Customer Reviews

All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery

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I read a great number of biographies that deal with American history, and this is simply one of the finest works I have ever read. In terms of scope and ambition and writing style, I compare ALL ON FIRE with Robert Caro's THE POWER BROKER. Henry Mayer should come to be known as one of America's finest living biographers. In addition to being the definitive biography of William Lloyd Garrison, this is also a brilliant retelling of nineteenth-century American history as seen through the eyes of its greatest Abolitionist leader. This is social and intellectual history at its finest, for Mayer uses Garrison as a focal point to tell the story of the political leaders, writers, agitators, and early women's rights advocates whose lives were affected by the fight to abolish slavery. I realize that this book will take you a good chunk of time, but it is worth every minute. ALL ON FIRE becomes an absorbing, tragic tale, yes, an epic, with all events leading to the carnage of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Once you have finished this book, you will put Garrison before Lincoln as the one person most responsible for setting free the slaves. It's hard to imagine a time in American history when people were so socially and politically responsible (read the section where 10,000 people encircle a Boston prison to protest the removal of an escaped slave back to South Carolina, for example). There is a great tradition in America of social protest. This book is really a colossal achievement that harkens back to an age when people and ideas still mattered.

I thought I knew my American history reasonably well until Henry Mayer taught me how much I had missed. Garrison certainly was far more than the hot-headed crusader on the nut fringe I read about in one text after another. But this book also is more than a correction of an historial footnote; Mayer breathes life into the moral arguments about slavery before the Civil War and weaves America's history from the signing of the Constitution to the passage of the 14th Amendment into a colorful, lively tapestry. This is biography raised to its finest form.

If God had decided to destoy the United States in the 1830s as an iniquitious country, he might have stayed his hand on account of the existence of William Lloyd Garrison. So long derided as a fanatic who spread discontent and brought about the Civil War, Garrison is here re-habilitated as a man dedicated to racial equality and liberty, and even a figure of some pragmatism and moderation. Indeed, he should be praised and elevated by those who profess to see America as 'a shining city on a hill', except that probably their motives are baser than Garrison's. Garrison went so far as to burn the Constitution in public as a 'pact with slavery'. Yet he was always a dedicated pacifist. This is a brilliant biography bringing to life the man and the turbulent era in which he lived. A must for anyone with even a remote interest in antebellum history of the USA, or anyone who likes to become immersed in biography at its best.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. A rich read about a great American hero for all times. Mayer obviously loves and admires Garrison, but this did not keep him from portraying this hero with his blemishes as well as strengths. The most startling thing about this great read is just how important Garrison was to America's most tumultuous time --- the abolitionist of all abolitionists, a leader who appreciated how deep religious beliefs and moral politics go together, who believed in the power of the written and spoken word, who helped perhaps as much as anyone in our history to move our nation and free it of slavery. Truly a companion biography to go with the best biographies of Lincoln --- no understanding of the Civil War can be complete without knowing about Garrison, and this is definitely the way to know about Garrison. To say it simply: no one can claim to be a Civil War buff without knowing about Garrison, and no one can know about Garrison any better way than by reading this book. Highest kudoes to Mayer!

I've spent much of my leisure time over the last 35 years reading history and historical biography. Simply put, this is the best historical biography I've ever read. It is meticulously researched, beautifully written, and flawlessly edited. I thought I knew quite a lot about abolitionism, but this book provided a whole new perspective on this important movement.

All on Fire is a superb book. Written in a style that combines lucidity with passion, an enormous amount of factual information with a historical imagination that brings everything described to vivid life, it covers the years during which what may be the defining issue in American history led to civil war and to a settlement that transformed our lives. By focusing on one man Mayer is able to present a coherent, constantly dramatic narrative that never loses its way. Garrison himself is a unique phenomenon: thorny, admirably and sometimes infuriatingly faithful to a rigorously held set of principles that gave him the power to influence history by sheer force of will and intelligence. By following Garrison's thirty-five hears as editor of his paper The Liberator while reconstructing the history in which that journal participates Mayer brilliantly brings mid-nineteenth century America to life, simultaneously presenting people, places, and events with a novelist's imagination and animating moral and political issues with judicious understanding. The result is a powerful reading experience. Without preaching Mayer implicitly raises important questions about our own polital life: race and gender are enduring problems that one would expect, but the underlying question of the role of uncompromising adherence to personal ideals in public life asks us to think about our own politics. As a beautifully imagined recreation of a crucial period in American life (wonderful passages explaining the mechanics of typesetting and printing, for example, or describing travel by land and sea), as an analytic study of what lies beneath the surface of mere storytelling (the demographics of slaveholding, as a typical example), as a constantly illuminating exploration of political history, and not least as the studiously researched, moving, and sympathetic biography of a fascinating man, All on Fire is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Henry Mayer has written a definitive account of the life of William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist. While I have a Master's Degree in American History, and have read extensively about 19th century America, I had not until now read anything of this power and scope about this great central figure. In many ways, the Garrison portrayed here is the epitome of an American ideal: fierce and unswerving in the constancy of his views about great and weighty matters, willing to not only stand up for his convictions, but to live them every day of his life. Mayer does a particularly good job in delinieating the early days of Garrision's life and the surprising--at least to me--roots of both his background and his passion. While we can learn a great deal not only about the conduct of an intellectual life from Garrison, we can also learn a great deal about the conduct of family life as well. Gentle, kind, loving and doting, Garrison at home stood in marked contrast to his public personna of "Garrison the Madman," as he sometimes introduced himself. We also find a cast of peripheral characters in this biography (William Herndon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.) which enliven it and give it the necessary depth required for a weighty and detailed biography. Taken in all, this is a terrific biography, and one of the best books I have read in some time.

This excellent biography of Garrison seems to unlock one of the enigmas of both abolition and the Civil War, where the attempt to preserve the Union led to the abolition of slavery. But we might backtrack to the generation of the heroic abolitionists, among them the completely consistent and unwavering Garrison whose platform on disunion is one of the key steps in the mystery of opposites here.
The tale is told in fine grain of a very remarkable one-pointed focus by one who did not compromise and yet outlasted all those who did. From his humble beginnings as an apprentice printer til the suspension of the Liberator after eighteen hundred issues in 1865 we have the portrait of one who brought about real social change, yet was almost marginalized near the end, as the harvest of his labours was achieved.
Even if we are secularists, we should tip our hats to these agitator Christians who had the presence of mind to see the obvious in a culture where everyohne else was out in left field and even the Northern states were racist and seened to resist every step of the way.

This is an absolutely breathtaking display of passionate and organized thinking and writing. Mayer gets right to the point. Here is the first paragraph from the Preface to this book (he puts the first three lines are in all caps, just in case some people might have trouble "missing" his point):

"ALL ON FIRE IS A BOUT ABOUT AN AGITATOR, AND ITS ARGUMENT CAN BE SIMPLY STATED. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879) IS AN AUTHENTIC AMERICAN HERO WHO, WITH A BIBLICAL PROPHET'S POWER AND A Propagandist's skill, forced the nation to confront the most crucial moral issue in its history. For thirty-five years he edited and published a weekly newspaper in Boston, The Liberator, which remains today a sterling and unrivaled example of personal journalism in the service of civic idealism. Although Garrison--a self-made man with a scanty formal education--considered himself "a New England mechanic" and lived outside the precincts of the American intelligentsia, he nonetheless did the hard intellectual work of challenging orthodoxy, questioning public policy, and offering a luminous vision of a society transformed. He inspired two generations of activists--female and male, black and white--and together they built a social movement which, like the civil rights movement of our own day, was a collaboration of ordinary people, stirred by injustice and committed to each other, who achieved a social change that conventional wisdom first condemned as wrong and then ridiculed as impossible."

It is a rare and beautiful thing when a biographer and his/her subject are so perfectly matched. It will inform you, excite you, and will leave you in tears in places. High drama. Garrison himself would have been proud of this work.

Hopefully this book will rescue this wonderful American from the unbelievable bile his opponents still continue to spew about him.

I am learning more about 19th century American history from this biography than from any other single book in my library. I'm recommending this to all my friends. Garrison defined the issues we still need to come to terms with, and this biography presents it all as compelling story.