Springfield, Mass[.] 13 Jan[uary] 1856[.]

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ESQR.Garrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72.

MR GARRISON:

Sir. I find the following from your pen, in the last number of the “Standard,’'¹Douglass refers to an article published in the 12 January 1856 issue of the . Entitled “A Faithful Correction and Willing Acknowledgment,” the article, reprinted from the London , contains portions of a letter from William Lloyd Garrison to the editor of the . In the letter, Garrison takes issue with Douglass’s autobiography , and with his ill will toward Wendell Phillips, Garrison, and the Old Organization; in addition, he characterizes Douglass as ungrateful and disloyal to his friends. NASS, 12 January 1856; Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:417-18.— copied into that paper from the “”—published in London, England—and Edited by George Thompson Esqr.²George Thompson (1804-78), a leading Garrisonian abolitionist in Britain, was born in Liverpool, England. In 1833 he formed emancipation societies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The following year, he began a fifteen-month speaking tour in the United States; mob violence from supporters of
slavery forced him to leave Boston secretly in 1835. Back in England, he again worked with British abolitionists. Thompson joined Douglass at a public meeting in Glasgow on 21 April 1840 to condemn the Free Church of Scotland’s fellowship with slaveholders. He later made two more visits to the United States on behalf of abolitionism. ., 29 May 1846; Garrison and Garrison, , 1:434-522, 2:1-72; Howard Temperley, (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 237-38; C. Duncan Rice, “The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834-1835,” , 2:13-31 (April 1968); , 10:691.

My object in calling your attention to this last effort to injure, is respectfully to ask you (if not incompatable with your chosen mode of dealing with me) to point out in the pages of My Bondage and my freedom, the offensive portions of the Book to which you refer,³The London quoted a private letter from William Lloyd Garrison charging that , “in its second portion, is reeking with the virus of personal maliginity towards WENDELL PHILLIPS, myself, and the old organizationists generally, and full of ingratitude and baseness towards as true and disinterested friends as any man yet had on earth, to give him aid and encouragement.” London , 15 December 1855; , 22 February 1855, , ser. 2, 2:417. thus the readers of the “Standard” and the “Empire” may read and judge for themselves, of the justice of your denunciations—

Respectfully yours—

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

ALS: William Lloyd Garrison Papers, MB.