In the pages of The Liberator , Garrison printed articles by both white and black abolitionists. These included female writers, at a time when women were discouraged from entering the political arena. Some of the most influential abolitionists in Boston were women, including Lydia Maria Child and the Weston sisters, whose letters form a large portion of the Anti-Slavery Collection.
From the start, the newspaper was not popular among whites. His letters reveal how black abolitionists eagerly gathered subscribers and support for the periodical. They have risen in their hopes and feelings to the perfect stature of men: in this city, every one of them is as tall as a giant. About ninety have subscribed for the paper in Philadelphia, and upwards of thirty in New-York, which number, I am assured, will swell to at least one hundred in a few weeks.
Without the support of black abolitionists, The Liberator would not have spread its influence and message as far as it did over its thirty-year life. At the top of most issues, the masthead included an illustration that showed the evils of slavery or a vision of an emancipated future. In April of , The Liberator first adopted an illustrated masthead showing a slave auction, in which a family is torn apart on the auction block.
At the far left, a black man is whipped by a slave owner within sight of the Capitol Building. On March 2nd, , Garrison changed the illustrated masthead to include a hopeful scene on the right, of an emancipated family. The scene on the left is of a slave auction, contrasting with the scene on the right. The drawing on the right shows a black middle-class family in a peaceful rural setting, who represent a hopeful future.
In the distance, men carve timber logs to build a new America, which is graced by the dawning light of a rising sun. The masthead did not change again until January 3, , at which point a more detailed scene made up of three episodes showed the same contrasting vision of an enslaved America versus a free America. It was drawn by the white artist Hammatt Billings and engraved by the white engraver Alonzo Hartwell.
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Sign Me Up Dismiss. In , he reunited with his mother and took an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, but the work proved too physically demanding for the young boy. A short stint at cabinetmaking was equally unsuccessful. In , when Garrison was 13 years old, he was appointed to a seven-year apprenticeship as a writer and editor under Ephraim W. Allen, the editor of the Newburyport Herald. It was during this apprenticeship that Garrison would find his true calling.
After he finished his apprenticeship in , when he was 20 years old, Garrison borrowed money from his former employer and purchased The Newburyport Essex Courant.
Garrison renamed the paper the Newburyport Free Press and used it as a political instrument for expressing the sentiments of the old Federalist Party.
The two forged a friendship that would last a lifetime. Unfortunately, the Newburyport Free Press lacked similar staying power. When the Free Press folded in , Garrison moved to Boston, where he landed a job as a journeyman printer and editor for the National Philanthropist , a newspaper dedicated to temperance and reform. In , while working for the National Philanthropist , Garrison took a meeting with Benjamin Lundy. By the time he was 25 years old, Garrison had joined the American Colonization Society.
The society held the view that Black people should move to the west coast of Africa. But Garrison grew disillusioned when he soon realized that their true objective was to minimize the number of free enslaved people in the United States.
It became clear to Garrison that this strategy only served to further support the mechanism of slavery. In Garrison broke away from the American Colonization Society and started his own abolitionist paper, calling it The Liberator. Garrison soon realized that the abolitionist movement needed to be better organized. After taking a short trip to England in , Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, a national organization dedicated to achieving abolition.
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