money for a new newspaper.
City officials and leaders in Boston did not rejoice when Garrison returned to the city in 1830. He tried to reserve a hall in Boston for a speech, but everyone he contacted refused his request. As a last resort, he announced plans for a speech on the Boston Common. The prospect of a large and unruly gathering on the Common changed the minds of city leaders. They quickly issued an invitation for the free use of Julien Hall, and Garrison accepted.133
Boston’s abolitionist community turned out to hear Garrison on October 15, 1830. The audience included John Tappan, brother of Arthur Tappan; Moses Grant, a prominent local merchant in the paper business who was active in the temperance movement; attorney Samuel E. Sewall; and a number of ministers, including Lyman Beecher and Samuel Joseph May, a Unitarian minister from Brooklyn, Connecticut. Garrison discussed the “sinfulness of slave-holding” and “the duplicity of the Colonization Society.” He also said, “Immediate, unconditional emancipation is the right of every slave and the duty of every master.”134
Garrison’s speech had a powerful effect. “That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its center, but he will shake slavery out of it,” May said. “We ought to know him, we ought to help him.”135 May came from a prominent Boston family and had graduated from the Harvard Divinity School. He assisted at churches in Boston and New York City before accepting a call to a church in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Garrison, May, Amos Alcott, and Samuel Sewall gathered at Alcott’s home after the speech. “Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse all you have said this evening,” May said. “Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work, and I mean to help you.”136
May recalled an incident from the summer of 1821, when he and his sister traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to visit friends and relatives. While riding in a public stagecoach, they saw a row of black men chained together in handcuffs walking behind a wagon, and young children in another wagon, lying on straw. “My first thought was that they were prisoners,” May said. “Scarcely had I uttered the words, when the truth flashed … They are slaves.”137 May recalled that another passenger, a southerner, noticed May’s reaction: “It is bad. It is shameful. But it was entailed upon us. What can we do?”138
May had agreed to preach at the Summer Street Church in Boston as a favor to a minister who was away and decided to change the focus of his sermon to slavery. “It is our prejudice against the color of these poor people that makes us consent to the tremendous wrongs they are suffering,” May said.139 He concluded with a dramatic call to either end slavery or break up the United States. “Tell me not that we are forbidden by the Constitution of our country to interfere in behalf of the enslaved. … If need be, the very foundations of our Republic must be broken up … It cannot stand, it ought not to stand, it will not stand, on the necks of millions of men. For God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.”140
The congregation reacted with bewilderment and outrage that rippled through the rows of parishioners. May acknowledged the response at the end of the service, but did not apologize. “Everyone present must be conscious that the closing remarks of my sermon have caused an unusual emotion throughout the church,” May said. “I am glad. Would to God that a deeper emotion could be sent throughout our land.”141 A woman who approached May after the service told him, “Mr. May, I thank you. What a shame it is that I, who have been a constant attendant from my childhood in this or some other Christian church, am obliged to confess that today, for the first time, I have heard from the pulpit a plea for the oppressed, the enslaved millions in our land.”142
Not everyone who heard Garrison’s speech had the same positive reaction as Samuel May. Moses Grant, the paper merchant, rejected Garrison’s call for immediate emancipation and declined to help.143 John Tappan strongly supported colonization and told his brother Arthur it was a shame he had bailed Garrison out of jail.144
Gradually, Garrison enlisted the help of other friends and supporters. Isaac Knapp, a boyhood friend and the original owner of the Free Press, offered typesetting assistance. Stephen Foster, a colleague at one of the religious papers, the Christian Watchman, volunteered to print Garrison’s newspaper until he could afford a press of his own.145 With the publishing arrangements in place, the newspaper needed a memorable name. Samuel Sewall suggested the Safety Lamp.146 Garrison initially proposed to call it the Public Liberator and Journal of the Times.147 This became the Public Liberator, and finally, the Liberator. The Liberator became the most famous, influential, and longest running of any abolitionist newspaper.
In the fall of 1830, Garrison reached out to the black population of Boston for support and subscriptions. Many knew of Garrison’s brief partnership with Benjamin Lundy, his imprisonment in Baltimore, and his Independence Day speech regarding slavery. In the fall of 1830, the black community in Boston needed advocates. The black newspaper Freedom’s Journal had ceased publication in 1829. Black leader David Walker had died, most likely as a result of tuberculosis, although some believed he was poisoned and murdered. The lanky twenty-four-year-old Garrison begged the question—how could this young, white man know of the trials and needs of the black community? Garrison persisted, and in November and December of 1830, he received support at black churches and in meetings with black leaders. As one commentator later wrote, “It is no wonder that, after launching his operation without a single subscriber or a penny in reserve, with borrowed type and paper obtained on the shakiest of credit, he quickly picked up 450 subscribers, of whom 400 were Negroes.”148
Garrison published volume one, number one of the Liberator in Boston on New Year’s Day 1831. In the time since his Independence Day speech in 1829, he had witnessed slave auctions in the markets and streets of Baltimore. He had supported and then rejected colonization and its goal of returning blacks to Africa, an idea “full of timidity, injustice and absurdity.”149 Garrison took aim at both the slave owners in the South and slavery apologists in the North. Comparing his time in Baltimore with his years in Massachusetts, Garrison concluded that prejudice in the North was as bad and often worse than in the South. “I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen, than among slave owners themselves,” Garrison said.150 “I determined, at every hazard, to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within the sight of Bunker Hill and in the birthplace of liberty.”151
While Garrison did not embrace violence, he aligned himself with the activist philosophy of David Walker. “Let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble,” Garrison wrote in his passionate statement of purpose. “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. … I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”152
13. William Lloyd Garrison in the 1850s.
William Lloyd Garrison. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937 (37.14.37). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Garrison’s launch of the Liberator in January 1831, when he was twenty-five years old, was an act of faith. From a business point of view the entire enterprise, held together with borrowed assets and romantic notions, seemed doomed to failure. The cause of the newspaper—the immediate abolition of slavery—severely limited his base of subscribers and advertisers. This did not deter Garrison. “The curse of our age is, men love popularity better than truth, and expediency better than justice,” he wrote.153 The modest success he had achieved did not make him cautious. Instead, Garrison vowed to risk everything, his
