The son of a devout Baptist mother and a father who abandoned the family while he was still a child, William Lloyd Garrison grew up poor in Newburyport, Massachusetts. From his mother’s faith he inherited the conviction that the gospel demands concrete justice, not only private devotion.
In 1829, at age 23, he spoke publicly against slavery for the first time at Park Street Church in Boston, calling it a “national sin.” Shortly afterward, an accusation he published against a merchant involved in transporting enslaved people earned him seven weeks in prison in Baltimore, on a charge of libel.
In 1831 he founded the newspaper The Liberator in Boston. There he broke with the then common idea of gradual emancipation, demanding immediate freedom with no compensation to slaveholders, grounded in the conviction that every human being has equal worth before God. Across the top of the paper ran the motto, “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.”
He helped found the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, drafting the latter’s Declaration of Sentiments. His frankness came at a steep price: in 1835 a mob dragged him through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, nearly lynching him.
Garrison’s radicalism also divided his allies. He insisted on including women in the movement’s leadership, broke with Frederick Douglass over whether the U.S. Constitution was pro or antislavery, and in 1854 burned the document in a public square, a gesture that many, inside and outside the abolitionist movement, judged excessive.
He also drew away from organized church life, which he saw as silent in the face of slavery, and adopted ideas of “Christian perfectionism” that unsettled even his fellow reformers. Even so, he never abandoned biblical language or the conviction that faith demands the public denunciation of injustice.
He published the final issue of The Liberator in December 1865, months after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. He died in 1879 in New York, having turned his certainty that all people are equal before God into a newspaper, a movement, and a national reform.
