biography
| name: |
Garrison, William Lloyd
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1805–79)
|
| biography:
| Journalist, abolitionist, and social activist, born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, USA. With little formal education, he was a printer by trade who became editor of several small New England newspapers (1824–8). Turning his attention away from temperance to slavery, in Boston (1829) he delivered the first of his many inflammatory public addresses against slavery, and later that year joined Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore to help edit the Genius of Universal Emancipation. If not the first abolitionist, Garrison was one of the earliest to demand the ‘immediate and complete emancipation’ of slaves. Founder and editor of The Liberator (1831–65), he continued his uncompromising attacks on slavery despite threats and harassment from pro-slavery opponents and often disagreement and dismay from other less absolute abolitionists. Co-founder and agent for the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1831) and its president (1841–63), he favoured a peaceful separation of the North and South. To dramatize his contempt for the US Constitution's acceptance of slavery, he publicly burned a copy in Framingham, MA (1854), but as a pacifist he opposed the actions of John Brown and others who supported violence. With the end of the Civil War and slavery, he turned his passions and energies to crusading for such reforms as prohibition, the plight of Native Americans and, above all, women's rights. In 1840, when the world's anti-slavery convention met in London, he had refused to attend sessions because women were excluded. |
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