William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown

About the Author

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1805. From his teens he worked in the newspaper-publishing business. Then, in 1831, he published the first issue of his Boston newspaper, the Liberator, which until the end of 1865 served as his personal vehicle for broadcasting his many controversial opinions, most notably that slavery must be immediately abolished and that people of all skin colors must be treated as equals. In 1833 he played a major role in the establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which for the first time united black and white reformers of both genders in support of programs of mass agitation to promote immediate abolition and racial equality.

In the late 1830s Garrison adopted still more radical beliefs by embracing female equality and Christian pacifism, denying the literal truth of Scripture, rejecting the authority of religious denominations, and demanding the boycotting of governments and elections. By 1842, when he denounced the U.S. Constitution as a pro-slavery document and demanded that the free North secede from the slave South, he had become a divisive force within the abolitionist movement and a controversial figure in the nation's developing political crisis over slavery.

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s Garrison and his small circle continued to espouse a wide-ranging reform agenda through speeches and in the pages of the Liberator. In 1859, however, John Brown's insurrectionary raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, led Garrison to jettison his pacifism. When the Civil War began in 1861, he quickly became one of its most fervent supporters, demanding that all slaves be freed by force of arms. In 1865, after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, Garrison closed the Liberator and ended his career. He died on May 24, 1879.

Garrison was perhaps the antebellum era's most innovative editorial agitator. In an era of rapidly expanding print and telegraphic communication, his ceaseless desire to promote himself as the nation's moral censor and his unerring capacity for challenging conventional values made it all but impossible for Americans to deny the moral problem of slavery. He accomplished his goals because of his exceptional talent as a polemicist and his inexhaustible love of ideological conflict. His temperament aligned him closely to the romantic impulses that inspired New England Transcendentalists and utopian reformers who, like him, were deeply suspicious of established institutions and who celebrated intuitive illuminations of God's “truth.” In short, he addressed public opinion in idioms it instinctively understood.