William Lloyd Garrison and the humanitarian reformers

During the antebellum era a series of reform impulses coursed through the nation. From the 1830s to the 1860s, many Americans dedicated themselves to the causes of temperance, education, criminal justice reform, women's rights, and opposition to slavery in an effort to create a more moral and perfect nation. One of the leading voices in these efforts was William Lloyd Garrison, who for over three decades championed the goal of national reform from the pages of his newspaper The Liberator. In this short work Russel Nye provides an account of Garrison's life that assesses his activist career and its place in the broader spectrum of events in mid-19th century America.

As Nye explains, Garrison's rise to prominence required him to overcome show more considerable personal adversity. The son of a shipping master who abandoned his family, Garrison entered the newspaper profession at a young age through his apprenticeship as a printer. Garrison's religious convictions soon led him to the editorship of a Boston newspaper promoting temperance, and though the journal soon failed, it set Garrison on a cause of lifelong activism. While Nye notes that Garrison promoted a range of reform issues, it was at this point when he embraced the cause that would define his career: the abolition of slavery.

Garrison's embrace of abolition came at an especially unpromising time. By the late 1820s the initial belief that slavery would die out on its own had faded with the expansion of cotton cultivation. Though many advocated for its end, their emphasis was on a gradual phasing out of the "peculiar institution," coupled with recolonization of the freed slaves. By contrast, Garrison's passionate advocacy of immediate and total abolition marked him out as an unfashionable extremist. Initially a marginal figure, the outbreak of Nat Turner's rebellion soon after the launching of Garrison's newspaper The Liberator in 1831 led many Southerners to identify his extremist writings as its cause, giving Garrison a sudden prominence out of all proportion to the limited subscribership of his newspaper. Nye charts this odd duality over the next three decades of his life, showing how Garrison's uncompromising positions often traded broader support for a visibility that ensured him a leading role in the national discourse, one that he would maintain until the final abolition of slavery in 1865.

By situating Garrison within the often complex and ever-shifting politics of the antislavery cause, Nye defines clearly the scope of Garrison's achievements. Though he makes it clear that Garrison was just one voice in the abolition movement, Nye credits his subject with helping to define slavery as a moral issue in a way that contributed to its ultimate demise. It is this combination of detail and nuance that makes Nye's book an excellent introduction Garrison's life, one that still can be read profitably for the insights it provides into the labors of a committed advocate who never lost sight of his goal. show less