William Lloyd Garrison. Cabinet Photo of the White Abolitionist and Founder and Publisher of THE LIBERATOR Newspaper.
In 1830, Garrison left the American Colonization Society upon discovering their real objective was to deport free blacks. The following year, he founded a newspaper which due to his tireless labor became the foremost abolitionist paper in the world. In 1832, he joined fellow abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society, serving as its president from 1843 to 1865.
Many considered him too radical. On Independence Day in 1854, he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, a document he labeled “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell!” because it permitted slavery. And once the Civil War began, Garrison argued for the North to secede from the slaveholding Union to create a new nation.
Being an abolitionist publisher was risky business, and some lost their lives or had their presses destroyed. In 1835, Garrison was set upon by a mob within the Anti-Slavery Society’s Boston office, bound with a rope and nearly lynched. Georgia’s legislature offered a five thousand dollar bounty to anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him into the state for prosecution.