Abolitionism: Garrison, Douglass, and the Conscience of Massachusetts

On January first, eighteen thirty-one, a twenty-five-year-old printer named William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of a newspaper called The Liberator from a small office in Boston. The opening editorial was uncompromising. He wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice." He promised his readers he would not equivocate, he would not excuse, he would not retreat a single inch, and he would be heard.

Garrison had grown up in poverty in Newburyport. He had no formal education beyond apprenticeship. What he had was conviction. He rejected gradual emancipation and colonization schemes. He demanded immediate, unconditional abolition. For that position, in eighteen thirty-one, he was considered a dangerous radical by most Americans, including many who opposed slavery.

Massachusetts became the center of American abolitionism in the eighteen thirties and forties. The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia in eighteen thirty-three, but its strongest chapters were in Massachusetts. When Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in eighteen thirty-eight, he settled in New Bedford. When he first spoke publicly about his experience as a slave, in Nantucket in eighteen forty-one, Garrison was in the audience. Within days, Douglass had been recruited to lecture for the anti-slavery movement.

Douglass's autobiography, published in eighteen forty-five, named his enslaver, described the plantation in Maryland by name, and gave dates and facts that proved he had been a slave. It was one of the most politically dangerous books ever published in America. He published it in Boston, from a Massachusetts address.

The abolitionist movement in Massachusetts was never without conflict. It split over women's rights, political action, and theology. But it changed the moral language of American public life in ways that outlasted all the disagreements.