Tuesday, October 19, 2010

William Lloyd Garrison

In 1831, William Llyod Garrison, a mild-looking reformer of twenty-six. The son of a drunken father and a spiritual child of the Second Great Awakening, Garrison began publication in Boston of his first issue of the abolitionist, militantly antislavery newspaper, "The liberator". This marked the beginning of the radical abolitionist movement. Uncompromising, Garrison immediatly abolished slavery in every state and territory without compensating with slaveowners. In 1833, Garrison and other abolisionist founded the American Antislavery Society. Garrison attaked by condeming and burning the constitution as a proslavery document. Garrison's radicalism soon led to a split in the abolition movement, he started a thirty-year war of words and in a sense fired one of the opening shots of the Civil War.

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