PRESENTATION OUTLINE
William Lloyd Garrison
Born: December 10, 1805
Died: May 24, 1879
By: Gregorie Brown-Thomas per.6, 2/20/19
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was born the son of a merchant sailor in Newburyport, Massachusetts on December 10, 1805. When Garrison was only three years old, his father Abijah abandoned the family. Garrison’s mother, a devout Baptist named Frances Maria, struggled to raise Garrison and his siblings in poverty.
Garrison lived with a Baptist deacon for a time, where he received a rudimentary education. In 1814, he reunited with his mother and took an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, but the work proved too physically demanding for the young boy. A short stint at cabinetmaking was equally unsuccessful.
In 1828, while working for the National Philanthropist, Garrison took a meeting with Benjamin Lundy. The antislavery editor of the Genius of Emancipation brought the cause of abolition to Garrison’s attention. When Lundy offered Garrison an editor’s position at Genius of Emancipation in Vermont, Garrison eagerly accepted. The job marked Garrison’s initiation into the Abolitionist movement.
In 1818, when Garrison was 13 years old, he was appointed to a seven-year apprenticeship as a writer and editor under Ephraim W. Allen, the editor of the Newburyport Herald. It was during this apprenticeship that Garrison would find his true calling.
Through Garrison’s various newspaper jobs, he acquired the skills to run his own newspaper.
By the time he was 25 years old, Garrison had joined the American Colonization Society. The society held the view that blacks should move to the west coast of Africa. Garrison at first believed that the society’s goal was to promote blacks’ freedom and well being.
But Garrison grew disillusioned when he soon realized that their true objective was to minimize the amount of free slaves in the United States. It became clear to Garrison that this strategy only served to further support the mechanism of slavery.
In 1861, as the American Civil War broke out, Garrison continued to criticize the U.S. Constitution in The Liberator, a process of resistance that Garrison had now practiced for nearly 20 years. Understandably, some found it surprising when the pacifist also used his journalism to support Abraham Lincoln and his war policies, even prior to the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862.
When the Civil War came to a close in 1865, Garrison at last saw his dream come to fruition: With the 13th Amendment, slavery was outlawed throughout the United States—in both the North and South.
