The New Student's Reference Work/Garrison, William Lloyd

Gar′rison, William Lloyd, an American journalist and abolitionist, was born at
WM. L. GARRISON Newburyport, Mass., Dec. 10, 1805. After trying shoemaking and cabinet-making, he became a printer on the Newburyport Herald, and when only 16 began to write for the newspapers, trying to arouse an interest in the slavery-question. In 1824 he became editor of the Herald and accepted some of Whittier's earliest poems, when their author was yet unknown to fame. Later he became editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation at Baltimore, and was imprisoned for his outspoken antislavery views. In 1831 he founded The Liberator in Boston, without capital or subscribers, a paper which he carried on until slavery was abolished. He was threatened with imprisonment and even with assassination, and a mob severely handled him in Boston in 1835, but he kept to his purpose. He made several visits to England in the interest of the cause he had taken up, and in 1833 he organized the American antislavery society, of which he was afterwards president. He continued his newspaper during the Civil War, and discontinued it in 1865, when the amendment to the constitution prohibiting slavery in the United States was adopted. The same year a number of his friends presented him with $30,000 as a memorial of his services. He died at New York, May 24, 1879. See Life by Johnson.