrison as grounded in a Baptist faith, as if our knowledge of 21st century Christian denominations would suffice to inform this statement. Mayer provides a quick summary of religious denominations in early 19th century New England, reminding me of the words of my Southern Baptist Seminary history Professor Karen Smith who taught that Christian history can be seen as an interplay between prophecy and order, similar to what Mayer describes as successive revivalist movements separating from institutional tendencies. “New England had been born in separatism and nurtured in piety, but each generation had contended with dissenting concepts of faith and the “hiving off” – or casting out – of those souls who yearned for a more perfectionist and anti-institutional Christianity. The seventeenth century had seen its greatest challenge from Quakers and Anabaptists, the eighteenth century had endured itinerant Baptists and Methodist revivalists, and the most recent generations struggled with Universalists and Shakers and Mormons and Disciples of Christ and dozens of ephemeral sects that gathered for a season under a charismatic shepherd, then dispersed or merged with others. As Garrison came to manhood, however, the most compelling threat to New England’s traditional religious order came not from the mystics, but from the rationalists.” (Mayer, 1998, p. 47)
(2) “Lundy personified the visionary “new race of editors” to which Garrison aspired. He saw in Lundy a middle-aged version of himself: slender and quick, with abundant energy and sharp talk that testified to his righteousness with every gesture and syllable. Their faiths stood upon the same twin rocks – the Bible and the Declaration of Independence – and their hands knew the bonds of a shared craft… Garrison declared that no previous publisher had realized the “all-shaking power” of the press for moral witness the way Lundy had. Lundy had suffered the wrath of slave traders, had endured a beating on the streets of Baltimore, a judges effort to suppress his paper on charges of libel. Nothing could stop him. … Garrison saluted Lundy’s efforts and esteemed The Genius as the bravest and best attempt in the history of newspapers. (Mayer, p. 53)
(3) Mayer describes the historical significance of the lengthy run of The Liberator: “Thus began one of the most remarkable ventures in the history of American journalism. No editor has ever produced a newspaper of agitation for longer than Garrison sustained The Liberator, which appeared weekly without interruption for thirty-five years and did not cease publication until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment constitutionally abolished slavery in December of 1865. When the twenty-five year old Garrison started his newspaper, Abraham Lincoln was a twenty-one-year-old sodbuster on the Illinois prairie … Harriet Tubman was a ten-year-old field hand on a Maryland slave plantation. John Brown was teaching school and running a tannery in Pennsylvania, Stephen A. Doulas was reading law in western New York, Frederick Douglass was learning to read as an adolescent slave in Baltimore, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was teaching composition in her sister’s Hartford Female Seminary. Their careers a generation hence would each be profoundly shaped and, in some cases, redirected by the process Garrison set in motion in 1831. With ferocious determination, Garrison broke the silence and made the public listen in a way his predecessors had not. He employed a writing style of extraordinary physicality – in his columns trumpets blare, statues bleed, hearts melt, apologists tremble, light blazes, nations move – that animated the moral landscape … he made the moral issue of slavery so palpable that it could no longer be evaded.”
(4) “In October of 1831, the town of Georgetown in the District of Columbia passed an extraordinary law prohibiting free Negroes from taking copies of The Liberator out of the post office under penalty of a twenty-dollar fine and thirty days in jail, as well as the threat of being sold into slavery for four months if the fines and jail fees went unpaid. In Raleigh, a grand jury indicted Garrison and Knapp for distributing incendiary matter … in Columbia, South Carolina, a vigilance association posted a $1,500 reward for the apprehension and conviction of any white person circulating The Liberator or other publications of a sedacious tendency.” In Georgia the legislature upped the ante by offering a reward of $5,000 for anyone who arrested Garrison and brought him to the state to be tired for seditious libel.” (Mayer, 122-123)
Bibliography
Mayer, H. (1998). All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Rapley, R. (Writer), & Rapley, R. (Director). (2013). American Experience: The Abolitionists [Motion Picture]. PBS / Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“Abolition” – abolish slavery, that “institution” by which, in the 1820s, approximately 2 million African American men, women, and children were held in absolute bondage, property of their owners and treated as property, subject to being bought and sold as needed, and subject to abuse outside of the normal bounds of criminal acts that applied to individuals who were not slaves. The earliest know formal antislavery resolution originated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. The first American Anti-slavery society was also founded in Pennsylvania in 1775. But as of 1830, the “institution,” as it was called, encountered only slight resistance and in fact the number of slaves would double in number from the 1820s to the 1860s.
William Lloyd Garrison, born December 10, 1805, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, grew up without his absentee father and with a mother who of necessity moved around to follow work that was available. The Garrison’s struggled in poverty and leaned on the community; the father left the family in Garrison’s early childhood, falling prey to alcoholism and economic hard times; an older brother failed in every endeavor, but mother and younger son persevered. Grounded in the Baptist (1) faith of his mother and the Farnham and Bartlett families that helped raise him, Garrison landed providentially in a newspaper apprenticeship opportunity at the age of 12. (Mayer, 23) “Apprenticeship” sounds more glamorous than the role entailed, being apparently one of the dirtiest, smelliest and most laborious types of work that a young man could engage in. But Garrison found his gift and his calling. The combination of an environment marked by religious and social activism and Garrison’s personal spiritual convictions led him to believe that he was destined to make a difference in the world. The newspaper would be his mouthpiece.
Garrison had no formal education, but was strongly encouraged in the value of literature by the families around him, and along with the Bible, hymns, and preaching, this would become his education. Shakespeare, Milton, Felicia Hermans, Thomas Moore, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott – these were his teachers. (Mayer, 27-28) Public preaching was a leading venue for the propagation of moral inspiration and debate around the issues of the day, and when Garrison moved to Boston in 1826 at the age of 21, he made the most of his opportunity to hear the premier orators of his day.
By 1828, Garrison had been editor of two newspapers and would author a third before embarking on what would become his most significant professional endeavor – publication of The Liberator beginning in January of 1831. In undertaking publication of The Liberator along with his other activist endeavors, Garrison was essentially taking up the mantle of Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker who had founded the newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1821. Lundy, grieved by witnessing the Slave Trade on the Ohio River, vowed … “to break at least one link of the oppressive chain.” 1816, Lundy sold his business to become a witness and a prophet, in the Quaker tradition, on behalf of emancipation and the Golden Rule. (Mayer, 52) By the late 1820s, Lundy is said to have travelled to 19 of the 24 states and logged 12,000 miles, crisscrossing the country with his antislavery message. (Mayer, 53) Lundy exhibited a moral passion that passed on to Garrison and came to characterize the movement. (2)
Garrison had established himself as a writer and orator in the years preceding the founding of The Liberator. In 1830, Garrison was arrested and accused of libel for vilifying a slave owner in The Genius. He was found guilty and jailed on 4/17/30, and served 49 days of his sentence until the remainder of his fine was paid by the New York philanthropist Arthur Tappan. Garrison’s incarceration galvanized his sense of purpose and his confidence that he must more than ever speak boldly for his cause. From the Baltimore Jail, Garrison wrote … “Everyone who comes into the world should do something to repair its moral desolation, and to restore its pristine loveliness; and he who does not assist, but slumbers away his life in idleness, defeats one great purpose of his creation.… It is my shame that I have done so little for the people of color. A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights, and should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrunk from that duty or danger.” (Mayer, 93-94)
Significant in Garrison’s education and circle of influence was his personal interaction with free blacks in Boston, then later in Baltimore (which had a 25% Black population in the 1830s) and again upon return to Boston. In fact, the early significant financial support for The Liberator came from free Blacks including James Forten of Philadelphia, who sent a donation which paid the first significant expense that came due for the publication. Other funds from a committee of Black Boston leaders who took up collections in support. A significant number of Black subscribers to The Liberator in its first year proved a sustaining force. (Mayer, 116)
In the first half of the 1830s, the abolitionist message of immediate emancipation with citizenship status took shape, in a larger context in which much of the northern anti-slavery sentiment was strongly focused on colonization, and gradualism. Garrison and like minded advocates promoted a message of immediate abolition and African rights, not return to Africa but a new vision of America for black and white (Ref: American Colonization Society, 1826) (Mayer, 71-72, 99-103) These differences were significant and deep, for the religious establishment in Boston and much of the north not only did not embrace but in fact actively opposed and resented the aggressive message of the abolitionists.
The movement was promoted through local abolition societies and traveling tours of speakers who appeared at assemblies in churches and town halls. Lerner describes the coming together of different strands in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, an umbrella organization which would grow eventually to 2,000 societies and approximately 200,000 members.
“Uniting the three strands of radical abolitionism, Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the New York Anti-Slavery Society and the Western antislavery movement, the new organization marked the final break with Colonization ideas. Immediate emancipation, improvement of the lot of the Negro by education, and an end to race prejudice were the main demands which defined the new organization.” (Lerner, 113)
The movement was essentially a moral and religious movement rather than a legal or political one. “Our measures shall be the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption, the destruction of error by the potency of truth, the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love, the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance. Their intention was to use “moral suasion” to convert slaveholders to the cause of abolition. Along with Christian moral principles, the movement included appeal to the nation’s founding principles. “Garrison emphasized his reliance on the Declaration of Independence and a nonsectarian intention to enlist all religions and parties in “the great cause of human rights … to strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” (Meyer, 110)
The slavery issue excited intense emotion in opposing factions. The rhetorical strategy demonstrated in The Liberator of boldly challenging the institution of slavery and challenging the religious and moral ground upon which slave owners stood inflamed the debate. From 1831 onward, southern, as well as many northern newspapers, legislative bodies, and even prominent ministers and institutional expressions of the church attempted silence the meddlesome and passionate abolitionists. Along the way, and for decades, Garrison and other leaders and benefactors of the movement would be beaten, burned in effigy, and subject of bounties from multiple southern states. Homes of some abolitionists were set on fire. During one stay in New York City, he witnessed an excited mob charge across town from one meeting hall to another with the purpose of confronting an anti-slavery rally, only to find that the participants had exited the back of the building. In 1835, Garrison was kidnapped in his own shop by a lynch mob. He was rescued from the crowd by two men took him to the city authorities, essentially to be placed under protective arrest. His commitment to the cause only grew.(4)
To be continued.
Notes:
(1) It’s overly simplistic to refer to Garrison as grounded in a Baptist faith, as if our knowledge of 21st century Christian denominations would suffice to inform this statement. Mayer provides a quick summary of religious denominations in early 19th century New England, reminding me of the words of my Southern Baptist Seminary history Professor Karen Smith who taught that Christian history can be seen as an interplay between prophecy and order, similar to what Mayer describes as successive revivalist movements separating from institutional tendencies. “New England had been born in separatism and nurtured in piety, but each generation had contended with dissenting concepts of faith and the “hiving off” – or casting out – of those souls who yearned for a more perfectionist and anti-institutional Christianity. The seventeenth century had seen its greatest challenge from Quakers and Anabaptists, the eighteenth century had endured itinerant Baptists and Methodist revivalists, and the most recent generations struggled with Universalists and Shakers and Mormons and Disciples of Christ and dozens of ephemeral sects that gathered for a season under a charismatic shepherd, then dispersed or merged with others. As Garrison came to manhood, however, the most compelling threat to New England’s traditional religious order came not from the mystics, but from the rationalists.” (Mayer, 1998, p. 47)
(2) “Lundy personified the visionary “new race of editors” to which Garrison aspired. He saw in Lundy a middle-aged version of himself: slender and quick, with abundant energy and sharp talk that testified to his righteousness with every gesture and syllable. Their faiths stood upon the same twin rocks – the Bible and the Declaration of Independence – and their hands knew the bonds of a shared craft… Garrison declared that no previous publisher had realized the “all-shaking power” of the press for moral witness the way Lundy had. Lundy had suffered the wrath of slave traders, had endured a beating on the streets of Baltimore, a judges effort to suppress his paper on charges of libel. Nothing could stop him. … Garrison saluted Lundy’s efforts and esteemed The Genius as the bravest and best attempt in the history of newspapers. (Mayer, p. 53)
(3) Mayer describes the historical significance of the lengthy run of The Liberator: “Thus began one of the most remarkable ventures in the history of American journalism. No editor has ever produced a newspaper of agitation for longer than Garrison sustained The Liberator, which appeared weekly without interruption for thirty-five years and did not cease publication until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment constitutionally abolished slavery in December of 1865. When the twenty-five year old Garrison started his newspaper, Abraham Lincoln was a twenty-one-year-old sodbuster on the Illinois prairie … Harriet Tubman was a ten-year-old field hand on a Maryland slave plantation. John Brown was teaching school and running a tannery in Pennsylvania, Stephen A. Doulas was reading law in western New York, Frederick Douglass was learning to read as an adolescent slave in Baltimore, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was teaching composition in her sister’s Hartford Female Seminary. Their careers a generation hence would each be profoundly shaped and, in some cases, redirected by the process Garrison set in motion in 1831. With ferocious determination, Garrison broke the silence and made the public listen in a way his predecessors had not. He employed a writing style of extraordinary physicality – in his columns trumpets blare, statues bleed, hearts melt, apologists tremble, light blazes, nations move – that animated the moral landscape … he made the moral issue of slavery so palpable that it could no longer be evaded.”
(4) “In October of 1831, the town of Georgetown in the District of Columbia passed an extraordinary law prohibiting free Negroes from taking copies of The Liberator out of the post office under penalty of a twenty-dollar fine and thirty days in jail, as well as the threat of being sold into slavery for four months if the fines and jail fees went unpaid. In Raleigh, a grand jury indicted Garrison and Knapp for distributing incendiary matter … in Columbia, South Carolina, a vigilance association posted a $1,500 reward for the apprehension and conviction of any white person circulating The Liberator or other publications of a sedacious tendency.” In Georgia the legislature upped the ante by offering a reward of $5,000 for anyone who arrested Garrison and brought him to the state to be tired for seditious libel.” (Mayer, 122-123)
Bibliography
Mayer, H. (1998). All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Rapley, R. (Writer), & Rapley, R. (Director). (2013). American Experience: The Abolitionists [Motion Picture]. PBS / Corporation for Public Broadcasting.