For nearly 150 years, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the famed antislavery newspaper The Liberator, has been represented by scholars, educators, politicians and authors as the founder of the American abolitionist movement. Yet the idea that Garrison was the leader of a coherent movement was strongly contested during his lifetime. Drawing on private letters, diaries, newspapers, novels, memoirs, eulogies, late 19th century textbooks, poetry and monuments, this study reveals the dramatic social and political forces of the postwar period which transformed our perceptions of Garrison, the abolitionist movement and the first histories of the Civil War.