[In the following essay, Fredrickson summarizes Garrison's theories of reform, nonviolent resistance, and social progress, while critiquing some of the more radical elements of his political position.]

William Lloyd Garrison did not, in any real sense, lead the American antislavery movement. Abolitionism was a decentralized enterprise subject to local variation and internal factionalism, and Garrison's control of tactics and strategy never extended far beyond the borders of New England (it often was challenged even there). Furthermore, the influence of his brand of abolitionism upon Northern opinion, which never was very great, did not increase with time. His refusal to endorse political activity left him outside the mainstream antislavery efforts of the 1840's and 1850's that resulted in the Free Soil movement and influenced the founding of the Republican Party. But despite these facts and their use by historians in an attempt to discredit the “myth” of Garrison's influence, he remains, and deservedly so, the central figure in the crusade against slavery.

Part of the mystery about Garrison's significance may be resolved by reviewing the facts surrounding his emergence from obscurity. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805, Garrison grew up fatherless and poor. His father, a sailing master with a penchant for strong drink, abandoned the family in 1808. Raised by his mother and by foster parents, he received little formal schooling and eventually was apprenticed to a printer. Educating himself as he set type, Garrison soon became a part-time journalist and then, in 1825, the editor of a weekly newspaper. Unsuccessful in this role, he next moved into the new field of reform journalism, which was developing in the late 1820's as a result of the rise of a variety of benevolent societies and of crusades for human betterment.

In 1828, while editing the National Philanthropist, a Boston temperance organ, he met Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker opponent of slavery. Garrison then decided that the cause of the slave was a better center for his reform interests than Demon Rum and agreed to go to Baltimore to become acting editor of Lundy's paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy was a supporter of the movement to bring about gradual emancipation through colonizing freed Negroes abroad, but Garrison, although initially accepting this program, soon concluded that the only suitable antislavery platform was immediate emancipation without colonization. In taking this position, he was influenced by the situation in Britain, where the movement for emancipation in the West Indies was triumphing under the slogan “immediate emancipation.” As editor of The Genius, Garrison took a hard line against slavery and its supporters and eventually was jailed for allegedly libeling a ship owner engaged in the coastal slave trade. The libel judgment brought an end to the joint venture with Lundy, and after forty-nine days in confinement, Garrison returned to Boston, where he began publishing his own antislavery journal, the Liberator, in January, 1831.

The Liberator was a new departure in the antislavery movement. There had been opposition to slavery previously—much of it a carry-over from the Revolutionary era, when slavery had come under attack as incompatible with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. But this earlier opposition had been linked, in most cases, with the belief that the two races could not live together in freedom and that emancipation therefore must be gradual and accompanied by the removal of free Negroes from the country. In the Liberator, in his speeches, and in his book Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), Garrison berated the colonizationists as being, at best, men of little faith and, at worst, covert supporters of slavery. He was not the first antislavery spokesman to attack colonization, but he was the first to make an impression. He wrote in the introductory issue of the Liberator, “I will be heard.” And heard he was, largely as the result of a harsh and uncompromising mode of expression that publicized his cause through its shock effect and its power to arouse violent opposition. In this way—and perhaps this was the only possible way—he raised the slavery issue in a new form and forced philanthropists and reformers to re-examine their premises. Can we live another moment, he asked, with such a crime as slavery? Does not colonization mean in effect the indefinite prolongation of this curse? Can we be true to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and also say that the Negro can never be made the equal of the white man as long as he remains within the United States? By asking questions of this sort with a new urgency, Garrison exposed the moral core of the problem as no one else had done. And he succeeded in altering the course of the antislavery movement by reducing colonization to irrelevance.

This work accomplished, he continued to emphasize the moral dimension, while other men, stimulated by Garrison's initiative to act against slavery, discussed the tactical problems of the movement. The American Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison helped found in 1833, split in 1840, largely because Garrison insisted on combining feminism and radical pacifism with the crusade against slavery and because other abolitionists were now turning to the kind of overt political activity that he opposed on principle. This schism severely limited Garrison's influence on organized antislavery, but he kept up his agitation. In the 1840's and 1850's, he attacked the Constitution and called for Northern secession from the Union, a position that put him on the extreme left of the antislavery movement but served the function of dramatizing the moral urgency of the cause. Garrison's persistent refusal to come down to the level of practical problems and political exigencies, as well as his tendency to extend the logic of reform into other areas, caused most other abolitionists to part company with him at one time or another. But his primacy as instigator of the movement was unchallenged, and he continued up to the time of emancipation to play an indispensable role as a moral gadfly, keeping the ideal ever in sight of those engaged in confronting the actual.

Besides being the prime mover in freeing abolitionism from the fetter of the colonization scheme and raising it to the level of a colorblind Declaration of Independence, Garrison is important because of the intense opposition he aroused. The South, which was already firmly committed to the defense of slavery before Garrison appeared on the scene, saw him as a real threat, on the erroneous assumption that he had a substantial and growing body of Northern opinion behind him. Impelled by a combination of fear and guilt, Southern extremists strengthened the supports of slavery, launched a militant defense of the institution as “a positive good,” and began to argue for its territorial extension. This in turn led Northerners who were offended by the extremism of Garrison to view the South as an aggressive enemy of American (that is, Northern) institutions. The opposition he aroused in the North led to another form of indirect influence; mob action against Garrison and his supporters, like that which took place in Boston in 1835, led prominent Northern moderates to see a danger to civil liberties in efforts to suppress the abolitionists, and their concern for minority rights brought them into alliance, for some purposes, with antislavery zealots whom they otherwise would have spurned. Although Garrison did not guide and control Northern opinion, his initial uncompromising stand helped set off the emotional chain reaction that led to the Civil War and the destruction of slavery.

Since Garrison was the embodiment of the original abolitionist impulse, the question of his motivation and source of inspiration becomes an inescapable problem for anyone desiring to understand the coming of the Civil War. Efforts have been made to describe the abolitionists as disturbed personalities and to characterize the whole antislavery movement in terms of psychological abnormalities. Without doubt, Garrison was self-righteous, dogmatic, lacking in a sense of humor, and prone to think of himself as a martyr to truth in an unbelieving world. In many situations such traits would raise serious questions about a person's mental balance. Yet in Garrison's case, one could argue, they were not fundamentally out of tune with reality, for slavery was an evil to which moral outrage and dogmatic judgment were not inappropriate responses. In addition, those aspects of the Garrisonian posture and style that are hardest for the modern mind to accept were natural results of his education and background. In other words, Garrison successfully internalized a role that his heritage and upbringing clearly favored. Intellectual criticisms may be directed at his mode of thought and action by those whose values differ from his, but the world view it reflected may not be described as a product of personal maladjustment.

The key factor in Garrison's background was the piety and millenarianism spawned in New England by the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In the 1740's and 1750's, the American colonies had seen a religious upheaval that gave rise to hopes for an American millennium; zealots of the Awakening had envisioned the transformation of the world through mass conversions and through the organization of an army of believers to crush out the forces of sin and false religion. There resulted a mentality that could easily veer from universal benevolence to uncompromising hatred for the sinner and the hypocrite. This spirit did not die quickly, but continued cropping up in various ways, providing fuel for further awakenings well into the nineteenth century. The radical and individualistic side of the Awakening was preserved most fully in the New England Baptists, many of whom originally had separated from Congregational churches they considered impure or under the guidance of unconverted ministers. Garrison's mother Fanny had been a Baptist convert, a decision that took all the courage of the “come-outer” who is willing to break traditional ties, for it resulted in her being turned out of the house forever by her Episcopalian father. She then had raised her son in the demanding faith and thirst for personal purity that her religious experiences had inculcated. As a young apprentice, Garrison was distinguished from his fellows by a piety that at one point led him to think seriously of becoming a missionary. The essence of his inherited faith was a refusal to compromise with sin, as well as a belief that the millennium would come through the spread of a pure and literal Christianity. Such a gospel was at the heart of Garrison's abolitionist doctrines. From this orientation came his doctrine of “nonresistance,” his denial of the authority of all earthly governments, and his rejection of a Constitution that countenanced slavery as “a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell.” The kind of behavior on the part of Garrison and his followers that more moderate abolitionists found most objectionable was strikingly like the behavior of the extremists of the Great Awakening. When the Garrisonians disrupted religious services and called for parishioners to “come out” of proslavery churches, they were following the precedent of the “come-outers” of the previous century. When they attacked the clergy and moderate antislavery men as having impure hearts, they echoed the evangelical attacks upon the “unconverted ministry.”

All this, of course, was not simply atavism. It was in tune with important contemporary currents of thought. Given his predispositions, Garrison responded in turn to evangelical crusades like the temperance and peace movements, to an antislavery enterprise that even in its colonization phase had a religious character, and finally, in the late 1830's, to the radical Perfectionism of John Humphrey Noyes, the Christian utopian who believed that the Second Coming already had taken place and that the man of faith could be free from sin and the Law. It seems clear that Garrison can best be understood in religious terms, as a militant Christian anarchist and a legitimate offspring of the left wing of American Protestantism.

Yet Garrison's faith, as extended to include literal acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount and the doctrine of nonresistance to evil, was subject to a severe testing when it came to the question of slave rebellion. It may well be that the aspect of Garrison's thought that is most significant and relevant in our present circumstances is his confronting as a pacifist the reality or possibility of Negro violence. During most of his career, Garrison opposed on principle all use of force. At times, he counseled Southern slaves to be patient and to await the triumph of moral influences. Nevertheless, he could speak approvingly of actual slave revolts, and in 1859 he endorsed John Brown's raid in a manner that set the stage for his support of the Civil War as an antislavery enterprise. There is a certain irreducible inconsistency in his discussions of insurrection and the use of force against slavery, but not as much as is generally supposed. A close reading of Garrison's discussion of insurrection reveals an interesting, if not wholly satisfactory, effort to resolve the dilemma of the pacifist who sympathizes with the victims of oppression.

Garrison recognized, first of all, that slavery itself was a form of violence directed against the Negro. He hoped, undoubtedly, to end slavery by moral suasion but, with all his belief in human perfectibility, was not absolutely certain that this would happen. Another part of his religious heritage recognized divine judgments upon sinful nations, and he never ruled out the possibility that slavery would go down in blood as a judgment upon those who had refused to heed a moral appeal. (It was in precisely these terms that he was to support the Northern effort in the Civil War.) Certain that the violence of the oppressor led inevitably to the violence of the oppressed, Garrison felt justified in calling attention, as part of his effort to convince slaveholders of the need for immediate steps toward emancipation, to the danger of slave insurrection. In believing that such an appeal would be effective, he grossly underestimated the tenacity of the Southern commitment to slavery; if anything, his appeals contributed to increased coercion in the South. His belief that oppression leads inevitably to resistance might also be questioned on the ground that oppression can be so severe that there is little or no chance for rebellion, as seems, by and large, to have been the case with Southern slavery. But Garrison lived in a revolutionary world not totally unlike our own, and he could not escape thinking in terms of revolutionary precedents. The French and the American revolutions at the end of the previous century had been followed by the European uprisings of 1830, and Garrison was clearly in sympathy with the results of these movements if not with their methods. He pointed out in a speech to a free Negro audience in 1831:

The signs of the times do indeed show forth great and glorious and sudden in changes in the condition of the oppressed. The whole firmament is tremulous with an excess of light; the earth is moved out of its place; the wave of revolution is dashing to pieces ancient and mighty empires; the hearts of tyrants are beginning to fail them for fear; and for looking forward to those things which are to come upon earth.

Believing, as he did, that the millennium would come only with the abjuration of the use of force in all its forms, he wished to take a personal stand based upon the pure ideals of the Coming Kingdom, but he made clear where his sympathies would be in the case of an actual slave rebellion. As he pointed out in his speech on John Brown, “Wherever there is a contest between the oppressed and the oppressor,—the weapons being equal between the parties,—God knows my heart must be with the oppressed, and always against the oppressor.” He went on, in that speech, to argue that the use of force by those striving for elemental freedom was actually a step in the direction of “the sublime platform of non-resistance,” because it was “God's way of dealing retribution on the head of the tyrant” and would presumably lead to conditions that would make the use of force unnecessary. “Rather than see men wear their chains in a cowardly and servile spirit,” he concluded, “I would, as an advocate of peace, much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains. Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill, and Lexington, and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of a slave plantation.” With statements like these Garrison continually challenged the consistency of the American majority, which reverenced the American Revolution and was sympathetic to the recent European uprisings but regarded a slave rebellion as a monstrous crime. He maintained over and over again that only a man like himself who had rejected the authority of a government that condoned slavery, and was thereby disassociated from the machinery of oppression, had a moral right to condemn slave resistance. Indeed only a people that collectively had ceased to practice violence against the Negro in the form of slavery had a right to expect anything but violence from the Negro.

Although Garrison condoned or even welcomed slave uprisings as better than subservience to tyranny, he clearly and unequivocally ruled out the use of force, public or private, to right the inequities of a society like that of the North, which was based on “free institutions.” He recognized that Northern free Negroes suffered from discrimination and segregation, but to them he counseled only “Christian resignation” and “self-help” in an effort to win the approval and respect of their white neighbors. When confronting English Chartists and other labor radicals, he made clear his belief that the grievances of the working men did not constitute “industrial slavery” and were no cause for new forms of collective action. In the first issue of the Liberator, he denied the existence of conflict between wealth and poverty, or between labor and capital, and demonstrated his faith in an industrial order held together by the benevolence of the rich and the cultivation of Protestant virtues by the poor. Hence, Garrison's oblique support of revolution was limited to revolution against flagrant political despotism, whether of a European king or of a Southern plantation owner. He foresaw no possible need for revolutionary action in a formally democratic and egalitarian society in which, despite occasional harassment of those with unpopular opinions, there were freedom of expression and the possibility of influencing men's minds through peaceful agitation.

Garrison's implicit theory of progress was, therefore, a three-stage affair. From despotism, a people moved up to a republican laissez-faire society, generally but regrettably through the use of force; from this formally democratic society, a genuinely free society without government or coercion emerged, brought about by the peaceful agitation and moral suasion that was now possible. What Garrison could not foresee before 1861, and failed to recognize thereafter, was that history was not moving in the millennial direction he had charted for it, and that subtler forms of oppression would develop in the bosom of a slaveless republic that would raise new doubts as to whether entrenched injustice could be eliminated by appeals to conscience and morality.