Gar: Gardner through Garrison

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


GARDNER, Charles W., 1782-1863, African American, Episcopal clergyman, abolitionist.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 590)


GARDNER, Eliza Ann, 1831-1922, African American, abolitionist. 

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 592)


GARDNER, Oliver, abolitionist, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1848-57.


GARFIELD, James Abram, 1831-1881, lawyer, Union general.  Lt. Colonel, 42nd Regiment Ohio Volunteers.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.  Twentieth President of the United States. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 599-605; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 145; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 715; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 145-150:

GARFIELD, JAMES ABRAM (November 19, 1831-September 19, 1881), soldier, congressman, president of the United States, was the last of the chief executives to be born in the typical American environment of the log cabin. He was preceded by at least six Garfields born in America, his immigrant ancestor having come to Massachusetts Bay with Winthrop (E. G. Porter, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XIX, 1882, p. 83). They were all "hungry for the horizon," and in successive generations they made the cabin and its attributes a part of the family inheritance (G. F. Hoar, Eulogy upon ... James Abram Garfield, 1882, p. 9). Abram Garfield, the father of James, was married in 1820 to Eliza Ballou, of old Rhode Island ancestry. He moved with his family to Ohio, and in 1827, when there were already three children, took a contract to be worked out in the construction of the Ohio Canal; but he abandoned this occupation and became a pioneer farmer in Cuyahoga County in time to welcome to his cabin his last child, James Abram, to become a member of the Disciples of Christ, and to die of a sudden "ague" in 1833. His widow became the man of the family and steered her children through poverty and uncertainty to an honored independence. It was a life of hardship for all of them, and Garfield knew every kind of frontier work, and nothing of that leisure and security that come from economic freedom. Before he was thirty he had scraped together an education, exhausted the intellectual offering of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College), joined the Disciples church, worked his way into and through Williams College with the class of 1856, and served as teacher and even principal of the Institute at Hiram Young for the position, he had as advantages nearly six feet of height, great breadth of shoulders, and a "round German-looking face," which he generally obscured with a heavy beard. He married, on November 11, 1858, Lucretia Rudolph, his childhood playmate, fellow student, and pupil. In the following year he was elected to the Ohio Senate as a Republican; and when in 1861 the crisis of the Civil War came he was a leader who upheld the right of the federal government to coerce a state.

His power of debate, already ripe, increased by his efforts as lay-preacher in his church, and his oratorical style, more florid than it was to be later in his life, made Garfield a useful agent in raising troops and stimulating enlistments. In the summer of 1861 he helped assemble a regiment, the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, that contained many of his Hiram students; and of this he became lieutenant-colonel, and then colonel. He had no military experience to warrant his appointment to a line command, but he possessed what was rare among citizen officers of the Civil War, a willingness to study and an ability to understand books. With a manual before him he made his recruits into soldiers; and he looked and acted his part so well that a few days after he and his regiment joined Major-General Don Carlos Buell in Kentucky he was given a brigade and was sent to the Big Sandy to confront Humphrey Marshall, a West Pointer commanding the Confederate army there (F. H. Mason, The Forty-Second Ohio Infantry: A History, 1876). At Middle Creek, on January 10, 1862, he won a victory that seemed important because of the scarcity of Union successes, and gained the rank of brigadier-general of volunteers. In April, with his new rank, he fought at Shiloh on the second day; and in the following winter he sat at Washington upon the famous court of inquiry in the Fitz-John Porter case (Senate Executive Document No. 37, 46 Congress, 1 Session). Bad health had brought him in from the field, but, his condition improving, he was reassigned to active duty and joined Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland early in 1863. Here, with an option before him, he chose to be chief of staff rather than to command a brigade; and in this capacity he served through the Chickamauga campaign, winning high praise from subsequent military historians because of his comprehension of the duties of a staff officer (Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War: Her Statesmen, her Generals, and Soldiers, 1868). He organized a division of military information that was far ahead of prevailing American military practise. For five months the army of Rosecrans remained at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It finally advanced, contrary to the almost unanimous judgment of its officers, chiefly because Rosecrans was convinced by Garfield of the wisdom of the action. In the engagement at Chickamauga that follow ed, on September 19, 20, 1863, Thomas was the hero and Rosecrans was discredited; while Garfield, chief of staff, gained wide repute for both courage and good sense. He was made a major-general of volunteers, dating from Chickamauga, as a reward; but he was through with fighting, as other opportunities had come to him. In December 1863, he took his seat in the Thirty-eighth Congress as representative from the 19th Ohio district.

The military successes of Garfield in the spring of 1862 made him a prominent political figure in northeastern Ohio, where anti-slavery radicalism had long maintained Joshua R. Giddings in Congress. Giddings had been displaced in 1858 by John Hutchins, whose retirement now was made easier by a new apportionment law passed after the census of 1860. Garfield, young and popular, nominated while he was in the service, was elected by a heavy majority. He did not take his seat until his military services had been rewarded by promotion; and it has been suggested that he surrendered his major-generalcy in December 1863 only because Lincoln believed that major-generals were easier to procure than Administration-Republican representatives. Eight times more, after 1862, Garfield came before the Republican convention of his district, sometimes after Democratic alterations in its boundaries had made Republican success highly doubtful, and once after the breath of scandal had endangered his future; every time he gained the nomination to succeed himself, and every time his people elected him to Congress. He was by nature a student, by training an orator, and by experience became a finished parliamentarian. His industry and his careful personal habits gave him other advantages, which he seized as they appeared. When Thaddeus Stevens passed off the stage of politics in 1868, James G. Blaine and Garfield knew they were ready to become the congressional leaders of their party (G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, 1903, I, 239); and when, in 1876, Blaine was translated to the Senate, Garfield had no real rival in the House.

The committee assignments of Garfield indicate the development of his interests. He took an important place on the committee on military affairs when he appeared in 1863, for he was fresh from the battlefield and the war was yet to be won. In later sessions he served on the committee on appropriations and the committee on ways and means. He developed and trained an interest in public finance that was so sound as to endanger his political prospects. When the Northwest was carried away by the "Ohio" (greenback) idea, and advocated the issuance of irredeemable pa per money, Garfield stuck to the promise of a resumption of specie payments. He was too lukewarm on the subject of the protective tariff to suit all of his Republican constituents, for northeastern Ohio contained many factories that were in a period of rapid expansion between the Civil War and the panic of 1873. But his independence of thought caused him le ss trouble than did two of the scandals of a period full of scandals. He was named in the memorandum book of Oakes Ames [q. v.] as one of the congressmen who had accepted stock in the Credit Mobilier Company. This Garfield denied, and the proof was far from being complete (House Report, No. 77, 42 Congress, 3 Session); yet the suspicion remained an available weapon for his enemies throughout his life. In the case of the DeGolyer paving contract there was no doubt about the underlying fact. He did accept a retaining fee for services rendered to a company ambitious to furnish the City of Washington with wooden-block pavement (Nation, July 1, 1880, p. 5). The interpretation placed upon the episode by his critics was that while a member of Congress he took pay from a company seeking favors from the government of the District; his answer was that he had no connection with the District government by which the paving award was to be made, and that his services were not to be differentiated from those which congressmen and senators were continually performing when they practised the profession of law in the federal courts. Both of these scandals were before his constituents when he appeared for reelection in 1874, but he surmounted them.

When the Republican party was thrown into the minority in the House after the election of 1874, Garfield and Blaine were its most effective leaders, and worked together with no more suspicions and jealousies than were to be expected. When the latter became senator from Maine in 1876, Garfield became the Republican candidate for speaker and was leader of the minority for the rest of his service in the House. He had taken an active part in the canvass for Hayes, and had gone to Louisiana as one of the "visiting statesmen" to watch the count of votes. He was active in framing the compromise legislation that settled the electoral contest, and served as a member of the electoral commission, where he voted for Hayes on every count. His natural desire to take John Sherman's place as senator from Ohio, when the latter went into the cabinet, was repressed at the request of Hayes who wanted him to remain as Republican leader in the House; but in 1880 there was no such obstruction and the legislature elected him to succeed Allen G. Thurman for the term of six years after 1881. His name, said the Milwaukee Sentinel (January 10, 1880), "is exceptionally clean for a man who has been engaged for twenty years in active politics." He never sat in the Senate. On the day that his term would otherwise have begun he was inaugurated as president of the United States.

At the time of Garfield's election to the Senate, John Sherman might easily have sought the post for himself, for he expected to be out of the cabinet after March 4, 1881. But Sherman desired the Republican presidential nomination of 1880, and efforts were made to induce Garfield to promise support in exchange for Sherman's support for the senatorship. Garfield seems to have refused to make a bargain, although he let it be known that his attitude towards Sherman's candidacy would be affected by Sherman's treatment of his. After his election he still declined to pledge support to Sherman, but on January 26, 1880, he wrote: "I have no doubt that a decisive majority of our party in Ohio favors the nomination of John Sherman. He has earned this recognition" (Cincinnati Gazette, January 28, 1880). As the spring advanced, the substantial unanimity of Ohio for Sherman brought Garfield into the movement. He went to the Chicago national convention as head of the delegation and manager for Sherman, and on the floor attained a commanding position because of the soundness of his case and the skill with which he managed it. Blaine and Grant were the leading rivals of Sherman for the nomination, and the "Stalwart" leaders who directed the fight for Grant took unsound positions in insisting upon the unit rule for state delegations, and upon the right of state conventions to instruct district delegates how they should vote. Garfield conducted the fight for the freedom of the delegate and blocked the paths of both Grant and Blaine but could not procure a majority for his own candidate. On the thirty-fifth ballot sixteen of the twenty Wisconsin votes were shifted to Garfield, and on the next roll call the nomination was made unanimous in a stampede. The Grant forces, led by Conkling, Cameron, and Logan, never forgave Garfield for his opposition; Blaine, who could not have been nominated, was grateful for the defeat of Grant; Sherman laid his failure to the stubbornness of Blaine and only late in life came to believe that Garfield had been disloyal to him. James Ford Rhodes agrees with Sherman's later opinion, writing that "apparently the thought of his [Garfield's] trust was overpowered by the conviction that the prize was his without the usual hard preliminary work" (History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley, 1877-1896, 1919, p. 126). But no evidence of importance has been produced to show that the management of Sherman's cause was anything but loyal; and historical proofs are incapable of determining whether under any circumstances it was ethical for the manager of Sherman to accept the nomination for himself.

In the canvass of 1880 the followers of Blaine and Sherman gave good support to the ticket, but those of Grant sulked, the leaders offering little more than a formal pledge of devotion to the party. Roscoe Conkling [q.v.], in particular, was outraged and held aloof. The nomination from his own following of Chester A. Arthur as vice-president gave him no pleasure. The selection of Marshall Jewell [q.v.] to be chairman of the national committee was an affront since Jewell had been summarily dismissed by Grant from the office of postmaster-general in 1876. On August 5 Garfield made a pilgrimage to New York to sit with a meeting of the national committee, in the hope that the New York wing of the party might be persuaded to help the ticket, but Conkling could not be induced even to meet him. He distrusted, says his nephew and biographer, "Garfield's imperfect memory of a private conversation" (A. R. Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 1889, p. 6n). In September, however, Conkling, Cameron, and Grant finally decided to recognize the candidate and made a western trip; in connection with this, Grant presided and Conkling spoke at a rally in Garfield's old district at Warren, Ohio, and they paid a visit of formal courtesy to Garfield at his Mentor farm; What they said to the candidate and what he said to them played a large part in the later political controversy as the "Treaty of Mentor," but cannot be documented. Garfield at least wrote in his diary, "I had no private conversation with the party" (T. C. Smith, post, p. 1032). The "Stalwarts" later chose to say that he promised them "fair" treatment as the price of support; and they insisted throughout his presidency that it was for them to determine in what fair treatment consisted. The canvass progressed somewhat more smoothly after this. On October 20 a New York weekly, Truth, printed what pretended to be a letter from Garfield to one H. L. Morey in which he advocated the importation of cheap Oriental labor for employment in factories. The Democratic national committee gave wide circulation to this document, in spite of its instant denunciation as a fraud; and Hancock and English, the Democratic candidates, secured five of the six electoral votes of California, where the feeling against the Chinese was strong. But Garfield and Arthur nevertheless carried the country with a plurality of about 10,000 popular votes, and with 214 electoral votes, against 155.

Garfield resigned from the House early in November. He surrendered the Senate seat as well, thus enabling John Sherman to return in 1881 to his old post as senator from Ohio. The President- Elect remained at Mentor, entrenched behind his "snow works" (Cincinnati Gazette, November 16, December 13, 1880), keeping up the hard-wood fires in his grates, smoking his large, thick cigars, and listening with non-committal patience to every one who came to see him. All the political leaders came, Conkling as well as Blaine, but the major appointments were kept guarded until Garfield was ready to transmit them to the Senate after his inauguration on March 4, 1881. He attempted to build a conciliation cabinet, but the appointment of James G. Blaine at its head as secretary of state caused it to be regarded by the "Stalwart" element in the party as a triumph for him. Continuously from the moment when Garfield asked Blaine to take the post, he was the recipient of letters of counsel from the latter. Much of the advice was good and some of it was taken. For the treasury, Garfield, appreciating the usual western "jealousy of Eastern financial leadership" (Harper's Weekly, March 26, 1881, p. 194), selected Senator William Windom of Minnesota, whom Sherman guaranteed as faithful to sound money and hostile to monopolies. Robert T. Lincoln, secretary of war, was a Grant man before the convention of 1880, but was appointed chiefly because of the tradition that he represented. William H. Hunt, who began life as a Southern Whig, became secretary of the navy. The selection of Wayne MacVeagh of Philadelphia as attorney-general involved an interesting situation, since he was at once a vigorous anti-Cameronian in Pennsylvania politics, and a son-in-law of old Simon Cameron. MacVeagh was known as a reformer, and was angered when Garfield named for assistant attorney- general William E. Chandler, a warm partisan of Blaine. Chandler, however, failed of confirmation by the Senate. Thomas L. James of New York, a Conkling man, had been postmaster of New York City, and became postmaster-general with a suspicion already lodged in his mind that the postal service needed purification. Senator Samuel J. Kirkwood of Iowa took the Interior department.

The doubts that had kept the "Stalwarts" lukewarm during the canvass, and had impelled Conkling to minatory counsels after election, were intensified as the winter of 1881 advanced. On February 11, with Arthur in the chair and Grant among those present, a commemorative dinner was given at Delmonico's in New York to Stephen W. Dorsey [q.v.]; and at this it was made to appear that to him as secretary of the national committee was due the credit for the victory of the Garfield ticket. His sharp strategy in carrying Indiana was specially commended. But Garfield's recognition of the "Stalwarts" was less than they expected, or at least desired. On March 23 he sent to the Senate a long list of minor nominees, including men of his own choice for the difficult New York custom-house posts that had occasioned Hayes so much trouble. Conkling took this as an open declaration of war against his friends, and as a violation of pledges that had been given him as the price of his support. He relied upon "senatorial courtesy" to accomplish the rejection of the distasteful nominees, advancing once more the theory that had been fought out with Hayes, that federal appointments within a state must be personally acceptable to the senator from that state. Garfield met the issue with more stubbornness than he usually displayed, telling John Hay, "They may take him [Robertson, the nominee for collector of the port] out of the Senate head first or feet first; I will never withdraw him" (New York Tribune, January 11, 1882).

The political battle soon shifted to the Post-Office Department, where Garfield and James had inherited a corrupt situation of old standing. The practise had been allowed to develop whereby rings of contractors in Washington received as lowest bidders scores of "star routes"-where the mails were carried by stage or rider rather than by railroad or steamboat. They then sublet the actual performance to local carriers, whom they paid what the service was worth, and by collusion later secured an unwarranted increase in the compensation to themselves. Ex-Senator Dorsey was heavily involved in "star route" contracts, as was the second assistant postmaster-general, Thomas J. Brady, in whose office the compensations were arranged. An investigation of Brady's work was under way in 1880 when he had asked for a deficiency appropriation of about $1,700,000. It h ad for a time appeared that the attacks were only the usual Democratic nagging of a Republican administration; but James brought to Garfield a report from the field workers of the department that uncovered more scandal than could be denied or concealed. Brady was dismissed on April 20, 1881, and a list of ninety-three suspected "star routes" was given to the press (Annual Report of the Postmaster-General, 1881, pp. 467, 516). The dismissal of Brady and the incidental involvement of Dorsey in charges of fraud came while the Senate was delaying the confirmation of the appointees of March 23. Attempts were made to scare off the investigation, by suggestion s that Garfield knew all about the frauds, had connived at them, and had been aware that a share of the plunder had found its way to the Republican campaign fund which Dorsey had administered so skilfully the preceding summer. (Much of Dorsey's campaign correspondence was printed by him in the New York Herald, December 18, 1882.) The reply of Garfield to this intimidation was to direct the preparation of the cases to be brought against the conspirators, and to withdraw all other nominations for New York positions except those for the custom-house, so as to emphasize his determination to maintain the independence of the president in matters of appointment. On M ay 4, however, a letter written August 23, 1880, was made public (New York Herald, May 5, 1881), showing that Garfield had th en inquired of Jay A. Hubbell, chairman of the Republican congressional campaign committee, how the departments were doing, and expressed the hope that Brady would help as much as possible.

It had been easier for opponents of Garfield to delay action on his appointments because the control of the Senate was insecure for several weeks after the inauguration. Accordingly, the Republican caucus, anxious not to break with the President and not to lose the aid of the votes influenced by Conkling, proceeded slowly in determining party policy. The public reactions respecting the "star route" frauds, and party bosses, and the hobbling theory that underlay Conkling's demand, determined the outcome of the contest. When it became quite clear that Garfield would not surrender, the caucus agreed to confirm. Conkling, with his New York colleague as trailer, resigned his seat upon the issue, and appealed to the New York legislature for a vindication which he did not receive. The two New York vacancies again threw the control of the Senate in doubt, but they transferred the turmoil from Washington to Albany, and gave to Garfield a release from the excitement and pressure that he had been under for two months. He now allowed Blaine to show the hand of the administration in foreign matters, issuing a call for a conference of the American republics to meet in Washington in 1882, and taking up where Hayes and Evarts had left it the contention with England that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 was no longer adequate (Alice F. Tyler, The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine, 1927, pp. 38-41, 165).

Before either of these matters could be pushed to a conclusion, there came an enforced hiatus in the administration. On July 2, while at the Washington railroad station en route for a northern trip and a visit to his college, Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, an erratic if not crazy lawyer and a disappointed office-seeker, who declared loudly that his was a political crime, that he was a "Stalwart" and wanted Arthur to be president. For eleven weeks Garfield was nursed at the White House, and then at Elberon, New Jersey, a summer resort where his family was in residence. The official bulletins from his physicians were numerous, but hardly revealed from day to day whether he was incapacitated or not, in the meaning of the Constitution. He never left his sick-bed, however; and on September 19, 1881, he died. The friends of the murdered President raised a handsome fund for the support of his widow and the five children who survived him. One of the latter, James Rudolph Garfield, was to have a distinguished career in politics, serving as secretary of the interior from 1907 to 1909; a second, Harry Augustus Garfield, became president of Williams College and United States fuel administrator during the World War.

Garfield's tragic death silenced the voice of criticism and gave the tone to many laudatory biographies. Not enough of his administration had been revealed for any estimate of it to be possible. He had failed to bring about the harmony that both good nature and selfish interest had urged him to attempt. Whether he could have managed to rule without "Stalwart" support is uncertain. Up to the moment of his accidental nomination for the presidency his career, to an unusual degree, resembles that of a typical successful parliamentary leader in a country possessing responsible government and the cabinet system. He would in England have been in line for Downing Street and the office of premier. In the United States such talents as his could obtain their chance ori.ly by accident.

[In addition to the Congressional Record, where the speeches of Garfield's Jong career are to be found, and to the newspapers which gave him abundant space, and to his obituaries, among which the address by James G. Blaine in the hall of the House of Representatives, February 27, 1882, Congressional Record, 47 Congress, 1 Session, p. 1465, is the most distinguished, there are many eulogistic biographies of the campaign type. Probably the best of these is Burke A. Hinsdale, The Republican Text-Book for the Campaign of 1880: A Full History of General James A. Garfield's Public Life (1880). Garfield's speeches were collected by Hinsdale and published as The Works of James Abram Garfield (2 volumes, 1882-83). The personal papers, which Garfield preserved in great number, were carefully arranged immediately after his death but were not worked over for nearly a generation, when they were entrusted to Prof. Theodore C. Smith, of Williams College. They include extensive diaries and a large collection of letters. The resulting biography by Professor Smith, The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield (2 volumes, 1925), one of the best presidential biographies in existence, is adequate for all reasonable needs.]

F. L. P-n.

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, pp. 599-605:

GARFIELD, James Abram, twentieth president of the United States, born in Orange, Cuyahoga county, Ohio, 19 November, 1831; died in Elberon, New Jersey, 19 September, 1881. His father, Abram Garfield, was a native of New York, but of Massachusetts ancestry, descended from Edward Garfield, an English Puritan, who in 1630 was one of the founders of Watertown. His mother, Eliza Ballou, was born in New Hampshire, of a Huguenot family that fled from France to New England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. Garfield, therefore, was from lineage well represented in the struggles for civil and religious liberty, both in the Old and in the New World. Abram Garfield, his father, moved to Ohio in 1830, and settled in what was then known as “The Wilderness,” now as the “Western Reserve,'” which was occupied by Connecticut people. Abram Garfield made a prosperous beginning in his new home, but died, after a sudden illness, at the age of thirty-three, leaving a widow with four small children, of whom James was the youngest. In bringing up her family, unaided in a lonely cabin (see accompanying illustration), and impressing on them a high standard of moral and intellectual worth, Mrs. Garfield displayed an almost heroic courage. It was a life of struggle and privation; but the poverty of her home differed from that of cities or settled communities—it was the poverty of the frontier, all shared it, and all were bound closely together in a common struggle, where there were no humiliating contrasts in neighboring wealth. At three years of age James A. Garfield went to school in a log hut, learned to read, and began that habit of omnivorous reading which ended only with his life. At ten years of age he was accustomed to manual labor, helping out his mother's meagre income by work at home or on the farms of the neighbors. Labor was play to the healthy boy; he did it cheerfully, almost with enthusiasm, for his mother was a staunch Campbellite, whose hymns and songs sent her children to their tasks with a feeling that the work was consecrated; but work in winter always yielded its claims to those of the district school, where he made good progress, and was conspicuous for his assiduity. By the time he was fourteen, young Garfield had a fair knowledge of arithmetic and grammar, and was particularly apt in the facts of American history, which he had eagerly gathered from the meagre treatises that circulated in that remote section. Indeed, he read and re-read every book the scanty libraries of that part of the wilderness supplied, and many he learned by heart. Mr. Blaine attributes the dignity and earnestness of his style to his familiarity with the Bible and its literature, of which he was a constant student. His imagination was especially kindled by the tales of the sea; a love for adventure took strong possession of him. He so far yielded to it that in 1848 he went to Cleveland and proposed to ship as a sailor on board a lake schooner. But a glance showed him that the life was not the romance he had conceived. He turned promptly from the shore, but, loath to return home without adventure and without money, drove some months for a boat on the Ohio canal. Little is known of this experience, except that he secured promotion from the tow-path to the boat, and a story that he was strong enough and brave enough to hold his own against his companions, who were naturally a rough set. During the winter of 1849-'50 he attended the Geauga seminary at Chester, Ohio, about ten miles from his home. In the vacations he learned and practised the trade of a carpenter, helped at harvest, taught, did anything and everything to get money to pay for his schooling. After the first term, he asked and needed no aid from home; he had reached the point where he could support himself. At Chester he met Miss Lucretia Rudolph, his future wife. Attracted at first by her interest in the same intellectual pursuits, he quickly discovered sympathy in other tastes, and a congeniality of disposition, which paved the way for the one great love of his life. He was himself attractive at this time, exhibited many signs of intellectual superiority, and was physically a splendid specimen of vigorous young manhood. He studied hard, worked hard, cheerfully ready for any emergency, even that of the prize-ring; for, finding it a necessity, he one day thrashed the bully of the school in a stand-up fight. His nature, always religious, was at this period profoundly stirred in that direction. He was converted under the instructions of a Campbellite preacher, was baptized and received into that denomination. They called themselves “The Disciples,” contemned all doctrines and forms, and sought to direct their lives by the Scriptures, simply interpreted as any plain man would read them. This sanction to independent thinking, given by religion itself, must have had great influence in creating that broad and catholic spirit in this young disciple which kept his earnest nature out of the ruts of moral and intellectual bigotry. From this moment his zeal to get the best education grew warmer; he began to take wider views, to look beyond the present into the future. As soon as he finished his studies in Chester, he entered (1851) the Hiram eclectic institute (now Hiram college), at Hiram, Portage county, Ohio, the principal educational institution of his sect. He was not very quick of acquisition, but his perseverance was indomitable, and he soon had an excellent knowledge of Latin and a fair acquaintance with algebra, natural philosophy, and botany. He read Xenophon, Cæsar, and Virgil with appreciation; but his superiority was more easily recognized in the prayer-meetings and debating societies of the college, where he was assiduous and conspicuous. Living here was inexpensive, and he readily made his expenses by teaching in the English departments, and also gave instruction in the ancient languages. After three years he was well prepared to enter the junior class of any eastern college, and had saved $350 toward the expenses of such an undertaking out of his salary. He hesitated between Yale, Brown, and Williams colleges, finally choosing Williams on the kindly promise of encouragement sent him by its president, Mark Hopkins. It was natural to expect he would choose Bethany college, in West Virginia, an institution largely controlled and patronized by the “Disciples of Christ.” Garfield himself seems to have thought some explanation for his neglect to do so necessary, and with particularity assigns as reasons that the course of instruction at Bethany was not so extended as in the old New England colleges; that Bethany was too friendly in opinion to slavery; and—most significant of all the reasons he gave—that, as he had inherited by birth and association a strong bias toward the religious views there inculcated, he ought especially to examine other faiths. Entering Williams in the autumn of 1854, he was duly graduated with the highest honors in the class of 1856. His classmates unite with President Hopkins in testifying that in college he was warm-hearted, large-minded, and possessed of great earnestness of purpose and a singular poise of judgment. All speak, too, of his modest and unassuming manners. But, outside of these and other like qualities, such as industry, perseverance, courage, and conscientiousness, Garfield had exhibited up to this time no signs of the superiority that was to make him a conspicuous figure. But the effects of twenty-five years of most varied discipline, cheerfully accepted and faithfully used, begin now to show themselves, and to give to history one of its most striking examples of what education—the education of books and of circumstances—can accomplish. Garfield was not born, but made; and he made himself by persistent, strenuous, conscientious study and work. In the next six years he was a college president, a state senator, a major-general in the National army, and a representative-elect to the National congress. American annals reveal no other promotion so rapid and so varied.

On his return to Ohio, in 1856, he resumed his place as a teacher of Latin and Greek at Hiram institute, and the next year (1857), being then only twenty-six years of age, he was made its president. He was a successful officer, and ambitious, as usual, beyond his allotted task. He discussed before his interested classes almost every subject of current interest in scholarship, science, religion, and art. The story spread, and his influence with it; he became an intellectual and moral force in the Western Reserve. It was greatest, however, over the young. They keenly felt the contagion of his manliness, his sympathy, his thirst for knowledge, and his veneration for the truth when it was found. As an educator, he was, and always would have been, eminently successful; he had the knowledge, the art to impart it, and the personal magnetism that impressed his love for it upon his pupils. His intellectual activity at this time was intense. The canons of his church permitted him to preach, and he used the permission. He also pursued the study of law, entering his name, in 1858, as a student in a law-office in Cleveland, but studying in Hiram. To one ignorant of the slow development that was characteristic of Garfield in all directions, it would seem incredible that he now for the first time began to show any noticeable interest in politics. He seems never to have even voted before the autumn of 1856. No one who knew the man could doubt that he would then cast it, as he did, for John C. Frémont, the first Republican candidate for the presidency. As moral questions entered more and more into politics, Garfield's interest grew apace, and he sought frequent occasions to discuss these questions in debate. In advocating the cause of freedom against slavery, he showed for the first time a skill in discussion, which afterward bore good fruit in the house of representatives. Without solicitation or thought on his part, in 1859 he was sent to represent the counties of Summit and Portage in the senate of Ohio. Again in this new field his versatility and industry are conspicuous. He makes exhaustive investigations and reports on such widely different topics as geology, education, finance, and parliamentary law. Always looking to the future, and apprehensive that the impending contest might leave the halls of legislation and seek the arbitrament of war, he gave especial study to the militia system of the state, and the best methods of equipping and disciplining it.

The war came, and Garfield, who had been farmer, carpenter, student, teacher, lawyer, preacher, and legislator, was to show himself an excellent soldier. In August, 1861, Governor William Dennison commissioned him lieutenant-colonel in the 42d regiment of Ohio volunteers. The men were his old pupils at Hiram college, whom he had persuaded to enlist. Promoted to the command of this regiment, he drilled it into military efficiency while waiting orders to the front, and in December, 1861, reported to General Buell, in Louisville, Kentucky. General Buell was so impressed by the soldierly condition of the regiment that he gave Colonel Garfield a brigade, and assigned him the difficult task of driving the Confederate general Humphrey Marshall from eastern Kentucky. His confidence was such that he allowed the young soldier to lay his own plans, though on their success hung the fate of Kentucky. The undertaking itself was difficult. General Marshall had 5,000 men, while Garfield had but half that number, and must march through a state where the majority of the people were hostile, to attack an enemy strongly intrenched in a mountainous country. Garfield, nothing daunted, concentrated his little force, and moved it with such rapidity, sometimes here and sometimes there, that General Marshall, deceived by these feints, and still more by false reports, which were skilfully prepared for him, abandoned his position and many supplies at Paintville, and was caught in retreat by Garfield, who charged the full force of the enemy, and maintained a hand-to-hand fight with it for five hours. The enemy had 5,000 men and twelve cannon; Garfield had no artillery, and but 1,100 men. But he held his own until re-enforced by Gens. Granger and Sheldon, when Marshall gave way, leaving Garfield the victor at Middle Creek, 10 January, 1862, one of the most important of the minor battles of the war. Shortly afterward Zollicoffer was defeated and slain by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and the Confederates lost the state of Kentucky. Coming after the reverses at Big Bethel, Bull Run, and the disastrous failures in Missouri, General Garfield's triumph over the Confederate forces at Middle Creek had an encouraging effect on the entire north. Marshall was a graduate of West Point, and had every advantage in numbers and position, yet seems to have been out-generaled at every point. He was driven from two fortified positions, and finally completely routed—all within a period of less than a fortnight in the month of January, 1862. In recognition of these services, especially acknowledged by General Buell in his General Order No. 40 (20 January, 1862), President Lincoln promptly made the young colonel a brigadier-general, dating his commission from the battle of Middle Creek. During his campaign of the Big Sandy, while Garfield was engaged in breaking up some scattered Confederate encampments, his supplies gave out, and he was threatened with starvation. Going himself to the Ohio river, he seized a steamer, loaded it with provisions, and, on the refusal of any pilot to undertake the perilous voyage, because of a freshet that had swelled the river, he stood at the helm for forty-eight hours and piloted the craft through the dangerous channel. In order to surprise Marshall, then intrenched in Cumberland Gap, Garfield marched his soldiers 100 miles in four days through a blinding snow-storm. Returning to Louisville, he found that General Buell was away, overtook him at Columbia, Tennessee, and was assigned to the command of the 20th brigade. He reached Shiloh in time to take part in the second day's fight, was engaged in all the operations in front of Corinth, and in June, 1862, rebuilt the bridges on the Memphis and Charleston railroad, and exhibited noticeable engineering skill in repairing the fortifications of Huntsville. The unhealthfulness of the region told upon him, and on 30 July, 1862, under leave of absence, he returned to Hiram, where he lay ill for two months. On 25 September, 1862, he went to Washington, and was ordered on court-martial duty, and gained such reputation in this practice that, on 25 November, he was assigned to the case of General Fitz-John Porter. In February, 1863, he returned to duty under General Rosecrans, then in command of the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans made him his chief-of-staff, with responsibilities beyond those usually given to this office. In this field, Garfield's influence on the campaign in Middle Tennessee was most important. One familiar incident shows and justifies the great influence he wielded in its counsels. Before the battle of Chickamauga (24 June, 1863), General Rosecrans asked the written opinion of seventeen of his generals on the advisability of an immediate advance. All others opposed it, but Garfield advised it, and his arguments were so convincing, though pressed without passion or prejudice, that Rosecrans determined to seek an engagement. General Garfield wrote out all the orders of that fateful day (19 September), excepting one—and that one was the blunder that lost the day. Garfield volunteered to take the news of the defeat on the right to General George H. Thomas, who held the left of the line. It was a bold ride, under constant fire, but he reached Thomas and gave the information that saved the Army of the Cumberland. For this action he was made a major-general, 19 September, 1863, promoted for gallantry on a field that was lost. With a military future so bright before him, Garfield, always unselfish, yielded his own ambition to Mr. Lincoln's urgent request, and on 3 December, 1863, resigning his commission, and hastened to Washington to sit in congress, to which he had been chosen fifteen months before, as the successor of Joshua R. Giddings. In the mean time Thomas had received command of the Army of the Cumberland, had reorganized it, and had asked Garfield to take a division. His inclination was to accept and continue the military career, which had superior attractions; but he yielded to the representations of the President and Sec. Stanton, that he would be more useful in the house of representatives.

General Garfield was thirty-two years old when he entered congress. He found in the house, which was to be the theatre of his lasting fame, many with whom his name was for the next twenty years intimately associated. Schuyler Colfax was its speaker, and Conkling, Blaine, Washburne, Stevens, Fenton, Schenck, Henry Winter Davis, William B. Allison, and William R. Morrison were among its members. His military reputation had preceded him, and secured for him a place in the committee on military affairs, then the most important in congress. His first speech (14 January, 1864), upon a motion to print extra copies of General Rosecrans's official report, was listened to with attention; and, indeed, whenever he spoke upon army matters, this was the case. But the attention was given to the man for the information he possessed, and imparted rather than to the orator; for in effective speech, as in every other matter in which Garfield succeeded, he came to excellence only by labor and practice. He was soon regarded as an authority on military matters, and his opinion was sought as an expert, experienced and careful. To these questions he gave all necessary attention, but they did not exhaust his capacity. He began at this time, and ever afterward continued, a thorough study of constitutional and financial problems, and to aid him in these researches he labored to increase his familiarity with the German and French languages. In this, his first session, he had to stand almost alone in opposition to the bill that increased the bounty paid for enlistment. He advocated liberal bounties to the veterans that reenlisted, but would use the draft to secure raw recruits. History vindicated his judgment. In the same session he spoke on the subject of seizure and confiscation of rebel property, and on free commerce between the states. On 13 January, 1865, he discussed exhaustively the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

In the 39th congress (1865) he was changed, at his own request, from the committee on military affairs to the ways and means committee, which then included Messrs. Morrison, of Illinois, Brooks and Conkling, of New York, and Allison, of Iowa. His reason for choosing this new field was that, the war being ended, financial questions would have supreme importance, and he wished to have his part in their solution. In the 40th congress (1867) he was restored to his old committee on military affairs, and made its chairman. In March, 1866, he made his first speech on the question of the public debt, foreshadowing, in the course of his remarks, that republican policy which resulted in the resumption of specie payment, 1 January, 1879. From this moment until the treasury note was worth its face in gold, he never failed, on every proper occasion, in the house and out, to discuss every phase of the financial question, and to urge upon the National conscience the demands of financial honor. In May, 1868, he spoke again on the currency, dealing a staggering blow to the adherents of George H. Pendleton, who, under the stress of a money panic, were clamoring for the government to “make the money-market easier.” It may be said that he was at this, as at later times, the representative and champion of the sound-money men in congress, and first and last did more than any one else, probably, in settling the issues of this momentous question. In 1877 and 1878 he was again active in stemming a fresh tide of financial fallacies. He treated the matter this time with elementary simplicity, and gave in detail reasons for a hard-money policy, based not so much upon opinion and theory as upon the teachings of history.

In the 41st congress a new committee—that on banking and currency—was created, and Garfield was very properly made its chairman. This gave him new opportunities to serve the cause in which he was heartily enlisted, and no one now seeks to diminish the value of that service. The most noticed and most widely read of these discussions was a speech on the National finances, which he delivered in 1878, at Faneuil hall, Boston. It was circulated as a campaign document by thousands, and served to win a victory in Massachusetts and to subdue for a while the frantic appeals from the west for more paper money. He served also on the select committee on the census (a tribute to his skill in statistics) and on the committee on rules, as an appreciation of his practical and thorough knowledge of parliamentary law. In the 42d and 43d congresses he was chairman of the committee on appropriations. In the 44th, 45th, and 46th congresses (the house being Democratic) he was assigned a place on the committee of ways and means. In reconstruction times, Garfield was earnest and aggressive in opposition to the theories advocated by President Johnson. He was a kind man, and not lacking in sympathy for those who, from mistaken motives, had attempted to sever their connection with the Federal Union; but he was not a sentimentalist, and had too earnest convictions not to insist that the results won by so much treasure and blood should be secured to the victors. An old soldier, he would not see Union victories neutralized by evasions of the constitution. On these topics no one was his superior in either branch of congress, and no opponent, however able, encountered him here without regretting the contest.

In 1876, General Garfield went to New Orleans, at President Grant's request, in company with Senators Sherman and Matthews and other Republicans, to watch the counting of the Louisiana vote. He made a special study of the West Feliciana parish case, and embodied his views in a brief but significant report. On his return, he made, in January, 1877, two notable speeches in the house on the duty of congress in a presidential election, and claimed that the vice-president had a constitutional right to count the electoral vote. He was opposed to an electoral commission; yet, when the commission was ordered, General Garfield was chosen by acclamation to fill one of the two seats allotted to Republican representatives. His colleague was George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts. Garfield discussed before the commission the Florida and Louisiana returns, on 9 and 16 February, 1877. Mr. Blaine left the house in 1877 for the senate, and this made Garfield the undisputed leader of the Republican party in the house. He was at this time, and subsequently, its candidate for speaker.

The struggle begun in the second session of the 45th congress (1879), when the Democratic majority sought to control the president through the appropriations, gave Garfield a fine opportunity to display his powers as a leader in opposition. The Democratic members added to two general appropriation bills, in the shape of amendments, legislation intended to restrain the use of the army as a posse to keep the peace at elections, to repeal the law authorizing the employment of deputy U. S. marshals at the elections of members of congress, and to relieve jurors in the U. S. courts from the obligation of the test oath. The senate, which was Republican, refused to concur in these amendments, and so the session ended. An extra session was promptly called, which continued into midsummer. Contemporary criticism claims that, in this contest, General Garfield reached, perhaps, the climax of his congressional career. A conservative man by nature, he revolted at such high-handed measures, and in his speech of 29 March, 1879, characterized them as a “revolution in congress.” Against this insult to the spirit of the law he protested with unwonted vigor. Like Webster in 1832, he stood the defender of the constitution, and his splendid eloquence and resistless logic upheld the prerogatives of the executive, and denounced these attempts by the legislature to prevent or control elections, however disguised, as an attack upon the constitution. He warned the house that its course would end in nullification, and protested that its principle was the “revived doctrine of state sovereignty.” (See speeches of 26 April, 10 and 11 June, and 19 and 27 June, 1879.) The result of it was that the Democrats finally voted $44,600,000 of the $45,000,000 of appropriations originally asked—a great party victory, to which General Garfield largely contributed. His arguments had the more weight because not partisan, but supported by a clear analysis and statement of the relations between the different branches of the government. His last speech to the house was made on the appointment of special deputy marshals, 23 April, 1880. At the same time he made a report of the tariff commission, which showed that he was still a sincere friend to protection. He was already United States senator-elect from Ohio, chosen after a nomination of singular unanimity, 13 January, 1880.

Where there is government by party, no leader can escape calumny; hence it assailed Garfield with great venom. In the presidential canvass of 1872, he, with other Republican representatives, was charged with having bought stock in the Credit Mobilier, sold to them at less than its value to influence their action in legislation affecting the Union Pacific railroad. A congressional investigation, reporting 13 February, 1875, seemed to establish these facts so far as Garfield was concerned. He knew nothing of any connection between the two companies, much less that the Credit Mobilier controlled the railway. Garfield denied that he ever owned the stock, and was vaguely contradicted by Oakes Ames, who had no evidence of his alleged sale of $1,000 worth of the stock to Garfield, except a memorandum in his diary, which did not agree with Ames's oral testimony that he paid Garfield $329 as dividend on the stock. Garfield admitted that he had received $300 in June, 1868, from Ames, but claimed that it was a loan, and that he paid it in the winter of 1869. It was nowhere claimed that Garfield ever received certificate, or receipt, or other dividends, to which, if the owner of the stock, he was entitled, or that he ever asked for them. The innocence of General Garfield was generally recognized, and, after the circumstances became known, he was not weakened in his district. Another investigation in the same congress (43d) gave calumny a second opportunity. This was the investigation into the conduct of the government of the District of Columbia. It revealed startling frauds in a De Golyer contract, and Garfield's name was found to be in some way connected with it. The facts, corroborated in an open letter by James M. Wilson, chairman of the committee, were: In May, 1872, Richard C. Parsons, a Cleveland attorney, then marshal of the supreme court in Washington, having the interests of the patents owned by De Golyer in charge, was called away. He brought all his material to Garfield, and asked him to prepare the brief. The brief was to show the superiority of the pavement (the subject of patent) over forty other kinds, and did not otherwise concern the contract or have anything to do with its terms. The fraud, as is generally understood, was in the contract, not in the quality of the pavement. Garfield prepared the brief and delivered it to Parsons; but did not himself make the argument. Parsons sent Garfield subsequently $5,000, which was a part of the fee Parsons had received for his own services. As thoughtful people reviewed the case, there was no harsher criticism than that suggested by General Garfield's own lofty standard of avoiding even the appearance of evil—that he had not shown his usual prudence in avoiding any connection, even the most honest, in any way, with any matter that could in any shape come up for congressional review. It was the cruel and unjust charges made in connection with these calumnies which sent the iron into his soul, and made wounds which he forgave but never forgot.

In June, 1880, the Republican convention to nominate a successor to President Hayes was held in Chicago, and to it came Garfield, naturally, at the head of the Ohio delegation. He sympathized heartily with the wish of that delegation to secure the nomination for John Sherman, and labored loyally for that end. There could be no criticism of his action, nor could there be any just criticism of his loyalty to his candidate, except (and that he never concealed) that he wished more to defeat the nomination of Grant than to secure that of Senator Sherman. He believed a third term such a calamity that patriotism required the sacrifice of all other considerations to prevent it. That view he shared with Mr. Blaine, also a candidate in this convention, whose instructions to his friends were, “Defeat a third term first, and then struggle for the prize of office afterwards. Success in the one case is vital; success in the other is of minor importance.” On the thirty-third ballot Grant had 306 votes, the remaining 400 being divided between Blaine, Edmunds, and Washburne. The hope of the Grant men or the Blaine men to secure the prize faltered, and in the thirty-fourth ballot Wisconsin broke the monotony by announcing thirty-six votes for James A. Garfield. This put the spark to fuel that had been unconsciously prepared for it by the events of the long struggle. In all the proceedings, peculiar fitness had put Garfield to the front as the counsellor and leader of the anti-Grant majority, and the exhibition of his splendid qualifications won increasing admiration and trust. His tact and readiness in casual debate, and the beauty and force of the more elaborate effort in which he nominated Sherman, won the wavering convention. On the thirty-sixth ballot the delegates broke their ranks and rushed to him. He received 399 votes, and then his nomination (8 June, 1880) was made unanimous. General Garfield left the convention before the result was announced, and accepted the nomination by letter. This was a thoughtful document, and acceptable to the Republican voters. Disregarding precedent, he spoke in his own behalf in Ohio, New York, and other states. He spoke sensibly and with great discretion, and his public appearance is thought to have increased his popularity. He was elected (2 November, 1880) over his competitor, General Winfield Scott Hancock, by the votes of every northern state except New Jersey, Nevada, and California. His inaugural address, 4 March, 1881, was satisfactory to the people generally, and his administration began with only one cloud in the sky. His cabinet was made up as follows: James G. Blaine, of Maine, secretary of state; William Windom, of Minnesota, secretary of the treasury; Wayne MacVeagh, of Pennsylvania, attorney-general; Thomas L. James, of New York, postmaster-general; Samuel J. Kirkwood, of Iowa, secretary of the interior; Robert T. Lincoln, of Illinois, secretary of war; William H. Hunt, of Louisiana, secretary of the navy. There was bitter dissension in the party in New York, and Garfield gave much consideration to his duty in the premises. He was willing to do anything except yield the independence of the executive in his own constitutional sphere. He would give to the New York senators, Conkling and Platt, more than their share of offices; but they should not be allowed to interfere with or control the presidential right of nomination. He made nominations to the senate—as many, it is said, as twelve—in that interest, and then (23 March, 1881) sent in the name of William H. Robertson, a leader in the other faction, as collector of the port of New York. Senator Conkling protested, and then openly resisted his confirmation. Yielding to him in the interest of senatorial courtesy, his Republican colleagues, in caucus, 2 May, 1881, agreed to let contested nominations lie over practically until the following December. This was a substantial victory for Mr. Conkling; but it was promptly met by the president, who, a few days afterward (5 May), withdrew all the nominations that were pleasing to the New York senator. This brought the other senators to terms. Mr. Conkling, recognizing defeat, and Mr. Platt with him, resigned their offices, 16 May, 1881. On 18 May, Collector Robertson was confirmed. The early summer came, and peace and happiness and the growing strength and popularity of his administration cheered the heart of its chief. At a moment of special exaltation, on the morning of 2 July, 1881, he was shot by a disappointed office-seeker. The avowed object was to promote to the presidential chair Vice-President Arthur, who represented the Grant or “stalwart” wing of the party. The president was setting out on a trip to New England, anticipating especial pleasure in witnessing the commencement exercises of his alma mater at Williamstown. He was passing through the waiting-room of the Baltimore and Potomac depot, at nine o'clock that morning, leaning on the arm of Mr. Blaine, when the assassin fired at him with a pistol. The first ball passed through his coat-sleeve; the second entered by the back, fractured a rib, and lodged deep in the body. The president was carried to the White House, where, under the highest medical skill, and with every comfort that money and devotion could bring, he lingered for more than ten weeks between life and death. The country and the world were moved by the dastardly deed; and the fortitude and cheerfulness with which the president bore his suffering added to the universal grief. Daily bulletins of his condition were published in every city in the United States and in all the European capitals. Many of the crowned heads of Europe sought by telegraphic inquiry more particular news, and repeated their wishes for his recovery. A day of national supplication was set apart and sacredly observed, and the prayers at first seemed answered. His physicians were hopeful, and gave expression to their hope. His condition seemed to improve; but when midsummer came, the patient failed so perceptibly that a removal was hazarded. On 6 September, 1881, he was taken to Elberon, New Jersey, by a special train. He bore the journey well, and for a while, under the inspiration of the invigorating sea-breezes, seemed to rally. But on 15 September, 1881, symptoms of blood-poisoning appeared. He lingered till the 19th, when, after a few hours of unconsciousness, he died peacefully. A special train (21 September) carried the body to Washington, through a country draped with emblems of mourning, and through crowds of reverent spectators, to lie in state in the rotunda of the capitol two days, 22 and 23 September The final services held here were never surpassed in solemnity and dignity, except on 27 February, 1882, when, in the hall of representatives, at the request of both houses of congress, his friend, James G. Blaine, then secretary of state, delivered a memorial address, in the presence of the president and the heads of all the great departments of the government, so perfect that the criticism of two continents was unqualified praise. In a long train, crowded with the most illustrious of his countrymen, which in its passage, day or night, was never out of the silent watch of mourning citizens, who stood in city, field, and forest, to see it pass, Garfield's remains were borne to Cleveland and placed (26 September, 1882) in a beautiful cemetery, which overlooks the waters of Lake Erie. The accompanying illustration represents the imposing monument that is to mark his last resting-place.

His tragic death assures to Garfield the attention of history. It will credit him with great services rendered in various fields, and with a character formed by a singular union of the best qualities—industry, perseverance, truthfulness, honesty, courage—all acting as faithful servants to a lofty and unselfish ambition. Without genius, which can rarely do more than produce extraordinary results in one direction, his powers were so many and well-trained that he produced excellent results in many. If history shall call Garfield great, it will be because the development of these powers was so complete and harmonious. It has no choice but to record that, by the wise use of them, he won distinction in many fields: a teacher so gifted that his students compare him with Arnold of Rugby; a soldier, rising by merit in rapid promotion to highest rank; a lawyer heard with profit and approbation in the supreme court; an eloquent orator, whose own ardent faith kindled his hearers, speaking after thorough preparation and with practised skill, but refusing always to win victory by forensic trick or device; a party leader, failing in pre-eminence only because his moral honesty would not let him always represent a party victory as a necessity of national well-being. In all these characters he was the friend of learning and of virtue, and would probably ask no other epitaph than the tribute of a friend, who said that, “among the public men of his era, none had higher qualities of statesmanship and greater culture than James A. Garfield.”

Garfield's speeches are almost a compendium of the political history of the stirring era between 1864 and 1880. Among those worthy of special mention, on account of the importance of the subjects or the attractive and forcible presentation of them, are the following: On the Enrolling and calling out of the National Forces (25 January, 1864); on the Reconstruction of the Southem States (February, 1866); on Civil-Service Reform, in the congress of 1870 and other congresses; on the Currency and the Public Faith (April, 1874); on the Democratic Party and the South (4 August, 1876), of which a million copies were distributed as a campaign document; the speech in opposition to the Wood bill, which was framed to break down the protective tariff (4 June, 1878); the speeches on Revolution in Congress (4 March and 4 April, 1879); on Congressional Nullification (10 June, 1879); on Treason at the Polls (11 June, 1879); and on the Democratic Party and Public Opinion (11 October, 1879). Among his speeches in congress, less political in character, were that on the National Bureau of Education (8 June, 1866); a series on Indian Affairs, covering a period of several years; one on the Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion (2 March, 1869); two on the Census (6 April and 16 December, 1879); one on Civil-Service Reform; many addresses on the silver question; and one on National aid to education (6 February, 1872). He found time to make frequent orations and addresses before societies and gatherings outside of congress. His address on College Education, delivered before the literary societies of Hiram college (14 June, 1867), is an admirable plea for a liberal education, and on a subject in which the author was always deeply interested. On 30 May, 1868, he delivered an address on the Union Soldiers, at the first memorial service held at Arlington, Virginia. A eulogy of General Thomas, delivered before the Army of the Cumberland, 25 November, 1870, is one of the happiest of his oratorical efforts. On the reception by the house of the statues of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams, he spoke with a great wealth of historical allusion, and all his memorial addresses, especially those on his predecessor in congress, Joshua R. Giddings, Lincoln, and Profs. Morse and Henry, are worthy of study. But in all this series nothing will live longer than the simple words with which, from the balcony of the New York custom-house, he calmed the mob frenzied at the news of Lincoln's death: “Fellow-citizens: Clouds and darkness are around him; His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds; justice and judgment are the establishment of his throne; mercy and truth shall go before his face! Fellow-citizens! God reigns, and the Government at Washington lives.”

After the death of President Garfield, a popular subscription for his widow and children realized over $360,000. The income of this fund is to be paid to Mrs. Garfield during her life, after which the principal is to be divided among the children—four sons and a daughter. More than forty of Garfield's speeches in congress have been published in pamphlet-form, as has also his oration on the life of General George H. Thomas. A volume of brief selections, entitled “Garfield's Words,” was compiled by William R. Balch (Boston, 1881). His works have been edited by Burke A. Hinsdale (2 vols., Boston, 1882). The most complete life of President Garfield is that by James R. Gilmore (New York, 1880).
A monument to President Garfield, designed by John Q. A. Ward, was erected in Washington, D. C., by the Society of the army of the Cumberland, and dedicated on 12 May, 1887. It consists of a bronze statue of Garfield, l0½ feet high, standing on a circular pedestal, 18 feet in height, with buttresses, on which are three reclining figures, representing a student, a warrior, and a statesman. The U. S. government gave the site and the granite pedestal, besides contributing to the cost of the statues, and furnishing cannon to be used in their casting. (See page 602.) The unusual attitude of the arms is explained by the fact that General Garfield was left-handed.—His wife, Lucretia Rudolph, born in Hiram, Portage county, Ohio, 19 April 1832, was the daughter of a farmer named Rudolph. She first met her husband when both were students at Hiram, Ohio, and was married 11 November, 1858, in Hudson, Ohio, soon after his accession to the presidency of the college. Seven children were born to them, of whom four sons and one daughter are living (1887). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 599-605.


GARLAND, Hudson M., Virginia, American Colonization Society, Executive Committee, 1840-1841. 

(Staudenraus, 1961)


GARLAND, James, Lynchburg, Virginia, American Colonization Society, Vice-President, 1838-41, Director, 1839-1841. 

(Staudenraus, 1961)


GARNER, Peter M., 1809-1868, Pennsylvania, pioneer abolitionist, teacher, helped slaves escape.

(Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, p. 606)

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume II, p. 606:

GARNER, Peter M., abolitionist, born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, 4 December, 1809; died in Columbus, Ohio, 12 June, 1868. He removed to Fairview, Guernsey county, Ohio, with his parents, became a teacher, and was a pioneer in the anti-slavery movement in Ohio. In 1845, with two other citizens, he was seized by Virginians and taken to Parkersburg and thence to Richmond, and held in confinement six months, on a charge of assisting slaves to escape, but was finally released on his own recognizance. From 1847 till 1860 he taught in the Ohio penitentiary at Columbus, and during the war had charge of the military prisoners. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 606.


GARNER, Peter M., 1809-1868, Pennsylvania, pioneer abolitionist, teacher, helped slaves escape.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 606)


GARNET, Henry Highland, 1815-1882, African American, abolitionist leader, clergyman, diplomat, publisher.  Member Liberty Party.  Former fugitive slave.  Published, The Past and Present Condition and Destiny of the Colored Race, 1848.  Publisher with William G. Allen of The National Watchman, Troy, New York, founded 1842. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 329-333; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 57, 60, 61, 62, 64, 152, 255, 273, 294, 296, 325, 337, 338; Pasternak, 1995; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 33, 164, 192, 305-306, 329; Sernett, Milton C. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002, pp. 22, 67, 70-71, 116-117, 206, 209, 240; Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971, pp. 89-92, 97, 113; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 606; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 154; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 332-333; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 735; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 608)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 154:

GARNET, HENRY HIGHLAND (1815- February 13, 1882), educator, clergyman, was the son of George and Henny or Henrietta Garnet, who later changed her name to Elizabeth. He was born a slave, at New Market, Kent County, Maryland, escaped from bondage in 1824, and subsequently made his way to New York, where he entered school in 1826. He was one of the persons of African blood on account of whose matriculation a mob broke up the academy at Canaan, New Hampshire, in 1835. His education was continued, however, under Beriah Green [q.v.] at Oneida Institute, Whitestown, New York. The intelligent and versatile Presbyterian minister, Reverend Theodore S. Wright of New York, with whom Garnet established an acquaintance, probably became the dominant influence in directing him to the gospel ministry. After finishing his education, he divided his time between preaching and abolition agitation in the employ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. While he did not neglect the ministry, he viewed the anti-slavery platform as his important post of duty. He easily took rank among the foremost negro Abolitionists, and his fame spread throughout the country. He held this position until 1843, when he delivered before a national convention of the free people of color at Buffalo, New York, a radical address calling upon the slaves to rise and slay their masters. This utterance caused consternation in that body, and the frightened majority of the representatives voted not to endorse the sentiments expressed therein. The chief opposition to Garnet's appeal in the convention came from Frederick Douglass [q.v.], who was then rapidly coming to be the most influential leader of his race. He also opposed the establishment of a press to promote emancipation when it was urged by Garnet, although Douglass himself resorted to it later and became one of the most popular of anti-slavery editors. This convention marked the highest point reached in the leadership of Garnet and the beginning of his comparative decline as a result of the increasing fame of Douglass.

Garnet thereafter found more time to devote to Christian work. From 1843 to 1848 he served as pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, and in 1852 he was sent as a missionary to Jamaica by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. A few years later, however, he returned to New York to assume the pastorate of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church made vacant by the death of the Reverend Theodore S. Wright. In 1844 he went to Washington as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, where he did much for the relief of the distressed during the Civil War and later assisted Federal functionaries in working out their policy with respect to the freedmen. On February 12, 1865, he preached a sermon in the House of Representatives commemorating the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (A Memorial Discourse, 1865). Although he had strongly opposed colonization at the beginning of his career, near the close of his life he began to manifest much interest in Africa. In 1881 he was appointed minister to Liberia. He reached there on December 28, but died on February 13, of the following year. His wife was Julia Williams, whom he married in
1841.

[W. M. Brewer, "Henry Highland Garnet," in the Journal of Negro History, January 1928; S. W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, Volume II (1883); C. G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (1922); H. H. Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (1865), with introduction by J. M. Smith, "Sketch of the Life and Labors of Reverend Henry Highland Garnet"; W. J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1887); Nat. Convention of Colored People; Proceedings (1847); New York Tribune, March 11, 1882.].

C.G.W.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 606:

GARNET, Henry Highland, clergyman, born in New Market, Maryland, 23 December, 1815; died in Monrovia, Liberia, 13 February, 1882. He was a pure-blooded negro of the Mendigo tribe, of the Slave Coast, and born in slavery. His parents escaped with him to Bucks county, Pennsylvania, where they remained a year, and in 1826 settled in New York city. He was educated in Canaan academy, New Hampshire, and the Oneida institute, near Utica, New York, where he was graduated with honor in 1840. He taught in Troy, New York, studied theology under Dr. Nathaniel S. S. Beman, was licensed to preach in 1842, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church in Troy for nearly ten years. For a short time he also published “The Clarion,” a newspaper. In 1846 he was employed by Gerrit Smith to distribute a gift of land among colored people. He went to Europe in 1850 in the interest of the free-labor movement, and lectured in Great Britain on slavery for three years. In 1851 he was a delegate to the peace congress at Frankfort. He went to Jamaica as a missionary for the United Presbyterian church of Scotland in 1853, but returned to the United States on account of failing health, and in 1855 entered on the pastorate of Shiloh Presbyterian church in New York city. In 1865 he accepted a call to a church in Washington, D. C. After a successful pastorate of four years he resigned to become president of Avery college, but gave up that post soon afterward, and returned to Shiloh church. President Garfield offered him the appointment of minister and consul-general to Liberia, and after the accession of President Arthur the nomination was made and confirmed by the senate. He arrived at Monrovia on 23 December, 1881, and entered auspiciously upon his diplomatic duties, but soon succumbed to the climate. A memorial school, organized by his daughter, Mrs. M. H. Garnet Barboza, was endowed in honor of him at Brewersville, Liberia. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 606.


GARNETT, James Mercer, 1770-1843, Essex County, Virginia, agriculturist, political leader.  Organized Liberian Society to raise funds for the American Colonization Society.  

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 607; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 156; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 607:

GARNETT, James Mercer, agriculturist and politician, born in Essex county, Virginia, 8 June, 1770; died there in May, 1843. He was a founder and the first president of the U. S. agricultural society, and wrote extensively on rural economy. He was also interested in educational progress, maintained a female seminary in his own house for twelve years, and was active in introducing into Virginia improved methods of instruction. He acted with the Democratic party, and engaged in a controversy with Matthew Carey, the protectionist. He was an intimate friend of his colleague in congress, John Randolph, of Roanoke. .After serving for several years in the Virginia legislature he was twice elected to the National house of representatives, and served from 2 December, 1805, to 3 March, 1809. In 1829 he was a member of the Virginia constitutional convention. Appletons’ Cylcopædia of American Biography, 1888.


GARRARD, James, 1749-1822, Governor of Kentucky 1796-1804, soldier, clergyman.  Tried unsuccessfully to exclude guarantees of the continuance of slavery from Kentucky State Constitution.  Opposed slavery as horrid evil.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 608; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 159; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 739)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 159:

GARRARD, JAMES (January 14, 1749-Ja n. 19, 1822), governor of Kentucky, Baptist clergyman, was a native of Stafford County, Virginia, a member of a family of considerable local importance. His father, William, was county-lieutenant of Stafford County, and James in 1781 held the rank of colonel with the Stafford county regiment of the Virginia militia (W. P. Palmer, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, II, 188{, 43). How much actual fighting the young Garrard said during the Revolution it is impossible to ascertain, but it is certain that his military life was interrupted by a year in the House of Delegates, 1779, when he represented Stafford County. In 1783, accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Mountjoy Garrard, whom he had married on December 20, 1769, and their seven children, he removed to Kentucky, where he settled on Stoner Creek in the present county of Bourbon, then Fayette. Here three years later he built his residence, "Mt. Lebanon," where he lived until his death. For many years after his removal to Kentucky Garrard's interests seemed to vacillate between religion and politics. He had been a member of the Baptist Church in Virginia, and soon after coming to Kentucky he helped organize, in 1787, the Cooper's Run church near Mt. Lebanon. For ten years he was one of the ministers of this church, and seems to have been active not only in his work here but also in the organization of Baptist -congregations in other parts of Kentucky. In 1785 he was elected as representative of Fayette County in the Virginia House of Delegates. One apparent result of his second service in the Virginia legislature was the creation of Bourbon County out of Fayette and the establishment of Mt. Lebanon as the temporary county seat (W. E. Henning, The Statutes at Large, XII, 1823, 89--90). He also represented Fayette and then Bourbon County in the conventions which marked Kentucky's prolonged struggle for statehood, and was a member of the convention which made the first constitution, but he seems not to have played a leading part in any of these meetings.

In 1796 Garrard was one of four candidates for the governorship of Kentucky. He was chosen over Benjamin Logan by the electoral college on the second ballot, although Logan had received a plurality of the votes on the first. The doubtful constitutionality of this election caused considerable discontent and had its influence in bringing about a revision of the constitution a few years later (Charles Kerr, History of Kentucky, 1922, I, 316). Garrard's popularity with the Kentucky legislature was attested by the fact that his name was given to a newly created county; his popularity with the people was shown by his election as governor by popular vote at the conclusion of his first term in 1800. During his eight years as governor, however, he did not display unusual ability. As to Republican leader he followed Jefferson in denouncing the Alien and Sedition law),, and used his influence in securing the adoption of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. ln one of his messages to the legislature he brought considerable ridicule on himself by advocating an increase of importations up the Mississippi as a measure for remedying the defective paper currency in Kentucky.

While governor, Garrard fell very much under the influence of his secretary of state, Harry Toulmin, a Unitarian. He came to have very pronounced Unitarian views and succeeded in spreading his ideas in his own congregation at Cooper's Run. As a result he was dropped from the church and from the Baptist Association in 1803. This act closed Garrard's ministry, and closed also his connection with the Baptist Church. His fellow Baptists seem always to have deplored his political ambitions but never lost faith in his integrity. In fact his popularity throughout Kentucky seems to have been due more to his probity than to his ability. After 1804 Garrard lived quietly at his home without holding or seeking further office. Upon his death the Kentucky legislature erected a monument in his honor at Mt. Lebanon. He was survived by twelve children, one of whom, James, played a prominent part in Kentucky history and is often confused with his father.

[The records of Stafford County were destroyed by fire and consequently very little is 'known of the Virginia branch of the Garrard family. Garrard's official journals and papers are preserved in the office of the secretary of state of Kentucky at Frankfort. For further reference see E. G. Swem and J. W . Williams, A Register of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1776-1918 (1918); A. R. des Cognets, Governor Garrard, of Kentucky: His Descendants and Relatives (1898); Lewis and R.H. Collins, History of Kentucky (rev. ed., 1874), I, 366; Mann Butler, A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (1834), p. 295; J. H . Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists (1885), I, 133- 34; Kentucky Gazette (Lexington), January 31, 1822.

J E. L.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 608:

GARRARD, James, governor of Kentucky, born in Stafford county, Virginia, 14 January, 1749; died in Bourbon county, Kentucky, 9 January, 1822. While engaged as a militia officer in the Revolutionary war he was called from the army to a seat in the Virginia legislature. Here he was a zealous advocate of the bill for the establishment of religious liberty. Having removed with the early settlers to Kentucky, in 1783, and settled on Stoner river, near Paris, he became there a political leader, and was a member of the convention which framed the first constitution of the state. Here he was ordained to the Baptist ministry. In 1791, pending the convention just named, he was chairman of a committee that reported to the Elkhorn Baptist association a memorial and remonstrance in favor of excluding slavery from the commonwealth by constitutional enactment. He was elected governor in 1796, and re-elected in 1800, serving eight years. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 608.


GARRETSON, Jesse, abolitionist, New Lisbon, Ohio, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1843-44, Vice-President, 1844-45. 


GARRETT, Thomas, 1789-1871, Wilmington, Delaware, abolitionist leader, Society of Friends, Quaker, member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, operator of the Underground Railroad, helped 2,700 Blacks escape to freedom, 1840-1860.  Vice President, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1843-1864.  Officer in the Delaware Abolition Society in 1827. 

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 185, 187; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961; McGowan, 1977; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 74, 306, 464, 488; Still, 1883; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 609; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 165).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 165:

GARRETT, THOMAS (August 21, 1789-January 25, 1871), Abolitionist, son of Thomas and Sarah Price Garrett, both Quakers, was born on a farm in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. In the early twenties, with his wife, Mary Sharpless, and their children, he moved to Wilmington, Delaware. There he set himself up as a hardware merchant and tool-maker. In 1827 his wife died and shortly afterward he was married to Rachel Mendenhall. During a pursuit to recover a free colored woman kidnapped from his father's home, he became convinced that his special mission was to help slaves escape. As early as 1818 he joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In time his Wilmington home became widely known as a refuge for slaves. With the sentiment of a slave state bitterly hostile to him, with his house constantly under surveillance, with a ten-thousand dollar reward placed by Maryland for his arrest, it is a tribute to his shrewdness that he so long escaped the penalty of the law. Although scurrilously attacked in the press, threatened, and warned by friends to leave, he was not prosecuted until 1848 when certain slave-owners brought suit against him before Chief Justice Taney for assisting seven slaves to escape, and ultimately secured his conviction. The fine, because of his recent business reverses, swept away all his property but did not deter him from continuing his activities in behalf of the negroes. With the assistance of his friends, he was able to rebuild his business handsomely although he was then over sixty years of age. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued he had helped about 2,700 slaves to escape.

In April 1870 the negroes participated in the Wilmington celebration over the Fifteenth Amendment by drawing Thomas Garrett through the streets in an open barouche, heralded by a transparency labeled "Our Moses." Upon his death some months later several of his colored friends bore him on their shoulders to his resting-place in the Friends' burying-ground. He was interested in many reform movements; his last important public appearance was as presiding officer of a suffrage meeting. The dominating traits of his character were an utter fearlessness which overawed even his slave-holding enemies, an honesty so upright that he refused to allow his lawyer to misrepresent him in pleading for leniency, great resourcefulness in an emergency, and a genuine love for his fellow men.

[Delawarean (Dover), January 21, 1850; scrap-book of letters, clippings, etc., compiled by Helen S. Garrett; W. L. Garrison, "The New Reign of Terror in the Slaveholding States for 1859-60," Anti-Slavery Tracts, n.d., no. 4 (1860); W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898); R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (1883); Wm. Still, The Underground Railroad (1872); U. S. Circuit Court (Delaware District), Docket, Equity and Law in the Court's Archives, Wilmington, 1846-48; Wilmington Daily Commercial, January 2s, 1871; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of Slave Power in America.

E.L.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 609:

GARRETT, Thomas, abolitionist, born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, 21 August, 1783; died in Wilmington, Delaware, 23 January, 1871. He was of Quaker parentage, learned his father's trade, that of an edge-tool maker, removed to Wilmington in 1820, and became a wealthy iron merchant. He was devoted to the cause of emancipation from the time when a colored female servant was kidnapped from his father's house, in 1807, and for forty years gave aid and succor to fugitive slaves, and concealed their flight so skilfully that slave-owners usually gave up the chase when they learned that their runaways had fallen into his hands. As many as 3,000 fugitives from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia owed their liberty to him. He never enticed negroes to escape, and shrewdly avoided any breach of the law that could be proved against him. In May, 1848, however, he was compelled to pay heavy damages to owners of escaped slaves, and, after the passage of the fugitive-slave law, incurred the penalty of a fine that swept away the remainder of his fortune. In answer to the reprimand of the U. S. district judge before whom he was tried, he said that he had always helped a fellow-being to liberty when he could, and should continue to do so. His fellow-townsmen readily advanced him the capital to begin business again, and before he died he had again acquired a competence. In accordance with his dying instructions, his body was borne to the grave by colored men of Wilmington. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 609.

Chapter: “Underground Railroad. - Operations at the East and in the Middle States,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872.

But unquestionably the most efficient agent of the Underground Railroad, as he was the most successful in these associated efforts of antislavery men to aid escaping fugitives, was Thomas Garrett of Delaware. Born in Pennsylvania of Quaker parentage, and richly endowed by nature with qualities calculated to command the respect and confidence of others, he early took up his residence in Delaware. At the age of twenty-four, by the kidnapping of a colored woman of his family, whom he pursued and rescued, he took his first lesson in what proved to be his life's work. Though he lived in a slave State, with the usual characteristics of a slaveholding community, he never concealed his opposition to the system, or his purpose to assist those who sought to escape its thraldom. Indeed, for more than fifty years, he was the Good Samaritan of his State; his the house of refuge, always open to the fugitive victims of an oppressed race. So persistent was his philanthropy and so widely known were his sentiments, that he left a record of more than twenty-seven hundred slaves\ he had assisted to escape. Nor did that record embrace the whole, as he did not begin the count at the outset of his operations. That .with such success and such clearly avowed opinions he should have been allowed to remain in a slave State, engaged in a lucrative business, and to fill up his more than fourscore years, are facts clearly opposed to the traditional policy of such communities. This seems all the more strange, as it does not appear that the slaveholders of that State had any scruples about inflicting upon him all that the law would impose. For in 1848, under the lead of James Bayard, afterward Senator of the United States, he was prosecuted four times before Judge Taney, and was convicted on the charge of abducting two slave children,--an alleged offence of which he was guilty, at worst, only by construction, --and mulcted in fines which swept from him all his property, leaving him penniless at the age of sixty, and compelling him to begin life anew.

With such evidence of his fidelity to his convictions, and of the determination of the slaveholders to prevent him from carrying into execution those convictions, it is certainly a mystery, not to be fathomed here, that he was permitted to accomplish so much. If he did not bear with him a charmed life, there certainly seems to be reason for the belief that the " voice within " he thought he heard was no fancy; and, more, that He who spoke that voice extended his protecting and guiding hand, enabling him to obey it. That, or far more than the ordinary amount of moral courage, must have inspired him when, in reply to the auctioneer who had just struck off the last article of his property, which had been seized and sold to pay the fine imposed, and who had expressed the hope that he would never be guilty of the like offence again, he said: " Friend, I haven't a dollar in the world; but if thee knows a fugitive who needs a breakfast send him to me." No more true heroism was exhibited by Luther at Worms, hardly more by the Apostles before the Sanhedrim. It was the utterance of a sublime trust, under circumstances well calculated to test the strength of both courage and principle.

No wonder, then, having outlived the fury of his persecutors, and the system which made them such, that he became an honored member of the community which had hunted him with such ferocity; that the closing years of his ripe old age were peaceful and serene; that, when he died, the whole community seemed moved as the heart of one man; and that his funeral seemed rather an ovation to a conqueror than the sorrowful rites around the lifeless form of a departed friend. It was a fitting close, too, to so triumphant a career, that representatives of the race he had done so much for became his own selected bearers of his body to the grave. His, too, was the rare good fortune, seldom accorded to reformers, of receiving here something like an adequate reward for their sufferings and sacrifices, not only in the accomplishment of what he labored for, but in the popular recognition of the virtues that made him thus heroic and effective.
Such was the Underground Railroad and the system of efforts it represented: They who engaged in those efforts were generally Christian men and women, who feared God and regarded man; and they did it because, in their esteem, such service was but obedience to the royal law, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'' They acted, indeed, in full view of the fact that in obeying that law they must often disregard human statutes; but this they were prepared to do, and to accept the consequences,--the censures, reproaches, and arguments they were sure to encounter; the fines, imprisonments, and even death itself, to which they were constantly exposed.  To the argument, generally twofold, that such interference was both unlawful and inexpedient, they returned for reply, that, though unlawful in the courts of earth, they were sure it could not be in the court of Heaven; and that that could not be inexpedient which was so clearly right.  They found warrant, too, in the infinite worth of the human soul, the wide difference between a chattel personal, subject to all the accidents of property, the helpless victim of human caprice, passion, and self-interest, and the freeman, at liberty to develop the vast capabilities of his humanity for both time and eternity.  The difference between Frederick Douglass, an ignorant and imbruted serf of an ill-tempered and brutal Maryland slaveholder, cowed and hopeless, and Frederick Douglass, with his imperial intellect, cultivated and resplendent, swaying thousands by his eloquence, and reaching forth his strong arm to lift up his race; between the Edmondson sisters, sold on the block for the vilest purposes, and the same, refined and Christian women, gracing the domestic and social circle,--was so great that they could not doubt the expediency of any efforts which might result in such a transformation.  And though the thousands thus rescued did not exhibit so wide discrimination, they felt it a glorious privilege, at whatever risk and cost, to give them the opportunity of such, or even far less, improvement.  There was, however, no election.  To them it was the Master’s
"Living presence in the bond and bleeding slave";
and the piteous entreaty of the latter was but the voice of Him they could not disobey. To them it was both a promise and a warning

“That he who treads profanely on the scrolls of law and creed,
In the depths of God's great goodness may find mercy in his need
But woe to him who crushes the soul with chain and rod,
And herds with lower na.tu.res the awful form of God! "

Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 83-86.


GARRIGUES, Abraham, abolitionist, officer of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 131)


GARRIGUES, William A., abolitionist, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1840-41.


GARRISON, William Lloyd, 1805-1879, journalist, printer, preeminent abolitionist leader.  Founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  President and Member of the Executive Committee, AASS, 1843-1864.  Founder, editor, Liberator, weekly newspaper founded in 1831, published through December 1865.  Corresponding Secretary, 1840-1844, Counsellor, 844-1860, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.  Co-founder, New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS).

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 185, 187; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 137, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 179, 182, 190, 273, 283, 286-287; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960; Garrison, 1885-1889, 4 volumes; Goodell, 1852, 1852, pp. 396-397, 401, 405, 410, 419, 436, 455-456, 458-459, 460, 469, 512, 541; Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833; Kraditor, 1969; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 2, 8, 26, 28, 131, 149, 152, 376, 378, 398n15; Mayer, 1998; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 41-42, 106, 131, 152, 179, 208-209, 289, 307-309, 321, 378, 463; Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971; Stewart, 1992; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 610-612; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, p. 168; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 332-334; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 8, p. 761; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 305-306; Merrill, Walter M. Against the Wind and Tide. 1963; Thomas, John L. The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison. 1963)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 1, pp. 168-172:

GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD (December 10, 1805-May 24, 1879), reformer, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the fourth child of _Abijah and Frances Maria (Lloyd) Garrison, who had emigrated to the United States from Nova Scotia early in the nineteenth century. His father, a sea-captain, was intemperate in his habits and deserted his family before William was three years old. Placed under the care of Deacon Ezekiel Bartlett, the boy had a meager schooling, and in 1818 was apprenticed for seven years to Ephraim W. Allen, editor of the Newburyport Herald, in the office of which he developed into an expert compositor and wrote anonymously for the paper. When his apprenticeship was completed, he became on March 22, 1826, editor of the local Free Press, in which he printed the earliest poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, who was to be his lifelong friend. After the Free Press failed, Garrison sought employment in Boston as. a journeyman printer, and in the spring of 1828, joined Nathaniel H. White in editing the National Philanthropist, devoted to the suppression "of intemperance and its kindred vices." It bore witness to his reforming propensities by attacking lotteries, Sabbath-breaking, and war. At this period he met Benjamin Lundy [q.v.], a Quaker, whose influence turned his attention to the evils of negro slavery. Soon Garrison went to Bennington, Vermont, to conduct the Journal of the Times, an Anti-Jackson organ. He return ed in March 1829 to Boston, where, on Independence Day, in the Park Street Church, he delivered the first of his innumerable public addresses against slavery. Later in the summer he was in Baltimore, cooperating with Lundy in editing the weekly Genius of Universal Emancipation. Although Garrison was far from being the first American Abolitionist, he was one of the earliest to demand the "immediate and complete emancipation" of slaves; and it was to this movement that his energies, for the next thirty years, were to be principally devoted. In the Genius of Universal Emancipation he wrote more and more vehemently, until, having accused Francis Todd of engaging in the domestic slave-trade, he was sued for libel and found guilty. Unable to pay his fine, he was imprisoned for seven weeks in the Baltimore jail, being released on June 5, 1830, through the intervention of the philanthropist, Arthur Tappan. During the ensuing autumn he lectured in eastern cities, and finally, after issuing a prospectus, founded his famous periodical, the Liberator, "in a small chamber, friendless and unseen." He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, virtually without resources, printed the paper on a hand-press from borrowed type, and it appeared every Friday. The motto heading the first number, dated January 1, 1831, was "Our country is" the world-Our countrymen are mankind," and its leading article was a manifesto ending, "I am in earnest! will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard." The subscription price was only two dollars a year, but the circulation was never over 3,000, and there was usually an annual deficit.

Garrison was a philosophical non-resistant, trusting in peaceful means to attain his ends, but his pacifism was of a militant type. Unwilling to resort to the ballot, he voted but once in his lifetime, and he relied on the power of moral principles for the conversion of his opponents. He had no practical method for abolishing slavery, but confined himself to denouncing it as an institution. In his condemnation of slave-owners, he was irrepressible, uncompromising, and inflammatory, and even his supporter, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, did not try to defend him against the charge of "excessive harshness of language." In its early numbers the paper had a plain title; beginning with the seventeenth issue, however, it bore a rude cut of a slave auction near the national capitol, which goaded Southerners into a fury, and they threatened Garrison with bodily harm. But nothing could daunt him. Even when the state of Georgia set a reward of $5,000 for his arrest and conviction, he was imperturbable, and, without making any distinctions or admitting any explanations, continued to pour out a torrent of invective against, all those who had anything to do with slavery.

The need for effective organization was met in 1831 by the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the constitution for which was drafted in part by Garrison. He was elected corresponding secretary and in 1832 became a salaried agent for spreading its doctrines. His Thoughts on African Colonization (1832) was a small but forceful pamphlet, undermining the work of the American Colonization Society, the plans for which he had formerly approved. In early May 1833 Garrison sailed for England to solicit funds for a manual-labor school for colored youth. He made many friends, including Daniel O'Connell and George Thompson. After an absence of nearly five months he landed in New York in season to attend unofficially a gathering called for organizing an anti-slavery society in that city. On December 4, 1833, in Philadelphia, he met with fifty or more delegates to form the American Anti-Slavery Society. Its declaration of principles, phrased largely by Garrison, announced that its members, rejecting "the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage," relied for the destruction of error only upon "the potency of truth." Although Garrison was elected foreign secretary, he soon resigned and would accept no other1important office in the society.

In 1835 the English Abolitionist, George Thompson, came to the United States on a lecture tour and was met in many places with enmity. On October 21, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society held a meeting, at which a mob of several thousand persons assembled, expecting to tar-and-feather Thompson. The latter, however, had been warned, and the crowd, searching for a victim, seized Garrison, dragged him with a rope around his neck through the streets, and might have used him more roughly but for the courageous intervention of Mayor Theodore Lyman. Garrison spent the night in the Leverett Street jail and in the morning withdrew from the city for several weeks. Meanwhile the opposition to slavery was growing.

Efficient though he was as a propagandist, Garrison had a talent for antagonizing even his supporters. He was a natural autocrat who demanded from his followers implicit belief in all his views. "You exalt yourself too much," wrote Elizur Wright, one of his most loyal friends. He could not endure moderation, and in his self-righteous manner he was often very irritating. His wayward mind was so receptive of radical ideas, and he advocated reforms with such promiscuity that he was accused by his enemies of picking up "every infidel fanaticism afloat." Because of his desire to link abolitionism with other reform movements, he lost some of his influence with sincere anti-slavery people. The appearance of Sarah and Angelina Grimke as speakers at their meetings was distasteful to the more conservative Abolitionists, who did not favor woman's rights. The indifference of many clergymen to the slavery issue soon brought Garrison into open conflict with orthodox churches, which he characterized vividly as "cages of unclean birds, Augean stables of pollution." He eventually denied the plenary inspiration of the Bible and was conspicuously unorthodox. In November 1840 he attended a meeting of the "Friends of Universal Reform," described by Emerson as distinguished by "a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak." He denounced theatres as "deep and powerful sources of evil," and he came out vigorously against the use of tobacco, capital punishment, and imprisonment for debt.

A decisive schism in the anti-slavery ranks developed over Garrison's opposition to concerted political action. The movement for the formation of a third party took shape ultimately in what was known as the "New Organization," and conflicting groups came to be known as the "Old Ogs," of which Garrison was still the leader, and the "New Ogs" (E. E. Hale, Memories of a Hundred Years, II, 1903, 129). Although Garrison for some years postponed defection, he could not prevent the nomination in 1839 of James G. Birney for president by the Liberty party. At a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1840 in New York, Garrison and his adherents, coming from Boston in a specially chartered boat, packed the gathering and won a temporary victory. At the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, held the following June, in London, he refused to participate in the proceedings when he found that women were excluded.

At least as early as 1841, Garrison became a disunionist, and publicly called upon the North to secede from a compact which protected slavery. This appeal drew an emphatic protest from the American Anti-Slavery Society; but the Massachusetts organization, in January 1843, under pressure from Garrison, resolved that the United States Constitution was "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and "should be annulled." Later in the same year Garrison was elected president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which passed by a large majority an expression of di s union sentiments prepared by him. Actually, however, he was losing ground. Times were changing, and the fight against slavery was being carried on by more practical men. Garrison naturally disapproved of the annexation of Texas and of the Mexican War. In the summer and autumn of 1846, he was in England for a third visit, addressing reform gatherings. In August 1847 with the negro, Frederick Douglass, he took a lecture tour beyond the Alleghanies, meeting with some rowdyism, but debating night after night against defenders of the Union. In twenty-six days he spoke more than forty times. He was often exposed to wretched weather, and his health, never very good, was seriously impaired.

The compromise measures of 1850 were to Garrison a "hollow bargain for the North" (Swift, post, p. 276), and he condemned Webster's Seventh of March Speech as "indescribably base and wicked," "infamous," and "dishonorable." One consequence of Webster's utterance was a strong reaction against Garrison and the anti-slavery disunionists. At the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society on May 7, 1850, a disorderly mob headed by Isaiah Rynders interrupted the proceedings, but the coolness of Garrison averted bloodshed. In the following year the Society could not obtain the use of any suitable hall in New York and was obliged to seek a haven in Syracuse. Unable to secure declarations against slavery from Father Mathew, the Irish temperance advocate, and from Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, Garrison denounced them abusively.

On Independence Day in 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, Garrison, at an abolitionist gathering, publicly burned the Constitution of the United States, crying, "So perish all compromises with tyranny!" He did not favor the formation of the Republican party, but continued to urge the peaceful separation of the states. As a non-resistant, he could not justify John Brown's uprising. During the five years preceding the Civil War, he suffered much from a bronchial affection and from financial. troubles, which curtailed his activities considerably. When secession took place in 1860-61 Garrison welcomed the event as an opportunity for allowing the Southern states to reap the fruits of their folly, maintaining that any attempt to whip the South into subjection was "utterly chimerical." Toward Lincoln, Garrison was at first rather cold, and he criticized what he thought to be the President's uncertain policy; but he also prevented Abolition societies from openly condemning the administration. He soon recognized the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862, and the meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1863, at Philadelphia, produced a reconciliation between the two factions of Abolitionists.

After the conclusion of peace, in April 1865, Garrison went to Charleston, South Carolina, with the once execrated George Thompson for his stateroom companion. As the guest of the government he went to attend the ceremonies at the raising of the Stars and Stripes over Fort Sumter. In a brief address, he declared, "I hate slavery as I hate nothing else in this world. It is not only a crime, but the sum of all criminality." As he stood by the grave of Calhoun in the cemetery of St. Philip's Church, he laid a hand upon the tombstone and said solemnly, "Down into a deeper grave than this slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection."

In January 1865 Garrison had moved that the American Anti-Slavery Society dissolve, but his proposal was rejected. He did, however, decline a twenty-third term as its president, and was succeeded by Wendell Phillips. He felt that his great task had been accomplished; and, after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, he prepared a valedictory editorial for the Liberator, locked the form in type, and sent the final number to the press on December 29, 1865. The paper had been published continuously for exactly thirty-five years.

Garrison had married, on September 4, 1834, Helen Benson, daughter of a retired merchant of Brooklyn, Connecticut, and had settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in a house called "Freedom's Cottage." Seven children were born to them, of whom two died in infancy. In December 1863 Mrs. Garrison, whose systematic management and tactful ways had brought order into her husband's chaotic affairs, was stricken with paralysis and lived for several years more as a helpless invalid. A few months later, Garrison moved to a more retired residence on Highland Street, in Roxbury, where he found "port after stormy seas." Two painful accidents greatly hampered his physical activity, but he made in 1867 another voyage to England, where he was greeted as a hero. On his return, he became an intermittent contributor to the New York Independent. In 1868 a testimonial fund of more than $30,000 was raised among his admirers and presented to him. Although his vitality was diminished, he never ceased to be a crusader, and he fought unceasingly for prohibition, woman's suffrage, justice to the red man, and the elimination of prostitution. It seemed to be his mission to act as "an antidote to American complacency." On January 28, 1876, his wife died of pneumonia. In the next year, on his last visit to England, he was so enfeebled that he could appear only occasionally in public. On October 13, 1878, in the office of the Newburyport Herald, he set type for three of his sonnets on the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of his apprenticeship as a printer. A disease of the kidneys soon prostrated him, and he died in New York, at the home of his daughter, Helen Garrison Villard. He was buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery, in Boston. In appearance he was slightly under six feet in height and erect in bearing. His spectacles, which he began to wear before he was twenty, relieved the sharpness of his face and gave him a mild and benevolent expression. Lowell wrote of him,

"There's Garrison, his features very benign for an incendiary."

As a speaker, he was described by Higginson as "usually monotonous, sometimes fatiguing, but always controlling." In his household he was cheerful, patient, and hospitable, but he was inclined to procrastinate and was always unsystematic. His sense of humor was not well developed. Although he suffered from chronic illness, he could endure long hours of drudgery, and he was rarely in low spirits. He cared little for nature, but he always enjoyed sacred music and wrote no small amount of verse, moralistic in tone, but highly imaginative. His Sonnets and other Poems was published in 1843.

Garrison was an extremist, incurably optimistic, often illogical, and extraordinarily persistent. Seldom has individuals m been more vehemently asserted than in his protests against social and moral orthodoxy. He was without perspective or a sense of proportion, and could be astonishingly credulous. He had implicit faith in pills and nostrums of all kinds, was keenly interested in phrenology, clairvoyance, and spiritualism, and was frequently deceived by charlatans. Opinion regarding him has differed widely. To some he has been the high-minded idealist who provided the chief impetus for the Abolition movement. By others he has been regarded as an impractical fanatic, who accomp1ished some good in a disagreeable way. His importance as a dominating figure in starting the campaign against slavery is conceded, but he inspired more than he led and the actual task of freeing the negro was carried through by better balanced leaders. He was a perplexing blend of contradictory qualities, of shrewdness and gullibility, of nobility and prejudice, who will be remembered chiefly for his courage in upholding a righteous cause when it was unpopular.

[The standard, although too extravagantly laudatory, life of Garrison, is Wm. Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of his Life Told by his Children (4 volumes, 1885-89). The best short biography is Lindsay Swift's Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1911), in the American Crisis Biographies. John Jay Chapman's Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1913) is so strongly eulogistic as to be useless for those desiring to form a fair estimate of Garrison's character. A complete file of the Liberator may be found in the Boston Athenaeum. Among other books to be consulted are Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 volumes, 1872-77); Oliver Johnson, Wm. Lloyd Garrison and his Times (1880); John J. Currier, Ould Newbury (1896), pp. 681-86; O. G. Villard, Some Newspapers and Newspaper-Men (1923), pp. 302-15; Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928), pp. 239-47; Thos. W. Higginson, Contemporaries (1899), pp. 244-56.]

C.M.F.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 610-612: 

GARRISON, William Lloyd, journalist, born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, 10 December, 1805; died in New York city, 24 May, 1879. His father, Abijah Garrison, was a sea-captain, a man of generous nature, sanguine temperament, and good intellectual capacity, who ruined himself by intemperance. His mother, Fanny Lloyd, was a woman of exceptional beauty of person and high character, and remarkable for inflexible fidelity to her moral convictions. They emigrated from Nova Scotia to Newburyport a short time before the birth of Lloyd, and not long afterward the father left his family and was never again seen by them. At fourteen years of age Lloyd was apprenticed to the printing business in the office of the Newburyport “Herald,” where he served until he was of age, becoming foreman at an early day, and displaying a strong natural taste and capacity for editorship. From the first he was remarkable for his firmness of moral principle, his quick appreciation of ethical distinctions, and an inflexible adherence to his convictions at whatever cost to himself. His aims and purposes were of the highest, and those who knew him best foresaw for him an honorable career. His apprenticeship ended, he became editor for a time of the Newburyport “Free Press,” which he made too reformatory for the popular taste at that day. To this paper John G. Whittier, then unknown to fame, sent some of his earliest poems anonymously, but the editor, discovering his genius, penetrated his incognito, and they formed a friendship that was broken only by death. Mr. Garrison's next experiment in editorship was with the “National Philanthropist” in Boston, a journal devoted to the cause of temperance. We next hear of him in Bennington, Vt., whither he went in 1828 to conduct the “Journal of the Times,” established to support John Quincy Adams for re-election as president. Before leaving Boston, he formed an acquaintance with Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, then of Baltimore, where he was publishing the “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” a journal that had for its object the abolition of American slavery. Going to New England with the distinct purpose of enlisting the clergy in his cause, Lundy was bitterly disappointed by his want of success; but he mightily stirred the heart of young Garrison, who became his ally, and two years later his partner, in the conduct of the “Genius of Universal Emancipation.” This journal, up to that time, had represented the form of abolition sentiment known as gradualism, which had distinguished the anti-slavery societies of the times of Franklin and Jay, and fully answered the moral demands of the period. These societies were at this time either dead or inactive, and, since the Missouri contest of 1819-'20, the people of the north had generally ceased to strive for emancipation, or even to discuss the subject. With the exception of Lundy's earnest though feeble protest, supported mainly by Quakers, the general silence and indifference were unbroken. The whole nation had apparently come to the settled conclusion that slavery was intrenched by the constitution, and all discussion of the subject a menace to the Union. The emancipation of slaves in any considerable numbers, at any time or place, being universally regarded as dangerous to the public peace, the masters were held excusable for continuing to hold them in bondage. Mr. Garrison saw this state of things with dismay, and it became clear to him that the apathy which tended to fasten slavery permanently upon the country as an incurable evil could be broken only by heroic measures. The rights of the slaves and the duties of the masters, as measured by sound moral principles, must be unflinchingly affirmed and insisted upon. Slavery being wrong, every slave had a right to instant freedom, and therefore immediate emancipation was the duty of the masters and of the state. What was in itself right could never be dangerous to society, but must be safe for all concerned: and therefore there could be no other than selfish reasons for continuing slavery for a single day. In joining Lundy, Garrison at once took this high ground, creating thereby a strong excitement throughout the country. His denunciations of the domestic slave-trade, then rife in Baltimore, subjected him to the penalties of Maryland law, and he was thrust into jail. When released upon the payment of his fine by Arthur Tappan, of New York, he immediately resumed the work of agitation by means of popular lectures, and on 1 January, 1831, founded “The Liberator,” a weekly journal, in Boston, which he continued for thirty-five years, until slavery was finally abolished. It was small at first, but after a few years was enlarged to the usual size of the newspapers of that day. The spirit of the paper was indicated by this announcement in the first number: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him moderately to rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” It was a purely moral and pacific warfare that he avowed. No appeal was made to the passions of the slaves, but to the consciences of the masters, and especially of the citizens of the free states, involved by the constitution in the guilt of slavery. But he was charged with a design to promote slave insurrections, and held up to public scorn as a fanatic and incendiary. The state of Georgia offered $5,000 reward for his apprehension, and the mails from the south brought him hundreds of letters threatening him with death if he did not abandon his moral warfare. The whole land was speedily filled with excitement, the apathy of years was broken, and the new dispensation of immediatism justified itself by its results. In 1832 the first society under this dispensation was organized in Boston; within the next two years the American anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia, upon a platform of principles formulated by Mr. Garrison; and from this time the movement, in spite of powerful efforts to crush it, grew with great rapidity. Governors of states hinted that the societies were illegal, and judges affirmed that the agitators were liable to arrest as criminals under the common law. Mr. Garrison aggravated his offence, in the eyes of many, by his opposition to the scheme of African colonization, which, under the pretence of unfriendliness to slavery, had gained public confidence at the north, while in truth it fostered the idea that the slaves were unfit for freedom. His “Thoughts on African Colonization,” in which he judged the society out of its own mouth, was a most effective piece of work, defying every attempt at an answer. From 1833 till 1840 anti-slavery societies on Mr. Garrison's model were multiplied in the free states, many lecturers were sent forth, and an extensive anti-slavery literature was created. The agitation assumed proportions that greatly encouraged its promoters and alarmed its opponents. Attempts were made to suppress it by the terror of mobs; Elijah P. Lovejoy, in 1837, at Alton, Illinois, was slain while defending his press, and in 1835 Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, his life being saved with great difficulty by lodging him in jail. Marius Robinson, an anti-slavery lecturer, in Mahoning county, Ohio, was tarred and feathered in a cruel way; Amos Dresser, a theological student, while selling cottage Bibles at Nashville, Tennessee, was flogged in the public square because it happened that, without his knowledge, some of his Bibles were wrapped in cast-off antislavery papers; and in Charleston, South Carolina, the post-office was broken open by a mob, which made a bonfire of anti-slavery papers and tracts sent through the mails to citizens of that city. In 1840 the abolition body was rent in twain, mainly by two questions, viz.: 1. Whether they should form an anti-slavery political party. 2. Whether women should be allowed to speak and vote in their societies. On the first of these questions Mr. Garrison took the negative, on the ground that such a party would probably tend to delay rather than hasten the desired action in respect to slavery. On the second he took the affirmative, on the ground that the constitutions of the societies admitted “persons” to membership without discrimination as to sex. This division was never healed, and thenceforth Mr. Garrison was recognized chiefly as the leader of the party agreeing with him upon these two questions. Personally he was a non-resistant, and therefore a non-voter; but the great body of his friends had no such scruples, and held it to be a duty to exercise the elective franchise in opposition to slavery. In 1844 Mr. Garrison became convinced that the constitution of the United States was itself the main support of slavery, and as such was to be repudiated. Borrowing the words of Isaiah, he characterized it as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” His influence carried the anti-slavery societies over to this ground, which they firmly held to the end of the conflict. Few of the members had any scruples as to forceful government. They simply declared that they could not conscientiously take part in a government that bound them by oath, in certain contingencies, to support slavery. The political party anti-slavery men went their way, leaving the work of moral agitation to Garrison and his associates, who were still a powerful body, with large resources in character, argument, and influence. The two classes, though working by divergent methods, had yet a common purpose, and, though controversy between them at times waxed warm, their agreements were broad and deep enough to insure mutual respect and a no inconsiderable degree of co-operation. The political anti-slavery leaders recognized the value of the moral agitation as a means for the regeneration of public sentiment, and for keeping their own party up to its work; and the agitators bore glad witness to the sincerity of men who, though they could not see their way clear to a repudiation of the constitution, were bent upon doing all that they could under it to baffle the designs of the slave-power. Thousands of the political abolitionists made regular and liberal contributions to sustain the work of moral agitation, and the agitators rejoiced in every display of courage on the part of their voting friends, and in whatever good they could accomplish. The civil war brought the sincere opponents of slavery, of whatever class, into more fraternal relations. Mr. Garrison was quick to see that the pro-slavery Union was destroyed by the first gun fired at Sumter, and could never be restored. Thenceforth he and his associates labored to induce the government to place the war openly and avowedly on an anti-slavery basis, and to bend all its efforts to the establishment of a new Union from which slavery should be forever excluded. In this they had the co-operation of the most enlightened and earnest leaders and members of the Republican party, and on 1 January, 1863, their united labors were crowned with success. President Lincoln's proclamation of freedom to the slaves was a complete vindication of the doctrine of immediate emancipation; while the conditions of reconstruction gave the country a new constitution and a new Union, so far as slavery was concerned. When the contest was over, the leaders of the Republican party united with Mr. Garrison's immediate associates in raising for him the sum of $30,000, as a token of their grateful appreciation of his long and faithful service; and after his death the city of Boston accepted and erected a bronze statue to his memory. During the struggle in which he took so prominent a part he made two visits to England, where he was received with many marks of distinction by the abolitionists of that country, as the acknowledged founder of the anti-slavery movement in the United States. The popular estimate of his character and career is doubtless expressed in the words of John A. Andrew, war-governor of Massachusetts: “The generation which immediately preceded ours regarded him only as a wild enthusiast, a fanatic, or a public enemy. The present generation sees in him the bold and honest reformer, the man of original, self-poised, heroic will, inspired by a vision of universal justice, made actual in the practice of nations; who, daring to attack without reserve the worst and most powerful oppression of his country and his time, has outlived the giant wrong he assailed, and has triumphed over the sophistries by which it was maintained.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 610-612.

Chapter, “Early Antislavery Movements: Benjamin Lundy - William Lloyd Garrison,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872:

In the great conflict between freedom and slavery in America many names became historic, a few illustrious. No person is more inseparably associated with that struggle than William Lloyd Garrison. Men have differed, do and will differ, in their estimate of his distinctive doctrines and modes of action, and of his influence on the final result; but he will ever be associated in their memories with the conflict which emancipated one race and broke the power of another.

Born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, December 12, 1804, Mr. Garrison learned the art of printing, and commenced his editorial career at twenty-one years of age. He was first connected with the " Free Press," in his native town; next with the "National Philanthropist," a temperance paper, published in Boston; then with the "Journal of the Times," at Bennington, Vermont; then with the " Genius of Universal Emancipation," at Baltimore; and finally, with " The Liberator," which he established in Boston, January 1, 1831, and of which he was the editor during the thirty-five years of its existence. During these forty years of continuous editorial service he evinced singular personal independence, rare moral courage, and an uncompromising fidelity to his convictions and to the claims of humanity.

While at Boston, in the spring of 1828, he became acquainted with Benjamin Lundy, then on his first tour to the Eastern States in the service of the slave. He there listened to the cogent reasonings and was moved by the tender appeals of that singularly disinterested and tireless champion, who had consecrated his life to the cause of his oppressed countrymen, and ever gratefully acknowledged these obligations.

When, in 1828, Mr. Garrison assumed the editorial control of the “Journal of the Times," at Bennington, Vermont, he announced in his editorial address that the paper would be independent in the broadest and stoutest signification of the term; that it should be trammeled by no interest, biased by no sect, awed by no power. He distinctly avowed that he had three objects in view, which he should pursue through life, whether in that place or elsewhere; and those three objects were "the suppression of intemperance and its associate vices, the gradual emancipation of every slave in the Republic, and the perpetuity of national peace." He pledged, himself that what might be wanting in vigor should be made up in zeal. This independence and this avowal elicited from Mr. Lundy, who had sought to secure Mr. Garrison's services for his" Genius of Universal Emancipation," the warmest commendations, because he had shown " a laudable disposition to advocate the claims of the poor, distressed African upon our sympathy and justice." And he declared, if he continued to advocate the cause of the unfortunate negro, that “his talents will render him a most valuable coadjutor in this holy undertaking."
Mr. Garrison continued his connection with the “Journal of the Times " for several months; but in the latter part of the summer of 1829 he became associated with Mr. Lundy in the editorship of his paper, in Baltimore. In this new field he was brought into more immediate contact with slavery; and yet his utterances were no less decided and strong, still proclaiming his unrelenting hostility to slavery, intemperance, and war. Although at first he had looked with favor on the colonization scheme, as "an auxiliary to abolition" deserving encouragement, yet utterly inadequate alone, a short residence at Baltimore, and a fuller acquaintance with the spirit and purposes of its advocates, soon led him to discard and denounce it, and from that time onward to become one of its most uncompromising foes. On the subject of slavery he claimed that slaves were entitled to complete and immediate emancipation; that expediency had no place in the consideration of questions of simple right; that, even if the question of expediency were admitted into the discussion, it remained true that the sooner the chains were broken the wiser the act; and that, if the idea of removing the slaves from the country were not visionary, as he contended it was, all colored people born on the soil had the right to remain, and none had the right to compel their removal.
The sinfulness of slavery and the duty of immediate emancipation had been often proclaimed before, --at least, in substance, if not in the precise phraseology of the new formula. Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, of the last century, as Wesley before them,, who had condensed his estimate of the system into that burning and oft-repeated sentence, " Slavery is the sum of all villanies," had stated, as strongly as language could express the thought, the essential wrongfulness of the system, and the duty of immediate repentance, with the consequent fruits meet for repentance. Reverend John Rankin, whose name is honorably associated with the earlier antislavery efforts of the present century, was a native of Tennessee; and he testifies that in his " boyhood " a majority of the people of Eastern Tennessee, though not of the State, were Abolitionists. In Kentucky, where he was first settled in the ministry, he says: “We had our abolition societies, auxiliary to a State society then existing." He spoke openly against the “sin" of slavery, while the people of his church showed the sincerity of their opposition by leaving the State almost as a body, because pf the increasing proslavery spirit of the people therein. At an anniversary meeting of the American Antislavery Society at New York, he declared that he himself and the antislavery societies of the South believed and avowed the doctrine of immediate emancipation.

In Ohio the antislavery sentiment was not only decided, but active. Indeed, several years before the formation of the American Antislavery Society the Chilicothe Presbytery made strenuous efforts to purge the Presbyterian Church of the sin of slavery. The Cincinnati Synod, on motion of Dr. Samuel Crothers, unanimously "resolved that the holding of slaves for gain is heinous sin and scandal." In 1825 Elizabeth Heyrick, of England, a member of the Society of Friends, had published a pamphlet, entitled, “Immediate, not Gradual Emancipation," which was somewhat in advance of the general sentiment of the British people, though they were not long in arriving at the same conclusion. It is stated, however, by Oliver Johnson, who had it on the highest authority, that Mr. Garrison had not seen the work before he wrought out the same sentiment in his own mind, basing his conclusion on the two-fold grounds of  ''moral duty and logical necessity." There can be no doubt that the new circumstances in which Mr. Garrison found himself, with the sad and revolting scenes which were daily enacted before his eyes in a slaveholding community, and in a slave-mart like Baltimore, quickened both mind and heart, and hastened convictions to which he soon arrived, and which, when reached, he was not slow to enunciate in language unequivocal and strong. For not only was slavery there, with it ordinary incidents of "wrong and outrage," but Baltimore was then, next to Richmond, the great Northern slave-mart of the Border States. It was the slave-trader's exchange, where was the slave-prison and where could be witnessed the revolting atrocities of the auction-block and the saddening exhibitions of the coffle and the slave-ship, with their heart-breaking partings, their apprehensions, and their despairing dread of impending evils. In a community where such scenes were common, and among a people accustomed to them and acquiescent in them, Mr. Garrison was not long in tracing the logic of the system, and in detecting the real tendency of colonization, and the empty pretensions of those who advocated it as a means of removing the evils of the system of oppression.

The subject, however, which more particularly stirred his soul and fired his indignation, and which called forth his fiercest anathemas, was the interstate slave-trade. In the prosecution of this general traffic an incident and illustration soon occurred which especially excited his feelings, and called forth his sternest rebukes and his most objurgatory language. The captain of a vessel owned by Francis Todd, of his own native town of Newburyport, took, with the owner's consent, a cargo of slaves for the New Orleans market. In consequence of the severity of his rebuke and his unmeasured words of condemnation, both a civil and criminal suit were instituted against Mr. Garrison. Tried by a proslavery court and jury, he was, of course, convicted, and his sentence embraced both imprisonment and fine.

The knowledge of this, and the great wrong done to an American citizen simply for language employed only in behalf of freedom and against oppression, excited a good deal of feeling, as it became known, among the philanthropists of the time. The case was brought by Mr. Lundy to the notice of that munificent as well as earnest friend of the slave, Arthur Tappan of New York, who at once paid the fine; so that, after an incarceration of seven weeks, Mr. Garrison was set free. It is said that Henry Clay was on the point of doing the same thing, through the earnest solicitation of John G. Whittier, who represented to him that Mr. Garrison had been an earnest and effective advocate of the election of John Quincy Adams. This action of the agents of slavery completed the work already far advanced, and made Mr. Garrison ever afterward an uncompromising, if not a bitter foe, not only to slavery, but to everything that interposed itself between him and the object of his unconquerable aversion and determined hostility. Nothing was too high or too low, nothing was too strong or too sacred, to escape his fierce denunciations. No iconoclast ever dashed down more remorselessly the idols of popular regard. The oath of eternal hostility to Rome which the youthful Hannibal was made to swear was not more sacredly kept than was the vow of the young reformer, as he went forth from that Baltimore prison, against that power which held millions of his countrymen in chains, and which would silence free speech and destroy the liberty of the press.

Imprisonment neither intimidated nor silenced him. From that Baltimore jail he sent forth a letter in which he arraigned the law and the arbitrary conduct of the court. “Is it,'' he asked, “supposed by Judge Brice that his frowns can intimidate me, or his sentence stifle my voice on the subject of oppression? He does not know me. So long as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I will not cease to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt of kidnappers, slavery abettors, or slave-owners, wherever they may reside, or however high they may be exalted. I am only in the alphabet of my task; time shall perfect a useful work. It is my shame that I have done so little for the people of color; yea, before God, I feel humbled that my feelings are so cold and my language so weak. A free white victim must be sacrificed to open the eyes of the nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I expect, and am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned, and bound for advocating the rights of my colored countrymen; and I should deserve to be a slave myself if I shrank from that danger."

This violent individual demonstration was, however, but significant of the general feeling and policy toward this antislavery sheet and its heroic conductors. Nor did the persecutions, slanders, and libel suits which they prompted fail of their purpose. Former friends timidly shrunk from the fierce conflict, and withheld both their moral and pecuniary support; and even these earnest and brave men were compelled so far to succumb to the popular pressure as to dissolve their partnership, and the paper was changed from a weekly to a monthly journal. But, though not agreed in all things, they parted with “the kindliest feelings and mutual personal regard." Mr. Lundy declared that Mr. Garrison “had proven himself a faithful and able coadjutor in the great and holy cause"; and the latter, in separating from his philanthropic friend, expressed the hope that “we shall ever remain one in spirit and purpose."

After his liberation from prison, in June, 1830, Mr. Garrison proceeded North delivering a course of antislavery lectures in Philadelphia, New York, New Haven, Hartford, Boston, Charlestown, and other cities and towns of New England. In these lectures he maintained the sinfulness of slavery, and the duty of immediate and unconditional emancipation. The colonization scheme, which had obtained a strong hold upon the confidence and support of the churches and the benevolent people of the North, was sternly arraigned, and the designs of its originators were declared to be hostile to the free people of color in the slaveholding States. Earnest appeals were made, especially to members of Christian churches, to engage at once in the work of immediate and unconditional emancipation, which was proclaimed to be the duty of the people and the right of' the slave. But these views were far in advance of the prevailing sentiments of even most of the members of the churches; and although some gladly accepted them, the many were either hostile or indifferent.  It was often with difficulty, therefore, that churches were opened for his addresses, and sometimes they were positively refused.

In the month of August he issued proposals for the publication of a journal, to be called “The Liberator," in the city of Washington. The proposition, though hailed with favor by a few persons in different sections of the country, was "palsied by public indifference." The persecutions against Mr. Lundy had: also been so great in Baltimore that he had been compelled to remove the "Genius of Universal Emancipation” to the seat of the Federal government, thus rendering the establishment of “The Liberator” there less necessary.
But there was another reason for changing the place of the publication of the proposed journal. This reason is given by Mr. Garrison in his first number, which was published in Boston, in January, 1831 :--

“During my recent tour," he says, " for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people by a series of discourses on the subject of slavery, every place that I visited gave fresh evidence of the fact that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States, and particularly in New England, than at the South. I found contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners themselves. Of course, there were individual exceptions to the contrary. This state of things afflicted, but did not dishearten me. I determined at every hazard to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill, and in the birthplace of Liberty. That standard is now unfurled; and. long may it float, unhurt by the spoliations of time or the missiles of a desperate foe, -- yea, till every chain be broken and every bondman set free! Let Southern oppressors tremble, - let their secret abettors tremble, --let their Northern apologists tremble, --let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble! "
In establishing "The Liberator, Mr. Garrison announced that he should not array himself as the political partisan of any man, and that, in defending the great cause of human rights, he wished "to derive the, assistance of all religions and of all parties."

Many persons, however, who had become deeply interested in Mr. Garrison's addresses in the summer and autumn deemed his language too vituperative, denunciatory, and severe. Some of his earliest and most, intimate friends, who earnestly, desired the success of his cause, had often remonstrated with him. In his salutatory address, referring to these remonstrances, he said:

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest, --I will not equivocate, --I will not excuse, --I will not retreat a single inch, -- AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead!"

To those who questioned the wisdom of his course, he replied:
“It is pretended that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective and the precipitancy of my measures. The charge is not true. On this question my influence, humble as it is, is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years, not perniciously, but beneficially, - not as a curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will bear testimony that I was right. I desire to thank God that he enables me to disregard' the fear of man that bringeth a snare,' and to speak his truth in its simplicity and power."

He closed with the vow to oppose and thwart the brutalizing sway of oppression, “till Africa's chains Are burst, and freedom rules the rescued land."

Mr. Garrison's partner in the publication of "The Liberator” was Mr. Isaac Knapp, a printer, like himself, and also a native of the same town. The paper was commenced without funds and without a single subscriber. Bearing the comprehensive and cosmopolitan motto, “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind," it appealed to no party, sect, or interest for recognition and support. Both editor and printer labored hard and fared meagerly; and it was only thus -- and a marvel it was at that -- that their journal lived. But Mr. Garrison had a mission to fulfil, and he bravely met the conditions it imposed. For, whatever may be the estimate of his policy, and whatever may have been his mistakes, none can withhold the meed of admiration at the moral courage and faith he exhibited as he entered upon his life's work. Hardly grander were their exhibition when Kepler was working out his problem of the solar system willing to "wait a century for a reader "; when Columbus was travelling through Europe, from court to court, from philosopher to prince, in the vain search for a convert to his new theory of a western passage to the Indies; or even when Luther was nailing his theses to the door of the church, and thus braving the thunders of the Vatican, than when that young man - with no advantages of birth or culture, with wounds still bleeding from his recent encounter with the dark and bloody tyrant, in his dingy room of sixteen feet square, at once his sanctum, workshop, and home-made assault upon a despotism which not only trampled millions of slaves in the dust, but dominated the whole country, binding both church and state in chains, and there forged his weapons of warfare from the indestructible materials of God's Word and the Declaration of Independence. It must have been something more than "the grace of indignation” which urged him on, which crowned him with the honors of imprisonment, gave him the garland of a rope, the escort of a mob of Boston's " respectability and standing," and extorted such honorable mention by Southern governors and legislatures as can now be gathered from their records.

It was not that Mr. Garrison discovered any new truths, or that he stood alone, which gave him his prominence from the start. The sinfulness of slaveholding, and the duty of its immediate relinquishment had been as unequivocally proclaimed by others, and there were those then in the field as decided and pronounced as he. It must have arisen partly, at least, from the peculiar state of public opinion at that time. After the crowning triumph of the Slave Power in the Missouri Compromise, and in the sectional victory of the South, by the defeat of Mr. Adams and the election of General Jackson, there seemed to be a general acquiescence on the part of the people in these triumphs, and a growing disposition to remit further antislavery effort.

The nation had reached its nadir; for, though there were subsequently other aggressions, more flagrant outrages, and new concessions and compromises, yet never after that was the nation so voiceless and timid. Cowed and silent before the domineering Power, with the number of protestants growing fewer and feebler, the very boldness and seeming audacity of the young man in his attic, telling the nation that he was in earnest and would be heard, aroused attention. The very deliberation with which he heralded and began the .assault, the stern defiance he bade the foe at whose feet he threw the gauntlet of mortal combat, made him the mark for criticism and hostile demonstration, as well as the rallying point of those who sympathized with him in spirit and in purpose. His impartiality, too, between sects and parties, men and schools, constitutions and laws, and whatever arrayed itself against the slave or remained neutral, increased that attention and criticism.

His pen, if possible, was more severe, caustic, and exasperating than had been his speech. While friends generally doubted and questioned, and the people condemned, the slaveholders were stung to madness. Before the close of the first year, the Vigilance Association of Columbia, South Carolina, “composed of gentlemen of the first respectability," offered a reward, of fifteen hundred dollars for the apprehension and conviction of any white person detected in circulating in that State "the newspaper called 'The Liberator.' “The corporation of Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, passed an ordinance rendering it penal for any free person of color to take from the post-office " the paper published in  Boston called 'The Liberator,'" the punishment for each offence to be twenty dollars fine or thirty days imprisonment. In case the offender was not able to pay the fine, or the fees for imprisonment, he was to be sold into slavery for four months. The grand jury of Raleigh, North Carolina, at the instigation of the attorney-general, made an indictment against the editor and publisher of “The Liberator" for its circulation in that county. The legislature of Georgia proceeded to pass an act, which was promptly signed by Governor Lumpkin, offering a reward of five thousand dollars for the arrest, prosecution, and trial to conviction, under the laws of the State, of the editor or publisher " of a certain paper called 'The Liberator,' published in the town of Boston and State of Massachusetts."

But neither the doubts of friends, the condemnation of the North, nor the threats and offered rewards of the South, moved Mr. Garrison from his purpose. He bade defiance to his persecutors, and avowed his readiness to die, if need be. He stood, he says, “like the oak, like the Alps, --unshaken, storm-proof. Opposition and abuse and slander and prejudice and judicial tyranny add to the flame of my zeal. I am not discouraged; I am not dismayed; but bolder and more confident than ever."

Nor is there any doubt that his voice and pen were among the most potent influences that produced the antislavery revival of that day. Antislavery societies were formed, antislavery presses were established, and antislavery lectures abounded. Nine years after the establishment of “The Liberator “there were nearly two thousand antislavery societies, with a membership of some two hundred thousand. This result, however, was not secured without agitation, controversy, and strife. Nor were these all outside of the societies. Within them were discords and dissensions, growing out of the nature of their work and the character of their members. For the latter were generally, and almost of necessity, persons of positive convictions and self-assertion, engaged in a work of appalling magnitude and beset with unanticipated difficulties. Especially true was this of those who gathered around Mr. Garrison; adopted and defended his views, and recognized him as their leader. Embracing many men, and especially women, of talent, culture, and eloquence, they were a small, compact, aggressive, and somewhat destructive body, who, with marked characteristics and occasional idiosyncrasies, yet seemed to be swayed by a common impulse, and to be committed not only to a common object, but to the pursuit of that object by modes peculiarly their own.
In pursuance of their object, they avowed the purpose of granting quarter to nothing which, in their apprehension, interposed itself between them and that object. Not finding that hearty co-operation and ready acquiescence in their utterances and modes of action in church or state which they desired or hoped for, but oftener hostility and persecution, they soon arrayed themselves in antagonism to the leading influences of both. Arid so, singularly enough, they presented what appeared to their countrymen the practical solecism of endeavoring to reform the government by renouncing all connection with it; of seeking to remove a political evil by refusing all association with political parties, by whose action alone that evil could be reached; of depending alone on moral suasion, and an appeal to the consciences of the people, and yet coming out of all the religious associations and assemblies of the land. This arraying themselves against the patriotism, the partisanship, and the religious sentiment of the great body of the people prevented harmonious co-operation, and rendered inevitable, sooner or later, a disruption of the national society. In that separation, which took place in 1840, but a small part remained with Mr. Garrison, --probably not more than one  fifth of the members of the antislavery societies then existing; and these were confined mainly to New England, and mostly to Eastern Massachusetts. Nor did their numbers increase during the conflicts of the subsequent twenty years. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, in 1860, when Mr. Lincoln was elected by a vote of nearly two millions, on a clearly defined and distinct issue with the Slave Power, there were more Abolitionists of that school than there were twenty years before, when the American Antislavery Society was rent in twain. During all this period, however, they acted, as they professed, "without concealment and without compromise." Whatever may be the estimate of the weight of their influence on public opinion, none will ever doubt the sincerity of their convictions, the purity of their motives, the boldness of their utterances, or the inflexibility of their purposes.

Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 176-188.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.