William Lloyd Garrison is one of the most influential men in American History to never have entered politics, or have fought on a battlefield. A small man with a blunt style of speaking and writing, he was unsuited to either pursuit had his conscience even allowed them. Instead, Garrison used his skill as a newspaperman and his fearless resolve to attack the injustices of his time. Though he is primarily known for his attacks on slavery, he also helped to promote women's rights, opposed war, promoted temperance, and eventually began to openly question the value of organized religion as opposed to a more apostolic Christianity. Soon after leaving Baltimore Prison, Garrison founded and ran a paper known as The Liberator, and ran it continuously for thirty-five years. It was the radical edge of the anti-slavery movement in the beginning, drawing attention to the plight of slaves, and, secondarily, to Garrison's other causes. His influence came because his blunt, uncompromising style of writing inflamed the consciences of the North and the tempers of the South. People listened, not necessarily because they agreed, but because they could not afford to be unaware of this small New Englander.

Many people have written about the portion of Garrison's life consumed by the Liberator, trumpeting him as a hero, reviling him as a villain, or dismissing him as an extremist. What turned him onto the path of advocacy, and ensured that he would stay on it throughout the rest of his seventy-four years of life? One can find the roots of his advocacy in an examination of his early life, a long series of events and circumstances that led him to his extremes. The continuance of that advocacy, however, one finds in Garrison's imprisonment in Baltimore Jail for forty-nine days in 1830. This stay in prison allowed him time away from work to solidify his ideals, and the sense of martyrdom from being imprisoned convinced him of the necessity of his campaign, serving to set his views in stone. To paraphrase Garrison himself, he was in earnest, he did not equivocate, he did not excuse, and he did not retreat a single inch. He was heard.¹

William Lloyd Garrison was not born into wealth. His father, Abijah Garrison, was a sailing master from Nova Scotia. Garrison's mother, Fanny Lloyd, was living with her uncle when she met Abijah, her father having disowned her for becoming a Baptist. They married and had two children, James and Caroline, before moving to the more hospitable and prosperous Newburyport, Massachusetts. It was there, on December 10, 1805², which William Lloyd Garrison was born.³

In 1805, Newburyport was a wonderful place for a seaman and his family. Situated on the Merrimack, it was a bustling seaport, thriving on the neutral status of America in the war between England and France. The Garrisons had moved in with the family of Captain Farnham, another sailing man. Martha Farnham was a friend of Fanny Garrison's. Both men were often gone to sea, so the Garrison children grew up under the watchful eyes of these two pious Baptist women.⁴ This period, no doubt, helped to instill in him a respect for the capabilities of women and a measure of his mother's temperance leanings, both of which would show up in his later work.

The Embargo of 1807 ended this time in Garrison's life, likely before he knew that it had begun. With foreign trade now illegal, many ships in the Newburyport Harbor lacked cargo, and many seamen were forced to land. Among those men were William's father, Abijah, who soon took to the vices of rum and cursing President Jefferson for the embargo. This sat poorly with the pious Fanny, and Abijah took to the taverns to flee her muttering discontent. The death of Caroline in 1808 (from eating poisonous flowers out of a neighbor's garden⁵), followed weeks later by the birth of Maria apparently left Fanny's temperament in a fragile condition. One night, when several of Abijah's friends were over for drinks, Fanny began to break bottles and throw his friends out on their ears. Abijah left that evening, never to see his children or wife again.⁶

Without Abijah, the family was in a crisis. The children often had to beg for food, and Fanny and both boys worked odd jobs in order to make ends meet. Fortunately, the friendship between Fanny and Martha Farnham continued, and the woman charged only nominal rent. However, in 1812 the families were forced to separate. Fanny moved with her oldest boy, James, to Lynn, Massachusetts, where James found work in a shoe factory. While the young Maria continued to live with the Farnhams, Fanny fostered William with the Bartletts, a Baptist deacon's family with two daughters, who needed a boy for chores. There he was able to attend school on occasion and the Baptist church regularly, even singing in the choir.

Garrison remained with the Bartletts for two years until his mother called him to Lynn, for she had found him an apprenticeship to a shoemaker. William disliked the work intensely, but kept at it for several months. His mother then bounced them briefly to Baltimore, following work that never materialized, before sending him back to the deacon. After a year, Deacon Bartlett apprenticed Garrison to a cabinetmaker, from whom he ran away, desperately unhappy. Bartlett was finally able to find a place for William as a printer's apprentice to Ephraim Allen, printer and owner of the Newburyport Herald. This work was much more to the liking of William, and he quickly became adept at it. Constantly working with words also helped to compensate for his scant formal education, and his thirst for knowledge led him to join other apprentices in debates, reading, and self-improvement.

Throughout this, Garrison maintained the piety inspired by his mother and Martha Farnham. At this early point, he was a Baptist, and quite devout in his observance of that faith. One of his fellow workers was Tobias Miller, a Baptist missionary, who often engaged Garrison in long theological discussions, and gave Garrison serious thoughts about joining the ministry. Although the ministry tempted him, Garrison ultimately stayed with newspapers.⁷ These discussions also helped to form Garrison's own opinions on subjects that would later become central to his cause.

In 1822, at the age of 16, Garrison first tried his hand at authorship. Writing as "An Old Bachelor," he spoke on the well-known case of a man who had been sued for $750 dollars by a young lady whom he had lived with for two years, but never offered to marry. Garrison was furious at the court for fining the man without there being any proof of a promise to marry the plaintiff having been made, saying "No doubt, many females are rejoiced in having it in their power to take the property of the man in so easy a manner."⁸ So harsh were his words, in fact, that Garrison's unknowing employer inserted a comment asking the readers not to judge the Old Bachelor too harshly, "as he must have undergone some sad disappointment to inspire him with so much aversion for the sex, it would be more generous to pardon him, than to testify resentment for what he says."⁹ Garrison continued to write on many topics, all under the same pseudonym, for the rest of the year. Finally, Allen asked for "A.O.B." to meet him at the offices of the Herald, and Garrison revealed himself. A surprised Allen told Garrison to continue writing, gave him a somewhat irregular column, and made him printing foreman. This was a definite step up for the apprentice, who had been begging for food just a few years before. Garrison rarely spoke of slavery in those days, and only once in the Herald. In that column, he stated in his then-awkward style that slavery did not endanger Republicanism, though it certainly detracted from "purity, decorum, exactness, and moderation."¹⁰

Despite the small victory of being published, the year 1822 marked the beginning of hard times for Garrison. These started with the death of his sister Maria. In 1823, his mother followed, having been ill for quite some time. Her death affected him greatly, and left him without any close blood relatives, his brother having gone to sea years before. He worked nearly three more years for Allen, a year more than his apprenticeship demanded, until joining Isaac Knapp on the Free Press (which Knapp had originally named the Essex Courant). Though Knapp had originally intended it to be a neutral political journal, under Garrison's lead it became a powerfully Federalist newspaper, many of those views having been gained from Allen. That stance cost them many subscriptions, which Garrison impudently said they would gladly erase and continue without. The paper folded six months later.

The next major step in Garrison's life was his work at the National Philanthropist in Boston, owned by Nathaniel White. Originally a temperance paper, Garrison expanded it to cover all of the moral inequities he saw, from intemperance to war. His writing style improved, building on the confidence gained from his early work, though he was still (and would always remain) incredibly blunt. He became acquainted with Lyman Beecher during this time, whose sermons helped to form the rigid morality and character that, in later years, made Garrison famous.

During this period, Garrison began his acquaintance with Benjamin Lundy. The two men stayed at the same boarding house, having many conversations about topics of importance to people of the day. Lundy had been an abolitionist for nearly twenty years, and he introduced Garrison to those thoughts early in 1828. Lundy was for gradual abolition and colonization, and Garrison absorbed those views, as well as a measure of Quaker pacifism, putting them into his writing, alongside his fight against poverty, war, and injustice.

Though the Philanthropist was in financial trouble, Garrison's work on it was well known in certain New England circles. In 1828, Garrison was asked by some of the citizens of Bennington, Vermont, to edit The Journal of the Times, an anti-Jackson, pro-Adams paper. Garrison agreed, but only if they allowed him to support his other causes, which now included slavery, temperance, pacifism, and attacks on Sunday mails, in its pages. When the owners agreed to that clause, he moved to Bennington, and produced the Journal for the duration of his six month contract. He then left the paper to join Lundy in Baltimore to edit The Genius of Universal Emancipation. ¹¹

On returning to Boston, en route to Baltimore, Garrison delivered a Fourth of July address to the Congregational Society of Boston. This was his first major speaking engagement, and one that would assuredly to have some of the most influential people in Boston present. It is reported that Garrison held forth for over an hour, making his views clear to those who listened. His four propositions,

were almost unheard of in that day and age. While almost all in the audience of colonizationalists could agree to his first point, and many would fall into line with him on the third, the second and fourth were inflammatory in the extreme. Garrison knew this. He wanted to inflame them, to make them see things with the same passion he did, and to follow him in a crusade of that might take many generations.

Between Boston and Baltimore, Garrison's thinking coalesced into the doctrine of Immediate Emancipation, a marked departure from the ideals of Lundy. Garrison, however, was by no means the originator of this idea. Reverend George Bourne had formulated it in 1816, and, as number 17 of the first volume of The Liberator made clear, Garrison was familiar with that work. The principle behind Bourne's work was that gradualism failed because it was tantamount to acknowledging the slaveholder's right to slavery. "For gradual emancipation," Bourne argued, "is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice. If it be just for one moment, it be hallowed forever; and if it be inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated."¹³ Thus, when Garrison disembarked in Baltimore, he had departed from Lundy's gradualism. When he informed Lundy of this change, Lundy was scarcely troubled, saying "Well, thee may put thy initials on thy articles, and I will put my initials on mine, and each will bear his own burden." That sufficed for Garrison's conscience, and the partnership was forged.¹⁴

Garrison and Lundy printed their first joint issue of The Genius of Universal Emancipation on September 2, 1829. From the beginning, their differences were clear, with Lundy speaking on the wonders of colonizing free and freed blacks in Haiti, and of the congeniality of the climate to them, while Garrison deplored Colonialism and Gradualism as ways of answering the slave question. To Garrison, the slaves who were born in America were American citizens by right, and that was the end of it. He brooked no argument on this point, and, one can imagine, only grudgingly allowed even Lundy's contradictory views in the paper.

While at the Genius, Garrison ran a feature he referred to as a "Black List." It listed several examples of the barbarities of slavery, such as whippings, kidnappings, and murders, often reported as nothing more than an overheard beating while walking home. Garrison listed several of these each week, usually with comments from the editor about their cruelty or lack of humanity. On November 13, 1829, he printed a notice about the departure of the Francis with a human cargo of 75. He promised to speak more of it in the next edition.¹⁵

True to his word, he returned to the topic in the November 20 edition of the Genius. Garrison published a letter condemning one Francis Todd of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for engaging in the transport of slaves. Garrison recommended that Todd and his Captain be "SENTENCED TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT FOR LIFE; they are enemies of their own species --- highway robbers and murderers; and their final doom will be, unless they speedily repent, to occupy the lowest depths of perdition."¹⁶ He forwarded a copy of his attack on Todd to the Newburyport Herald to be printed there, so people would know what kind of trade was making Todd the mysterious amounts of money he seemed to have. Though the Herald did not comply, Todd still came into possession of one of the papers that contained the editorial¹⁷. Todd sued Garrison and Lundy for libel, thus insuring that an otherwise commonplace piece in the Genius would be remembered as long as Garrison.

The trial itself was quite controversial, by the standards of 1830. The judge allowed the jury to read parts of the article not included in the indictment, which was unheard of in that day. Mr. Todd's own agent told the court, "Mr. Todd, in reply [to Mr. Thompson's informing him that the cargo was human], said he should have preferred another kind of freight, but as freights were dull, times hard, and money scarce, he was satisfied with the bargain." While this testimony showed that the claims of Todd being a slave-mover were not libelous, the jury nonetheless returned a guilty verdict on the civil charge of libel. The total fines were almost one hundred dollars, far more than Garrison could afford (or, likely, even ever possessed). Unable to pay the fine, he went to Baltimore prison, entering on April 17 to the other prisoners taunting of "Fresh fish! Fresh fish!"¹⁸

William Lloyd Garrison spent forty-nine days in jail, from April 17 to June 5, 1830. This was far from trying for him. He slept soundly his first night, and inscribed a poem on his wall when he awoke in the morning.¹⁹ In fact, he used the time in prison to his advantage, and wrote to newspapermen all over the country to bring widespread interest to his case, produced a pamphlet on his trial (which Lundy printed and distributed). He also wrote many letters, to both supporters and opponents.

To his supporters, he sent encouragement, telling them that he was all right, despite his incarceration, and spoke of his desire to be gone from the South. His letter to Todd asked the hard question of how Todd would react if his family had been stolen and sold in different states. "Would one of your townsmen (believing the job to be a profitable one) be blameless for transporting you all thither, though familiar with all these afflicting circumstances?" Garrison asked. The implication, of course, is clear. No man, least of all Todd, would hold that man blameless, so Todd should not be held blameless for doing the same to Africans. Toward the presiding judge, Nicolas Brice, he had considerably less good will. His letter to Brice taunted the judge, saying that he would erect a statue of Brice, practically daring Brice to declare him in contempt. The entire letter amounted to a written indictment of Brice for his conduct, a work Garrison felt would ensure Brice a "deathless notoriety".²⁰ In a later letter, to the Newburyport Herald, Garrison relates a story that displays his opinion of Brice most clearly. It seems that Judge Brice had remarked to Warden David Hudson that "'Mr. Garrison was ambitious of becoming a martyr.' 'Tell his Honor,' [Garrison] responded, 'that if his assertion be true, he is equally ambitious of gathering the faggots, and applying the torch.'"²¹

Garrison also used the time to the advantage of fellow inmates, helping them to write petitions to the governor to get their sentences commuted. The Warden, David Hudson, gave him relatively free reign in the prison, allowing him to visit with the other inmates in their cells, counsel them, and occasionally receive them in his own "suite." Garrison even ate with the Warden and his family on occasion, at their table. He famously debated a slave owner coming to claim his runaway "property" on the ethics and morality of slave holding.²² In response to the man's assertion the slave was his because his father had left the slave to him, Garrison said "'Suppose, your father had broken into a bank and stolen ten thousand dollars, and safely bequeathed the sum as a legacy: could you conscientiously keep the money?'" To this, the slaver had no reply, save to ask "'Perhaps you would like to buy the slave, and give him his liberty?'" Garrison, with his usual dry wit, replied "'Sir, I am a poor man; and were I ever so opulent, it would be necessary, on your part, to make out a clear title to the services of the slave.'" When the slaver, by now quite flustered, resorted to the Biblical argument of Ham's Curse by his father Noah, Garrison smoothly countered that it was a prediction of servitude, not an injunction to oppress. One can imagine that the slaver was now losing his patience, being skillfully debated by a prisoner, when he finally said, ""How should you like to have a black man marry your daughter?"" Garrison replied

At this, the man must have taken his slave and left, for, as Garrison said, "Thus ended the dialogue."²³

While Garrison was largely unsuccessful in drawing editorial interest to his case²⁴, he did get some scant recognition from his old printing master, Ephraim Allen, who commented upon Garrison's incarceration in the Newburyport Herald. Garrison received a copy, and replied in his usual blunt style. While much of the reply is devoted to responses to statements made by Allen, Garrison provides a statement of his own beliefs:

Garrison held these beliefs throughout his life, elaborating only their scope to include women as well as men, and government equally reprehensible as intemperance and war. He summed up his philosophy towards arguments with those who supported slavery in a single phrase. "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."²⁶

For his time, and even for the present day, Garrison was a remarkably progressive man, in favor of things that have only been legally mandatory since the 1960's, and, while more common today, are by no means universal. The origins of that progressivism are rooted in his eccentric Christianity and the political dogma that he absorbed while maturing.

Perhaps the simplest of his views to explain is that of the equality of blacks with whites. He grounds this belief in the basis of the country, quoting the Declaration of Independence's "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."²⁷ While the traditional interpretation of that statement had been, until his time, to mean only white men (and, preferably, white, Protestant, men), Garrison took it early in his life to the next logical step: That it referred to all men, no matter what their color. His well documented ties to the free black communities (gained through his advocacy of immediate emancipation) in Boston and Baltimore no doubt strengthened this interpretation.²⁸ Undoubtedly, he also saw a parallel to the slave in himself. His early life was poor, yet he managed to raise himself through education. If not himself, why not the slave? From there, it is but a small step to extend the words "all men" from meaning simply those of the male gender to meaning all of mankind. As mentioned above, associations with strong women, such as his mother and Martha Farnham, would have impressed upon him early the deservedness of female equality.

Garrison's dislike for intemperance is equally easy to trace. His mother, a devout Baptist, held temperance as almost an article of faith. While Garrison later moved away from the church, her early influence, combined with the cause for his father's leaving and the eventual fate of his brother²⁹, served to strengthen his temperance stance. As his above declaration of beliefs makes clear, temperance was already part of his beliefs, and, being free to roam the prison as he was, he would have seen more of the effects of drink than any man should want to.

Last, however, is his adherence to peace. This comes from his eccentric (for the time) and essentially apostolic understanding of Christianity. His mother and "Aunt" Martha were early influences in his religious life, helping to form the core of his beliefs. Many anti-war statements can be drawn from Christianity, starting with the basic "if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other, also."³⁰ However, one can also find references to war in the Christian scriptures, and a preponderance of history in the Common Era is about wars engaged in by Christians, for allegedly Christian motives. To find the roots of his non-resistant beliefs, then, we must move beyond scripture to Garrison's acquaintances. The simplest connection to make is with the Quakers, and more particularly, Benjamin Lundy. As Robert Abzug points out, when Lundy and Garrison met in 1828, they became fast friends³¹, and Garrison himself acknowledged a deep debt to him, later saying on the occasion of Lundy's death "I feel that I owe everything, instrumentally and under God, to Benjamin Lundy."³² Through Lundy, and later through his abolitionist actions themselves, Garrison met many Quakers, whose philosophy of non-resistance matched his own. While exposure to ideas does not necessarily mean their acceptance, in this case it is a reasonable assumption to make.

Yet, how do these tie back to Garrison's time in Baltimore Jail? First, there are the circumstances of his imprisonment. While technically imprisoned for inability to pay a fine for libel, Garrison saw himself as being in jail because of his views for immediate emancipation, and his temerity in speaking them; a martyr for the cause of liberty. His lawyer argued this in his closing arguments³³, and he himself said as much in a letter to Richard Gill, the prosecuting attorney of his case³⁴. With someone as stubborn as Garrison, this "martyrdom" was sure to cause him to dig in deeper, to hold onto what he knew to be correct. Second, one must consider the facts of imprisonment in Baltimore. Locked away with him were slaves caught while running away, drunkards unable to control themselves, and all manner of men who perpetrated violence. Only the last might have caused him to falter in his beliefs, yet that one did not. He saw the violence as endemic to society. To him, countries using force to secure their interests inferred that people would do the same. Much like modern advocates of television violence regulation, he felt that violence perceived would lead to violence enacted… and thus, only by having a non-resistant world could violence be solved and these people helped.

William Lloyd Garrison was a complex man, who lived a long life, filled with Crusades of every imaginable type. Like Tom Lehrer's Folk Song Army³⁵, he fought the fight against poverty, war, and injustice while most of the country was unaware that it even needed soldiers. He was able to fight for so long because he had built a solid foundation in his youth that he refused to shift from, no matter what the opposition hurled against him. Obstinate, pig-headed, and totally unreasonable, he helped make it possible for millions of Americans to be set free from chains of slavery and kitchen. Chains that, by an accident of birth, he would never be shackled with. No matter the bluntness and obstinacy of his methods, his cry, at the end of the paper that occupied the better portion of his life, was clear as to his intentions:

"On! Till from every vale, and where the mountains rise,

The beacon lights of Liberty shall kindle to the to the skies!"³⁶