William Lloyd Garrison

On January 1, 1831, a 25-year-old printer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, launched a newspaper called The Liberator with a declaration that left no room for misunderstanding: "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD." For the next 35 years, William Lloyd Garrison kept that promise. The Liberator ran without interruption until slavery was abolished, its final issue published in December 1865.

Garrison was the loudest, most uncompromising voice of the immediate abolitionist movement — and deliberately so. Where earlier reformers called for gradual emancipation or colonization of freed people in Africa, Garrison demanded an immediate, unconditional end to slavery and full rights for Black Americans. He co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, helped launch Frederick Douglass's career, and burned a copy of the Constitution on the Fourth of July, calling it "a covenant with death" for its protection of slavery. Southern states put a price on his head.

His tactics divided the abolitionist movement almost as much as they rattled slaveholders. Garrison refused to vote or hold office, believing a government that permitted slavery deserved no cooperation. He broke with Douglass when Douglass concluded that political engagement was necessary. Yet when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, Garrison could fairly claim that the moral ground his newspaper had held for three decades helped make it possible. He was not easy to like — but he was impossible to ignore.