Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
1805–1879

My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.

William Lloyd Garrison was the man who more than any one else helped to abolish slavery. He was what we call a Pioneer—or one who leads the way—because, though some people had hoped for the gradual freedom of the negroes, and a few had worked for it, Garrison was the first to ask for their immediate freedom and to set to work to make this question the most living and important one of the day. For he believed that if a thing is wrong in itself it should not exist another hour. Garrison was born at Newburyport, Mass., December 10, 1805. Like Thoreau and Hans Andersen, he was of humble birth and had a very hard childhood. His mother had been deserted by his father, and he was obliged to earn money to help her keep the home together. So as quite a small boy he went about peddling apples, and later worked at shoemaking and cabinet-making and other trades; he hated them all, and on one occasion ran away to sea. There was no time for learning from books, and he had practically no schooling. But when he was thirteen he became apprenticed to the printers’ business in the office of the Newburyport Herald, and to this work he took like a duck to water. He showed peculiar skill at printing, and also a great gift for writing. He wrote and sent articles to different papers and he read a great deal. He liked romantic books, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Byron particularly. He wrote poetry himself which is considered good. His mother had always warned her son against being an author, as she believed the lot of all literary men was to die of starvation in a garret. Nevertheless, Garrison seemed cut out for an editor or writer. He was left alone in the world when he was eighteen, for his mother died and his only brother, a bad lot, had disappeared. His apprenticeship with the printer ended when he was twenty-one. At this time he was a very taking and charming young man, with a refined, sensitive, clean-shaven face, and always well dressed; pleasant, mildly ambitious, and social, enjoying parties and going to church regularly, he conformed outwardly to what the world thinks is the right and proper thing. But there was more in William Lloyd Garrison than met the eye. His friends, who had complete trust in him, now lent him money to start a newspaper of his own. He called it the Newburyport Free Press, and became the editor and proprietor of it, and wrote, too, most of the articles. But the views in them were much too independent to please the ordinary person, and it failed.

Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was not going to take anybody’s word for a thing without thinking it all out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance paper, The National Philanthropist, in Boston, and then again the proprietor of a newspaper called The Journal of the Times. Once more he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and intellect of man to brutal incapacity.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

“This state of things,” he declared with vehemence, “must come to an end.” The article drew the attention to him of a much older man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison. Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy’s preaching, and equally disgusted with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.

It was almost impossible to get a church or a school for an anti-slavery meeting, and when they did succeed, on one occasion, the meeting was broken up by a clergyman who denounced the agitation against slavery as dangerous. “The moral cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbelief and cruel skepticism that were revealed,” says Garrison on that occasion, “filled me with rage,” and from that time he ceased to go to church.

Garrison was asked now by Lundy to become editor with him of a paper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation, whose object was to suppress drink and to free the negro. Garrison joined him. He wrote most of the articles and Lundy did the lecturing. The articles were very clear and forcible. “For ourselves,” the paper declared, “we are resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost; nothing but death shall prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human depravity.” Garrison worked hard: he got subscribers to the paper and managed to start a petition against slavery, which was signed by over two thousand people, and was presented to Congress. The answer came back that agitation would make the slaves restless and difficult to manage, and would put ideas into their heads when they might be comparatively happy and contented.

You can imagine the scorn Garrison felt for his Government. What else could he feel about a Government which boasted of itself as a democratic Government, which desired all people to have equal opportunities, rich or poor, and which, while sitting in the Capitol could see every day the manacled slave driven past the door to market? Custom, as it so often does, had blunted the sensibilities of these Senators: they remained untouched and unmoved. It needed a young, fresh, open mind like that of Garrison to show them the way. He was only twenty-six, but he saw clearly what much older men did not see, that in the long run the moral point of view is the only point of view, that right or justice is the only thing to work for, and all other issues are of no account at all. But it does not, perhaps, seem to us now a very wonderful thing that Garrison should have been so shocked and horrified at what he saw and heard about slavery. What strikes us as incredible now is that there were many thousands of people, and quite humane, kind people too, who defended it. It was the custom of the country and part of the Constitution. Many people didn’t trouble to reason about it; indeed, they believed that were slavery abolished the country would be ruined—they would have no cotton, no corn, no tobacco, because there would be no laborers to till the soil or to harvest the crops. The black men and women did the work for nothing. But so short-sighted and stupid were commercial people generally, that they could not see that slavery, besides being a moral wrong, was also a mistake economically. In the long run it was more expensive, because the work was less well done; an intelligent person who takes some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly removed from the animals.