Garrison, William Lloyd

Life Span
to
    Full name
    William Lloyd Garrison
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    7
    Family
    Abijah Garrison (father), Frances "Fanny" Lloyd (mother), Helen Eliza Benson (wife, 1834), Wendell Phillips Garrison (son), Lucy McKim (daughter-in-law)
    Occupation
    Journalist
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Baptist
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Women’s Rights

    William Lloyd Garrison, American Anti-Slavery Society (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    December 1833…leading northern abolitionists convened in Philadelphia to inaugurate the American Anti-Slavery Society. This organization was designed as a national body that would stimulate the creation of abolitionist societies across the North and win support for immediate emancipation. Its founding members, a profile of the larger crusade against slavery, included New York City religious evangelicals such as the Tappan brothers, Joshua Leavitt, and William Jay, Unitarian radicals such as Samuel Sewall and Samuel May, Quakers like John Greenleaf Whittier and Lucretia Mott, and free African Americans such as Robert Purvis and James McCrummell.

    Garrison's contribution to the launching of this biracial, gender-inclusive organization was his authorship of the society's Declaration of Sentiments, which stressed nonviolence. While condemning the slaveholder as a "manstealer," the Declaration announced unshakable opposition to colonization, to all laws upholding slavery, and to all customs and attitudes that enforced racial prejudice…

    To accomplish these formidable tasks, the Declaration also urged abolitionists to found newspapers and antislavery societies, launch petition campaigns, send speakers into the countryside, and challenge the moral sensibilities of slaveholders by appeals through the various religious denominations. Through this broad-based program of "moral suasion," as the abolitionists called it, the aim was peacefully to transform public opinion in favor of freeing the slaves and obliterating racial prejudice. While to most white Americans Garrison's Declaration reeked of fanaticism by proposing to transform three million slaves into equal citizens, to later generations it has come to represent a landmark of democratic aspiration.
    James Brewer Stewart, "Garrison, William Lloyd," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00256.html.

    William Lloyd Garrison, "Garrisonianism" (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, as the political crisis over slavery's westward expansion deepened, Garrison's espousals of northern disunion, nonresistance, woman's rights, and anticlericalism satisfied his own prophetic purity but left him and his supporters largely removed from the political events that were leading to civil war. At the same time, the term "Garrisonianism" also came to embody the most dangerous tendencies in Yankee political culture, not only for slaveholders but for those who valued the Union above all else. On 4 July 1854, when Garrison burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, his flamboyant gesture only confirmed a generalized fear of New England extremism that had become commonplace in antebellum political culture. Only after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 did Garrison begin to retreat from his nonresistant positions, and only after Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 did he begin to affirm that the Union deserved preserving in the face of southern moves toward secession.
    James Brewer Stewart, "Garrison, William Lloyd," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00256.html.
    Date Title
    New York Herald, "The Boston Fugitive Case," June 3, 1854
    Abraham Lincoln's Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 10, 1856
    New York Times, “Convention of Radical Abolitionists,” February 17, 1857
    New Orleans (LA) Picayune, “The New Nullification,” May 2, 1857
    Washington (DC) National Era, “A Mistake,” August 13, 1857
    Washington (DC) National Era, "The Union," October 15, 1857
    Louisa F. Jones to William Still, May 15, 1858
    Boston (MA) Liberator, "Anti-Slavery Celebration of Independence Day," June 25, 1858
    Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune, “New Orleans Delta on the Illinois Republican Convention,” July 5, 1858
    New Orleans (LA) Picayune, "The Harper's Ferry Outbreak," October 22, 1859
    Fayetteville (NC) Observer, "Good Out of Evil," October 27, 1859
    Carlisle (PA) American Volunteer, "Tenderly Sensitive," November 3, 1859
    New York Herald, “Seward Nominated for the Presidency by the Abolitionists,” December 25, 1859
    Boston (MA) Herald, “A Conflict of the Races in Canada,” January 23, 1860
    New York Herald, “Massachusetts Thoroughly Abolitionized,” September 7, 1860
    New York Herald, “Helper and His Black Republican Endorsers,” October 28, 1860
    New York Herald, “Free Love and Passional Attraction in the New Administration,” February 13, 1861
    New York Herald, “Honor to Abolitionism Pure and Simple,” March 24, 1861
    New York Times, “Slave Insurrections,” April 12, 1861
    Richmond (VA) Dispatch, “New European Views of the South,” May 17, 1861
    Chillicothe (OH) Scioto Gazette, “Disgraceful Fraud,” October 29, 1861
    Reverend Henry Ward Beecher's remarks at the ceremony restoring the flag to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 14, 1865
    How to Cite This Page: "Garrison, William Lloyd," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5714.