To the Public

William Lloyd Garrison was born on December 10, 1805. He was a prominent abolitionist and journalist, best known as the founder of The Liberator, a weekly anti-slavery newspaper published in Boston beginning on January 1, 1831. The newspaper ran until December 29, 1865, when it ceased publication after the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery. The influence of The Liberator continues to be felt; the magazine was transformed, though without Garrison’s direct involvement, into The Nation magazine, which is still published today.

Garrison’s father abandoned his family in 1808, causing great financial hardship. Garrison received only a rudimentary education and, at age 13, was apprenticed as a printer to a local Newburyport, Massachusetts, newspaper. Thus began his long career in journalism, which included work with such periodicals as the Newburyport Herald, the National Philanthropist, the Baltimore Genius of Universal Emancipation, and the New York Independent. In addition to his work with the press, Garrison became well-known as an orator, a prominent occupation in 19th-century America, and he traveled widely espousing his anti-slavery ideas as well as his positions on moral questions such as women’s rights, temperance, and criminal justice reform.

Garrison’s relationship to these causes, which many of his era considered radical, blossomed in the 1820s.