William Lloyd Garrison, (born Dec. 10/12, 1805, Newburyport, Mass., U.S.—died May 24, 1879, New York, N.Y.), U.S. journalist and abolitionist. He was editor of the National Philanthropist (Boston) newspaper in 1828 and the Journal of the Times (Bennington, Vt.) in 1828–29, both dedicated to moral reform. In 1829 he and Benjamin Lundy edited the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In 1831 he founded The Liberator, which became the most radical of the antislavery journals. In 1833 he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1837 he renounced church and state and embraced the doctrines of Christian “perfectionism,” which combined abolition, women’s rights, and nonresistance with the biblical injunction to “come out” from a corrupt society by refusing to obey its laws and support its institutions. His radical blend of pacifism and anarchism precipitated a crisis in the Anti-Slavery Society, a majority of whose members chose to secede when he and his followers voted a series of resolutions admitting women (1840). In the two decades between the schism of 1840 and the American Civil War, Garrison’s influence waned as his radicalism increased. Through The Liberator he denounced the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision and hailed John Brown’s raid. During the Civil War he forswore pacifism to support Pres. Abraham Lincoln and welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865 he retired but continued to press for women’s suffrage, temperance, and free trade.
