William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison helped transform the antislavery movement from a discussion about gradually ending slavery into a moral crusade demanding “immediate and complete emancipation.” A printer and editor, Garrison experienced his near-religious conversion to abolitionism around 1828 and founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. At first, he was a lone, fierce, and unpopular voice; at one point, he was almost lynched in his hometown of Boston. But Garrison refused to back down: “I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!” he wrote in the first salutatory address of the Liberator.

Garrison’s attack on slavery grew so fierce that he condemned the Constitution as a corrupt document for permitting it. Although his extremism was not shared by all, he and his growing number of followers forced the North to the previously radical propo-sition that slavery was both immoral and antithetical to the country’s founding principles.