Garrison, William Lloyd (1805–1879)

US abolitionist and journalist, William Lloyd Garrison.

US editor and abolitionist. An immediatist (campaigner for an immediate rather than gradual end to slavery), he was an uncompromising opponent of slavery. He founded the abolitionist journal The Liberator in 1831 and cofounded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Although initially opposed to violence, he supported the Union cause in the Civil War. After the Emancipation Proclamation, he disbanded the American Anti-Slavery Society and devoted his energies to prohibition, women's suffrage, and American Indian rights.

Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He trained as a printer and edited the Newburyport Free Press in 1826. Moving to Boston, Massachusetts, he edited the National Philanthropist, the world's first temperance newspaper, in 1827. He joined Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore, Maryland in 1829, editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation. His vigorous denunciation of slavery involved him in a libel charge, and brought about his imprisonment in Boston in 1831.

In 1840 Garrison publicly burned a copy of the US Constitution in protest of the slavery clauses. Most of the members of the American Anti-Slavery Society disagreed with his rejection of politics as a means to end slavery, as well as his insistence on the inclusion of women, and many left the Society in 1840. He continued to publish The Liberator until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (see Amendment, Thirteenth).

He later worked as an editor of various publications in Boston, Vermont, and Baltimore. He published Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), and Sonnets and Other Poems (1843). The Words of Garrison appeared in 1905.