No compromise with slavery: William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator

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William Lloyd Garrison’s life as an abolitionist and advocate for social change was dependent on his training as a printer, which was the one constant force in his life. None who have examined Garrison could ignore his editorship of The Liberator, but neither did they fully recognise the central role he believed that a well-edited newspaper performed in the maintenance of a healthy republic and in the struggle to reform society. Three institutions were anchors in Garrison’s life: church, politics and publishing. The first two were primarily responsible for instructing and directing all people’s lives. The final one, especially newspapers, provided citizens in a democracy with the information necessary to understand and make political and moral choices. When ministers and politicians, in the North as well as the South, steadfastly refused to address the horror of slavery and became tacit advocates for the
peculiar institution,
he felt compelled to aggressively employ the printing press to fill the void. Garrison did not become a publisher in order to advocate abolition; he was mechanic and an editor, later a reformer, but always a printer. For him, the printing press and the practise of journalism became the means for ending slavery.