Garrison's mind worked on two levels, the moral and the practical. On the one, his approach to issues was determined by principle; on the other, by tactics and strategy. The level of his argument fluctuated, as it did during the Civil War when he scourged Lincoln on principles, yet pleaded the value of expediency. Fundamentally, his approach to things was simple and consistent. He judged everything by two standards of moral right—natural law as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and Christian ethic as expressed in the Bible. To him these were essentially one, emanating from the same divine source. Any idea or institution which violated either, in part or whole, therefore was wrong. The final judgment rested with individual conscience, the roots of which lay in God. A world of conscience so rooted was Garrison's “kingdom to be established on earth,” in which the individual's own soul became the arbiter of action and the judge of institutions—a kingdom in which men voluntarily ceased to sin, established justice, and worshiped God in a “magistracy of holiness and love.”

The central fact of Garrison's life was his religious faith. The Bible was the only book he ever really read, and his abolitionism itself sprang directly from his belief that slavery violated God's law. “It was not on account of your complexion or race, as a people, that I espoused your cause,” he told a Negro meeting in Charleston in 1865, “but because you were the children of a common Father, created in the same divine image, having the same inalienable rights. …” Despite the charge of “infidelity” that followed him wherever he went, he was a rigidly religious man. The bland neutrality of nineteenth-century Unitarianism was not for him. The finespun speculations of New England transcendentalism lay beyond his capacity; even Lyman Beecher's brand of modified Calvinism was too soft. Instead he returned to an earlier, rigorous faith, straight from his Bible. In 1842, stung to exasperation by accusations of “infidelity,” he published his creed in the Liberator:

I believe that, in Jesus Christ, the believer is dead unto sin, and alive with God—that whosoever is born of God overcometh the world—that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness, to everyone who believeth. … I believe that priestcraft, and sectarianism, and slavery, and war, and everything that defileth or maketh a lie, are of the devil, and destined to an eternal overthrow.

The language was the language of the Old Testament, the spirit that of third-century Christianity. He had the zeal and fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, combined with apostolic dedication. His religion, he said, was “that of the Jewish religionists of eighteen centuries ago,” and his God a Hebraic God who spoke directly to his conscience. Him and only Him would Garrison obey and call Master.

From this Godbased individualism flowed Garrison's revolt against manmade authority—abolition, disunion, pacifism, perfectionism, women's rights, and “infidelity.” “Individual, personal effort”—he wrote—

is the true foundation of all real prosperity in the social state, and all excellence of character. No form of Society can be devised which will release the individual from personal responsibility. … It would be the greatest curse that could be inflicted upon him.

Garrison thus did not belong in an age of conciliation and compromise, nor was he fitted for what his era called “the principle of association.” He liked, he said, “causes which, being righteous, are unpopular, and struggling, in God's name, against wind and tide.” With God and conscience on his side, turmoil was his natural element. “Hisses,” he once said, “are music to my ears.” Organizations strait-jacketed him; he accepted them only as utensils for his own use. Temperamentally he was a no-government man and his aversion to cooperation was as ingrained as Thoreau's.

Garrison was a true revolutionary individualist who accepted nothing beyond himself, no tradition or institution whose existence violated his own inner, higher law. There was something of the eighteenth-century rebel in him, and more of the seventeenth-century Puritan's self-righteous independence. Emerson, too, preached the sufficiency of self and the integrity of self-reliance as God-reliance, but Garrison's deity was no transcendental Oversoul. His was a stern, inflexible God of wrath and justice, his individualism a flinty, arrogant self-faith. Emerson's individualism was ascetic and intellectual; Garrison's was visceral, emotional. He could never have taken to the woods as Thoreau did. He was a social being, tied to humanity and incapable of acting without it. As Emerson shrewdly remarked, Garrison “would find nothing to do in a lonely world, or a world with half-a-dozen inhabitants.”

Acting from his own driving religious faith and within the terms of his society, Garrison had every reason to be what he was—the Reformer Incarnate. He conceived himself to be the tool of God, his followers “soldiers of God” with “loins girt about with truth” and “feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.” His aim was nothing less than “the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force, from the bondage of sin.” This was the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of God awaited by the Hebrew prophets. The complete freedom of man was to him the whole purpose of life, and he lived with singleminded devotion to it.

Those who accused Garrison of deserting the main battle of abolition for minor skirmishes failed to recognize that to Garrison no reform, however close to the lunatic fringe, was unrelated to the larger purpose. He was always, as he said late in life, interested in nothing less than “the redemption of the human race.” If the human race needed redemption from slavery on the one hand and cigar-smoking on the other, there was no reason to neglect one crusade for another if both could proceed at once. Bronson Alcott, of all Garrison's contemporaries, understood the grand sweep of his design and saw what the others missed. He was, Alcott wrote in his journal, wholly “intent on the melioration of human woes and the eradication of human evils.” Nothing else could satisfy him. Garrison was no intellectual, but a man of action. He never liked to speculate, and he had no reverence for reflection. Emerson once said that Garrison “neighed like a horse” when they discussed ideas. Unlike Emerson, Garrison never tried to search hard for truth, because he had it.

The moral self-righteousness that lay beneath Garrison's crusade for the kingdom of God on earth was difficult to accept. There was no vacillation in him, no gray in his thinking, only right and wrong, deep black and pure white. There could be no compromise with sin and only Garrison could define sin. To disagree with him was to disagree with Right personified. In the last analysis his final court of appeal was conscience, not mind. Moral judgment was his first and last line of defense, and for this reason it was almost impossible to persuade him he was wrong. Founded on God and conscience, his stand was impregnable.

This absolute self-confidence was one reason his band followed him with worship this side of idolatry. Garrison had no hesitations, no questionings, no doubts, and inspired the same self-assurance in others. His sincerity and courage attracted men so widely different as the gentle May, the urbane Phillips, the wildly unstable Foster, and the unpredictable Wright. Some of his twists and turns made his most ardent supporters swallow hard, but Garrison to the end of his life believed himself perfectly consistent and unassailably right. His enemies always respected his obstinate sincerity. They sometimes thought he was wrong, or arrogant, or unreasonable—but never insincere. He was capable of absolute identification with a principle. If he believed in an idea he would die for it, though it be ill-advised, wrong, or downright foolish. This monolithic self-confidence drew men to him.

Garrison's faith in himself made him unconsciously dictatorial. He genuinely considered himself a modest man, refusing personal praise and credit. Yet he constantly sought it with a real inward hunger. His personality felt a deep need for recognition. He never aspired to political office, though certainly after 1861 he could have had it. He paid little attention to money, security, or possessions. He simply neglected to write his memoirs when he could have made thousands, and the financial status of the Liberator was always more important to him than his own. But he was sure from the first that he was a man for the ages, and he felt compelled to keep reminding himself and others of the fact. His remarks in the Liberator, less than a year after its inception, were not those of a humble, self-effacing young man: “The present generation cannot appreciate the purity of my motives or the value of my exertions. I look to posterity for a good reputation. The unborn offspring of those who are now living will reverse the condemnatory decision of my contemporaries.” Again, a few months later, he turned to a companion on leaving a meeting to remark, “You may someday write my biography.”

Garrison was not averse to comparing himself to the Apostles, though he obviously possessed little of their patience and forbearance. He rarely forgot or forgave those who differed with him, and occasionally he took more credit where less was due without the slightest embarrassment. He had not, as Alcott put it trenchantly, “won those self-victories which lead to the superior powers of those who have won themselves.” Significantly, Garrison had only a limited circle of close friends—“God's choreboy” Samuel May, Johnson, Quincy, and, closest of all, George Thompson, a man much like himself. Garrison lived in terms of his future epitaph, and carried his own Westminster Abbey about with him.

William Lloyd Garrison's place in history was hotly debated in his own time. His admirers made him a greater man than he was, and his opponents gave him less praise than he deserved. According to Wendell Phillips, Garrison “began, inspired, and largely controlled” the entire abolition movement from beginning to end. Another idolator called him “lawgiver at Washington, inspirer of Presidential policy, and framer of the greatest war of modern times.” But William Birney regarded Garrisonism as “the most utter abortion known in the history of this country,” and Henry Ward Beecher characterized him as “no more than a blister” on the antislavery movement. Neither the Tappans, nor Birney, nor Lundy, nor Weld, nor any of the pioneer abolitionists beyond New England thought of Garrison as more than an intractable, disturbing though sincere and devoted co-worker whose misguided zeal sometimes brought more harm than good to the cause.

The Garrison legend was partly the result of reams of uncritical praise poured out by Garrisonians—May, Johnson, Phillips, and others—in contrast to the comparative silence of those who opposed him. More than a little of Garrison's own conviction of immortality rubbed off on his followers. “Garrison has an army of men to write him up,” said E. L. Pierce in 1892, “and his writers are unscrupulous.” Those who admired Garrison gloried in praising him; those who opposed him charitably kept quiet.

It is only fair to grant Garrison pre-eminence in the first decade of abolition agitation. He personified its aggressive phase, publicized it for better or worse, and drove its issues deep into the national conscience. But he did not begin abolitionism, nor did he organize it. Weld and the Westerners, and the Tappans and the New Yorkers, deserve a large share of the credit; had Garrison never existed things might have been much the same. The movement, set in motion by others, was carried to its conclusion by methods he could not accept and ideas he could not understand. Abolition passed through him, not from him.

Yet Garrison was a person of real historical importance, for he was a symbol to his generation of the moral and ideological conflict that took its final shape in the Civil War. To the South, he represented all that was baleful and dangerous. Whatever his insistence on pacific intentions, he stirred up violent resentments and his appeals reached the passions rather than the consciences of slaveholders. His principle of “moral agitation” against slavery created only agitation. The proslavery forces, already consolidating, could concentrate all their fear and anger on him. If the approaching conflict was irrepressible, Garrison was at least a factor in convincing the South that it was so. By proslavery logic, Garrison led to John Brown; Brown led to Lincoln; Garrison, Brown, and Lincoln together led to an intolerable conclusion. It was easier for the South to argue from personalities rather than from principles, and Garrison was a personality no Southerner could overlook. By very little effort of his own he became a bogeyman to the South and a personification to it of things to come.

To the North, Garrison was a goad, a prick to the conscience, a symbol of the moral problem of slavery that remained unsolved despite compromises, conciliations, and tacit agreements to disregard it. Slavery, no matter how it was explained or rationalized, did exist; the fact of its existence was an anomaly in a nation dedicated to life, liberty, and the individual's right to pursue happiness. Garrison, more than any other one person, shattered the “conspiracy of silence.” One might decry his invective, censure his methods, or deny his appeal to disorder; one could never shut out his clamor. To disagree with Garrison men had to face up to the problem, rethink their beliefs, examine their own consciences. When men did this, slavery was doomed. Garrison contributed relatively little to the philosophy of abolitionism. He had only a single thought—that “slavery was a crime, a damning crime”—but he made other men think, though he sometimes muddled their thinking. Economic and political events that Garrison neither knew nor cared about made slavery a national issue and precipitated the war. But it had its moral causes too, which Garrison's career aptly symbolized to the victorious North.