but the money was never sent, even after his mother secured a job. This arrangement continued until Garrison’s eighth birthday, when an elderly couple, Ezekiel and Salome Bartlett, agreed to provide for the boy.87 The Bartletts were poor; caring for Garrison was an act of Christian charity that placed additional stress on their already meager family budget. Garrison attended school in the fall of 1814 when he was nine, but soon left to take whatever odd jobs he could find to help them all survive.88 He ran away once, traveling twenty miles on foot until a mailman picked him up and returned him home by wagon.89
His mother invited Lloyd to come live near her in Lynn with the family of Gamaliel Oliver, a shoemaker.90 Lloyd’s brother, James—who was only four years older than Lloyd—lived on his own and spent what little money he earned on alcohol. In the next four years Lloyd moved south to Baltimore and then back to Newburyport. He was shipped off to a cabinetmaker in Haverhill. All the moving around took a toll on Garrison. At thirteen years old, he ran away from the cabinetmaker and returned to Newburyport without a plan for his future.91
The Newburyport Herald had a sign in the office window, “Boy Wanted,” and Garrison walked through the door. In the fall of 1818 he began a career in publishing that lasted the rest of his life. It did not begin well. He was hired for the position of “printer’s devil.” The primitive technology of the time required printers to light a fire underneath a pot of varnish and lampblack until it became a boiling, sticky cauldron of black ink. The printer’s devil then applied the ink by hand to the metal type with sheepskin made pliable by soaking it in pails of urine. It was Garrison’s job to make the ink and soak the sheepskin.92 He thought of running away yet again, but stayed on hoping to advance from this bottom level of the newspaper business.
Garrison focused on learning his job and doing it well, and his superiors rewarded him for his hard work. He quickly advanced through the ranks of newspaper production and became an expert typesetter. He impressed the publisher of the Newburyport Herald, Ephraim Allen, with his talent and work ethic. Allen saw in Garrison some of the same ambition and determination that Allen possessed when he began his own career. Allen had purchased the Herald in 1801 when he was twenty-two years old; the newspaper went to press two days per week and had a small circulation. Allen served as the printer, editor, reporter, and carrier of the paper.93 Allen’s news-gathering technique consisted of traveling by stagecoach to Boston, purchasing all the newspapers he could find, and copying articles from other newspapers.94 Twenty years later the Herald was the leading newspaper in Newburyport with dozens of employees.
Allen promoted Garrison to the position of apprentice and invited him to board at Allen’s home. Ephraim Allen had six children, including a boy Garrison’s age. Garrison discovered a world beyond the reach of poverty. Parents and children all lived together. No one went hungry. Garrison took advantage of the family’s library and began an intense effort to educate himself; he read Shakespeare, Milton, and contemporary literature.95
By the beginning of 1823, Garrison supervised the production of the Herald. In 1826 he pursued an opportunity to purchase the Northern Chronicler, a rival newspaper in Newburyport. Ephraim Allen loaned Garrison the money needed for the purchase. Garrison was twenty years old. Allen and the staff of the Herald gave Garrison a congratulatory send-off on March 17, 1826. Garrison renamed his newspaper the Free Press and immediately plunged into local politics.96
The race for the region’s congressional seat generated a fierce battle of editorials. Garrison backed the Federalist incumbent, while Ephraim Allen supported Caleb Cushing, a former Herald employee. Garrison and Allen had disagreed on other issues in their respective newspapers; however, this time the sparring became personal and consequences ensued. On September 21, 1826, with no warning, Garrison sold the Free Press to a newspaperman who quickly aligned it with the editorial point of view of the Herald. Garrison said he sold his newspaper for personal reasons, but one historian concluded that “it seems inescapable” that Ephraim Allen ran out of patience with his not so deferential protégé and called in his loan.97 Garrison learned a bitter lesson in the ways of business and politics. After only six months he lost his newspaper. As a small consolation, Caleb Cushing lost the race for U.S. Congress.98
Garrison left Newburyport for Boston and took up residence in a boardinghouse owned by William Collier, a Baptist minister who published religious newspapers. Collier’s newspapers promoted two popular social movements: the temperance campaign to curb alcohol consumption and the new religious revivalism. Collier asked Garrison to manage the National Philanthropist, a temperance newspaper with the slogan, “Moderate drinking is the downhill road to intemperance and drunkenness.”99 While editing the National Philanthropist, Garrison met Benjamin Lundy, a friend of Collier.100
Lundy needed wealthy patrons to help finance his antislavery newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy found little support even among progressive businessmen and clergy. Many reformers preferred to concentrate on less-contentious issues such as ridding society of public drunkenness.
Prior to meeting Benjamin Lundy, Garrison considered slavery as one of many issues worthy of reform. Garrison described himself as a friend to the poor, “a lover of morality, and an enemy to vice,” and supported the temperance movement, antigambling efforts, and reform in local politics.101 He had a high opinion of his own potential. “My name shall one day be known to the world,” Garrison wrote in a letter to the Boston Courier in 1827. “This, I know, will be deemed excessive vanity—but time shall prove it prophetic.”102 Lundy’s accounts of the evils of slavery helped Garrison conclude that slavery was the single most important problem in the United States, a moral outrage that demanded opposition and justice.
Garrison impulsively quit his job at the National Philanthropist, hoping to join Lundy in Baltimore. Lundy, however, could not afford to take on a partner, and Garrison scrambled to find another job. He traveled to Bennington, Vermont, to edit the Journal of the Times, a political newspaper created for the sole purpose of supporting John Quincy Adams in his 1828 reelection bid for president. While Garrison was essentially a hired political operative, he did find ways to write about slavery. Garrison attacked Adams’s opponent, Andrew Jackson, and worked slavery into the story line, reminding readers that Jackson owned slaves.103 The rival and well-established Vermont Gazette, which supported Andrew Jackson, accused Garrison of being a paid mouthpiece for the Adams campaign and said the Journal was nothing more than a broadsheet for John Quincy Adams, which was all true. Garrison denied the charges. “The blockheads who have had the desperate temerity to propagate this falsehood have yet to learn our character,” he wrote.104 The Gazette also claimed that Garrison and the Journal supported ending slavery through immediate emancipation, which the Gazette said would ruin the South and the nation. Garrison denied that charge as well. Immediate emancipation was “out of the question,” Garrison wrote.105 On election day, John Quincy Adams won Vermont and all of the New England states, but the South and the Midwest solidly supported Jackson, and Andrew Jackson was elected president. Garrison, still hoping to work with Benjamin Lundy, left the Journal and returned to Boston.
Surviving on a variety of temporary printing jobs, Garrison won an invitation from the Boston Society of Congregational Churches to deliver an address on Independence Day 1829 at the Park Street Church. The American Colonization Society sponsored the event and received donations collected at the service.106 “The American Colonization Society has effected much good,” Garrison wrote, “and deserves unlimited encouragement.”107 Garrison acknowledged, however, that colonization alone could not bring about the end of slavery.
Garrison wanted to utilize the speech to make a name for himself in Boston. He spent weeks working on the text and laying out the evils of slavery. A few days before the address he predicted his speech “will offend some, though not reasonably.”108
