Word: abolitionist
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William Lloyd Garrison has been cast by historians as the great Abolitionist, a role he warmly welcomed. In point of fact, Garrison was only the best publicized of the abolitionists, as this biography-the most objective yet written-makes clear. John L. Thomas, assistant history professor at Harvard, shows that the vituperative Garrison was less a leader of the abolitionists than an eccentric outcast who gave the whole movement a taint of fanaticism it did not deserve. Despite his dedication, in the end Garrison was more hindrance than help in ultimately freeing the Negro slaves...
...worse than drink: slavery. All his other concerns were sidelined while he concentrated on this one. Moving from newspaper to newspaper, he impudently courted libel suits with his inflammatory editorials against slaveowners and traders. Convicted in one case, he spent 49 days in jail. Urged by a fellow abolitionist to calm down, Garrison snapped: "I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." In 1831 he launched his newspaper, The Liberator, which so infuriated the South that the Georgia legislature offered $5,000 reward to anyone who brought them Garrison...
...content to let the South keep its "peculiar institution." He was heckled when he spoke, and sometimes mobbed. But when the South, 25 years before the Civil War, began to make arbitrary arrests and to stamp out other civil liberties in its efforts to preserve slavery. Northern opinion turned abolitionist. Instead of welcoming the converts, Garrison quarreled with them. While other abolitionists interpreted the Constitution as an anti-slavery document,* Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death," and in the most theatrical gesture of his career burned a copy of it at a mass meeting. "By 1837," writes...
Lincoln's Epic. Northerners filled their writings with Calvinist fervor, certain that God had willed them to stamp out slavery. "This vision of Judgment," writes Wilson, "was the myth of the North." Though not at first an abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln made this "myth" stick by the power of his words. Driven by ambition to be President, he grew more apocalyptic in his comments on slavery as war approached. "He created himself as a poetic figure," writes Wilson, "and thus imposed himself on the nation. We have, in general, accepted the epic that Lincoln directed and lived and wrote." Some...
...Lloyd Garrison published the widely-influential Liberator in another building on the block. Abolitionist meetings were held there often and much of the philosophy of emancipation emanated from the confines of the Cornhill. Tufts College was founded on the street in 1858 and the area remained a seat of education and social reform for some years...