William Lloyd Garrison: Jailed for Libel, He Burned the Constitution

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William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of a merchant sailor left jobless by Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, who then abandoned the family. Garrison sold homemade lemonade and candy and delivered wood, and at 13 began a seven-year apprenticeship at the Newburyport Herald, learning to compose articles in his head as he set type. In the late 1820s he co-edited an anti-slavery paper in Baltimore with Quaker Benjamin Lundy and abandoned gradualism. His Black List column named Francis Todd, a shipper from his hometown carrying enslaved people from Baltimore to New Orleans. Todd sued for libel in Maryland, and Garrison spent seven weeks in the Baltimore jail until Arthur Tappan paid his $50 fine.

In 1831 he launched The Liberator in Boston with Isaac Knapp, demanding immediate emancipation. Its subscribers numbered about 2,000, roughly three quarters of them free Black Americans, but donors mailed free copies to lawmakers. Georgia offered a $5,000 bounty for his capture, and in 1835 a Boston mob of well-dressed gentlemen dragged him through the streets until the mayor locked him in the Leverett Street jail. He backed women's rights, embraced no-governmentism, and at an 1854 July 4th rally burned the Constitution as a covenant with death. During the Civil War he backed Lincoln, and after the 13th Amendment he ended The Liberator in 1865, splitting with Wendell Phillips. He died of kidney disease in New York in 1879.

• Southern politicians blamed his writing for Nat Turner's rebellion, and a North Carolina grand jury indicted him.
• At the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London he refused his seat and sat in the gallery with the excluded women delegates.
• He attacked pro-slavery writer Mordecai Manuel Noah with antisemitic language, yet opposed amending the Constitution to declare Christianity.
• After his wife Helen died in 1876 he attended seances hoping to reach her.
• Leo Tolstoy wrote about his nonresistance ideas, which passed through Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.