The first issue of The Liberator had a press run of four hundred copies. Its readership did not extend beyond the city limits of Boston.1
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William Lloyd Garrison was indifferent to the way American politics was acquiring a new shape in 1831. Three years earlier, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, had routed John Adams’s son, President John Quincy Adams, in his bid for a second term in the White House. John Quincy had been Boston’s last hope of national political leadership.
The men of the West, many of them originally Southerners, were joining forces with the South in a new entity called the Democratic Party, which would soon have adherents in New England. Opposing them was the emerging Whig Party, a mix of ex-Federalists and conservative Jeffersonian-Republicans, who chose the name hoping that some voters would remember the days of 1776, when rebel Whigs confronted loyalist Tories in the struggle for independence.
Garrison was unbothered by this new political alignment, which left New England an even weaker minority voice. From the start he reveled in being an outsider. He saw immediate emancipation as a triumph that would make political parties superfluous. “Nothing but extensive revivals of pure religion can save our country,” Garrison wrote in April 1831, suggesting that he saw religion and politics as moral and spiritual opposites. In a prophetic mode, Garrison declared that America’s redemption would come when Christian principles had triumphed in every soul. Then voters would change the name of the capital from the slave master Washington to Wilberforce.
Garrison was referring to William Wilberforce, the magnetic British orator and gifted politician who devoted forty years of his life to persuading Parliament to abolish slavery in the West Indies. Here was more evidence of Garrison’s almost breathtaking indifference to realistic politics. Less than twenty years after British troops had burned Washington, DC, Garrison was proposing to rename America’s capital after an Englishman!2
It was by no means the last time Garrison denounced George Washington as a slave owner. He believed that the Father of the Country was writhing in the flames of hell, eternally damned for the sin of slavery. The Liberator’s editor obviously knew nothing about Washington’s emancipation of his slaves or his concern for the durability of the American Union.
Garrison’s desire for a society where religion was the dominant force was an almost total repudiation of the principles on which the founders had created the American republic. One of their foremost goals had been the separation of religion from politics. They were not hostile to religion. They frequently affirmed its importance in the nation’s social fabric. But they did not see it having a role in governance. Their historical awareness of the bloody wars religion had triggered in England and other European nations convinced them that politicized religion would destroy all hope of an enduring American union.
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William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 in Newburyport, the third largest seaport in Massachusetts. His father, Abijah, was a moderately successful harbor pilot and occasional ship captain. On both sides, the family was Anglo-Canadian, having arrived in the New World in the 1760s and 1770s and settled on the border between Canada and Massachusetts. They had little or no roots in America’s founding experience—and no political experience worth mentioning.
Newburyport’s prosperity had attracted Abijah Garrison, and for a while he made a good living. But when the warring British and French began seizing American ships at sea, the number of voyages from Newburyport dwindled, leaving Abijah, a newcomer to the town, unemployed. President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo was a far worse blow; it destroyed Newburyport’s commerce. Abijah began drinking heavily, to the outrage of his sharp-tongued wife. One day in 1808 he walked out of their house on School Street and never returned.
His departure meant three-year-old Lloyd grew up as his mother’s son. Fanny Lloyd Garrison was a passionate Baptist who had converted to this emotional faith in defiance of her Anglican father. She implanted in Lloyd a similar belief in the central importance of his relationship with a demanding God. Nothing else—politics, wealth, friendship—came close.
From Fanny, young Lloyd also contracted a fondness for correcting and exhorting the less religious portion of mankind. His mother enjoyed exerting power over people, even when the results—especially in her husband’s case—were disastrous. Fanny had no better luck with her older son, James. He too began spending his time in waterfront bars, out of reach of his mother’s hectoring tongue. Eventually he went to sea and disappeared from the family.
Fanny Garrison was by no means unusual in making religion the center of her life. Around 1800, Baptist and Methodist preachers began what historians now call “the Second Great Awakening”—a nationwide evangelical revival that swept through the older Protestant churches, putting many of their pastors out of business. This activist faith required a man or woman to prove his or her conversion with good works, preferably in a social cause that needed reform. Lloyd, as his mother called him, had chosen slavery.3
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William Lloyd Garrison’s embrace of New England was as rooted in his early life as his religious faith. Too poor even to imagine attending Harvard, he had become a printer’s apprentice as a way to acquire at least a semblance of an education. From 1818 to 1825, young Lloyd toiled twelve hours a day in the offices of the Newburyport Herald, a newspaper that supported every and any attempt to breathe life into the moribund Federalist Party.
In the Herald’s files was a veritable history of the party’s losing struggle with the supposedly degenerate Jeffersonians, whom the Federalists saw as distorters and corrupters of the noble heritage of presidents George Washington and John Adams. Garrison read with delight and wonder the savage denunciations of Jefferson’s party from the acid tongues of Timothy Pickering, Fisher Ames, and other Federalist leaders. Although the older men made only passing references to slavery, their rhetoric made it easy for the young Garrison to see the “peculiar institution,” as it was beginning to be called, as a key element in the Jeffersonian-Republicans’ supposedly immoral system of government.
Garrison also inherited another article of Federalist faith—the conviction that the South was determined to humiliate and injure New England for its resistance to their rule. This, rather than a noble attempt to find an alternative to war, was the motive they imputed for President Jefferson’s embargo. Young Garrison had no difficulty accepting this doctrine. He had seen the tragic impact of the embargo on his own family.
Garrison subscribed wholeheartedly to the creed that was enunciated in a Boston newspaper in 1814. “The God of Nature, in his infinite wisdom, has made the people of New England excel every other people that existed in the world.” With such a faith, how could he find fault with the three times that New England had flirted with secession and treason—in the quarrels over the Louisiana Purchase, the embargo, and the War of 1812?
Harrison Grey Otis, a chief organizer of the Hartford Convention, was one of Garrison’s heroes. In 1823, Otis ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Federalist ticket. Garrison became his passionate advocate on the Newburyport Herald. He filled the paper’s columns with invective against Otis’s opponents, who were numerous and vocal. The Jeffersonian-Republicans, on their way to becoming Democrats, won in a landslide. Otis did not even carry Essex County, though he managed a majority in Newburyport.
In this election, Garrison found not a little of his voice and style. He did not analyze and refute his opponents’ arguments; he denounced them, sneered at them, dismissed them. He found no conflict between this style and his religious beliefs because both nicely complemented the prevailing attitude of New England Federalists. They were inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them.
This attitude was rooted deep in the New England soul, thanks to the sermons they and their ancestors had heard for the previous century. A Puritan preacher’s favorite rhetorical form was the “jeremiad,” a shorthan
d term for style and content inspired by the biblical prophet Jeremiah. Jeremaids combined lamentation and condemnation of the spiritual and moral shortcomings of a people for their sinfulness and selfishness. Only a handful of mankind, stained by Adam’s primary sin, would ever merit salvation.4
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In the early years of The Liberator, Garrison was often short of cash. He had no money of his own, and his partner, Isaac Knapp, also a former apprentice on the Newburyport Herald, had an equally empty wallet. Studying his subscription list, Garrison realized that he had only fifty white readers; the rest were free blacks. Garrison turned to these subscribers for help, and they responded with enthusiasm. James Forten became one of his strongest supporters, giving him serious amounts of money.
Garrison travelled to Philadelphia and New York to address black organizations, many of them created to oppose the American Colonization Society. By the end of his first year, Garrison had acquired another five hundred black subscribers, and he published a pamphlet based on his speeches, An Address to the Free People of Color. He urged them to continue to speak against the inequality being inflicted on them in the northern states, and assured them that The Liberator would welcome protest statements and articles from them.
Garrison did not rely completely on his subscription list to spread The Liberator’s message. It was customary for newspapers to send free copies to other papers around the nation and receive complimentary copies in return. By the end of his first year, Garrison was exchanging The Liberator with over a hundred papers, many of them in the South. The editors of the latter papers did not take kindly to The Liberator’s demand for immediate abolition or to Garrison’s frequent comparison of slavery to rape. They reprinted excerpts with furious refutations. Garrison gleefully reprinted these attacks and countered them with reprises of his own. This atmosphere of crisis and confrontation was exactly what he was hoping to achieve.5
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In late August of 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner gave Garrison’s obscure publication an outburst of publicity that he could never have otherwise obtained. Stirred by an eclipse of the sun in February, Turner, a self-appointed black preacher, became convinced God had ordained him to free Virginia’s slaves. On the night of August 22, he summoned several followers and approached the house of his owner, Joseph Travis. Later, Turner would admit that Travis was “a kind master.” But his kindness did not prevent Turner or one of his followers from burying a hatchet in Travis’s skull. Nor did the master’s benevolence rescue Mrs. Travis and four other members of his family, including an infant, from a similar fate.
It was as if a chapter out of Santo Domingo’s final slaughter under General Dessalines had somehow been reincarnated in Southampton County, a thinly populated rural region not far from Virginia’s seacoast. Blacks outnumbered whites by more than a thousand, but most whites owned only two or three slaves and many owned none. Seizing horses from nearby farms, Nat Turner and his swelling band, soon numbering more than fifty men, rode from farmhouse to farmhouse, killing everyone with white skin.
Turner told his followers that by exterminating the whites, “they would achieve the happy effects of their brethren in St. Domingo . . . and establish a government of their own.” The next day, whites who had managed to flee Turner’s rampage sounded the alarm and Virginia called out hundreds of militiamen.
A reporter on a Richmond newspaper, who belonged to one of the militia units, described what he saw: “Whole families, father, mother, daughters, sons, sucking babes and school children butchered, thrown into heaps and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs or to putrefy on the spot.” Especially horrendous was the discovery of a schoolteacher, Mrs. Levi Waller, and ten of her pupils “piled in one bleeding heap on the [classroom] floor.” One quick-thinking child had ducked into the fireplace and survived.
Saddest of all was the story of one of the last families killed. At noon Turner and his followers approached the Vaughan farmhouse. By now most of the rebels had guns seized from pillaged houses. The hoofbeats of their horses alerted Rebecca Vaughan, who was in her garden selecting vegetables for dinner. She fled into the house. What could she do? Her husband was not at home. She rushed to a window and cried out that there was no one in the house but her and her children. A volley of shots killed her instantly.
Her fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, heard—and perhaps saw—his mother’s murder and instinctively rushed to save her. He was riddled while climbing a nearby fence. Mrs. Vaughan’s niece, fifteen-year-old Eliza Vaughan, ran out of the house, perhaps hoping that if she reached nearby woods, she might survive. Another volley ended her life, too.6
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Forty miles away in Fortress Monroe, a U.S. Army bastion on the seacoast, Captain Robert E. Lee and his bride, Mary Custis Lee, considered themselves on an extended honeymoon. He had graduated second in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829. The couple had been married on June 30, 1831, at Arlington. Mary’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, had been delighted to welcome into the family the son of a soldier who had served with distinction under his step-grandfather. The wedding celebration had lasted a week, and they had spent much of the following month visiting relatives, enjoying more parties and showers of gifts and congratulations.
Arlington was crowded with Washington relics—portraits, his bookcase, the bed in which he had died. One of the house slaves, Caroline Branham, had been in the bedroom when the founder breathed his last. She had been one of Martha Washington’s slaves, who had not been freed in the President’s will. Lee’s marriage, wrote a kinsman, “made Robert Lee the representative of the founder of American liberty.”
It is not hard to imagine the shock and horror that swept through Fortress Monroe when the news of Nat Turner’s insurrection reached its officers and men. For Mary Custis Lee, it must have seemed a ghastly intrusion on her happiness. The fort’s commander immediately ordered the gates locked, barring the admittance of several dozen slave workmen who had been helping to rebuild part of the walls.
Three companies of regulars—perhaps 350 men—were ordered to march immediately to reinforce the militia sent to suppress Turner’s revolt. Five additional companies were rushed to the fort. By the time the regulars reached Southampton County, Virginia militia had dispersed, killed, or captured Nat Turner’s men. Only Turner himself escaped, remaining at large for another seven weeks.
As an engineering officer, Captain Lee did not accompany the dispatched regulars. But the stories that the Lees read in the newspapers or heard from fellow officers over the next several days must have left grisly memories. Rumor and terror swelled the insurrection’s numbers into the hundreds and even the thousands.7
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In Boston and elsewhere throughout the nation, newspaper headlines bellowed the story of Nat Turner: “INSURRECTION IN VIRGINIA!” William Lloyd Garrison pronounced himself “horror-struck.” Looking back to the poem about coming violence he had published in his first issue, he wrote: “What was poetry—imagination—in January is now a bloody reality.” Garrison invoked his professed pacifism to condemn the massacre, but he reminded his readers of the reason for it. “In his fury against the revolters, who will remember the wrongs?” he asked.
The answer to that question soon became evident: almost no one. Many of Turner’s followers were beheaded on the spot when captured. Any slave suspected of collusion with them was likely to suffer a painful death. Over a hundred blacks died in the next month in a reaction marred by hysteria and cruelty in many ways worse than the insurrectionists had displayed. Garrison privately welcomed this retaliation. On October 19, 1831, he told one correspondent that he was pleased the “disturbances at the South still continue. The slaveholders are given over to destruction. They are determined to shut out the light.”
Here was a signal revelation of the fundamental flaw in William Lloyd Garrison’s character, a flaw that permeated the New England view of the rest of America: an almos
t total lack of empathy. Fellow Americans had just been exposed to an awful experience—a tragedy that dramatized in horrendous terms the problem of Southern slavery. Did Garrison express even a hint of sympathy or pity for these stunned, grieving families and their terrified neighbors? Did he confess that his immediate emancipation slogan was wrong, or at least in need of amendment? The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was thinly disguised gloating—and a call for sympathy for the slaves. No matter how much they deserved this emotion, was this the time to demand it?
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Garrison soon found that slaveholders and many other people were determined to shut out his light. The National Intelligencer of Washington, DC, the closest thing the federal government had to a journalistic voice, accused him of “poisoning the waters of life” everywhere. The Intelligencer urged Boston authorities to shut down The Liberator. Garrison called this proof of “southern mendacity and folly.”
Silencing Garrison was soon endorsed by other newspapers and politicians. The Georgia legislature offered $5,000 to anyone who delivered him to the state for trial on a charge of seditious libel. Garrison raged it was a “bribe to kidnappers” and cited the Bill of Rights as his protection. One South Carolinian warned Boston that toleration of “seditious” journalism would inflict serious damage on the pocketbooks of her merchants.
Ironically, the mayor of Boston happened to be Garrison’s Federalist hero, Harrison Grey Otis. He soon received a letter from Nelly Custis, George Washington’s step-granddaughter, telling him how upset she was by The Liberator, which she blamed for Nat Turner’s eruption. She thought Garrison deserved to be hanged for his crimes. He had made her feel as if she were “living on the edge of a volcano.”
Mayor Otis also received a letter from Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, with whom he had served in Congress. The senator asked if Otis could or would suppress The Liberator. The mayor sent policemen to the paper’s one-room office, in which Garrison and Knapp slept, ate, and worked. The police wanted to know if they were bothering Senator Hayne by sending him copies of their paper. Mayor Otis reported back to Senator Hayne that The Liberator was not worth suppressing. Garrison was a penniless malcontent who would never make the slightest impression on respectable people in Boston or anywhere else.8
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