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“The Organ of an Individual”: William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert A. Fanuzzi
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Extract

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711, 277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of freedom.” Although their publicity campaign elicited a hostile reaction from political officials, newspaper editors, and most infamously, violent mobs, the abolitionists persisted. A typical budget for the MASS allotted far more money to printing and distribution than any other expenditure, including the remuneration of their often imperiled traveling agents.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 23 , October 1998 , pp. 107 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

NOTES

1. Garrison, William Lloyd to Phillips, Wendell, 06 4, 1839Google Scholar, in A House Divided Against Itself, vol. 2 of The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Merrill, Walter and Ruchames, Louis (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1971), 488s.Google Scholar

2. For the extent of the abolitionists' publicity campaign and its reaction, see Savage, W. Sherman, The Controversy Over the Distribution of Abolitionist Literature, 1830–80 (Association of Negro Life and History, 1938), 92Google Scholar; Richards, Leonard, Gentleman of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolitionist Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Ratner, Lorman, Powder Keg: Northern Opposition to the Antislavery Movement, 1831–1840. New York: Basic, 1968.Google Scholar In 1837, $1448 of the MASS budget was spent on printing, by far the largest expenditure. See Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at its Annual Meeting, in Annual Report of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1837 (1831–1853; rept. Westport, Conn.: Negro University Press, 1970), 1Google Scholar: xiv (hereafter cited as Proceedings with year).

3. Garrison, William Lloyd, “The Triumph of Mobocracy,” in Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison. 1852; rept. New York: Negro University Press, 1968., 380Google Scholar; also published in the Liberator, 11 7, 1835, 3.Google Scholar

4. Cf. Nord, David Paul, “Tocqueville, Garrison, and the Perfection of Journalism,” Journalism History 13 (1986): 56–63.Google Scholar Nord argues that the Liberator approximated the antebellum ideal of the “voluntary association” in print, whereas this account stresses the newspaper's 18th-century public ideal.

5. Proceedings of 1837, xxxiv.Google Scholar

6. “The Liberator, alias the Disorganizer,” Liberator, 11 11, 1842, 4.Google Scholar This reprint follows Garrison's practice of publicizing any mention of the newspaper, however hostile. For the significance of this practice in spreading the repute of the Liberator, see Thomas, John L., The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 131–35.Google Scholar

7. Proceedings of 1837, xxxvi.Google Scholar

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35. This characterization of the penny press and Greeley as its early beneficiary is taken from Schudson, , Discovering the News, 17–59Google Scholar; and Foner, Eric: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press), 14–39.Google Scholar

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39. This focus on print and political strategies to be compared to the exemplary account of abolitionist conflict in Kraditor, Aileen, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactic, 1834–1850. New York: Pantheon, 1969., 80–167.Google Scholar

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44. Garrison, William Lloyd, “Reply to James G. Birney,” Liberator, 06 28, 1839, 2.Google Scholar

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47. Garrison, William Lloyd, “The American Union,” in Selections, 117.Google Scholar

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