William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Bedford Series in History & Culture) [Paperback]

William Lloyd Garrison (Author), William E. Cain (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William E. Cain is professor of English at Wellesley College. His scholarly work is concentrated on nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, with a special focus on the literature and history of the Civil War period. His publications include The Crisis in Criticism (1984) and F. O. Mathiessen and the Politics of Criticism (1988) in addition to numerous essays on English and American literature, American and African American history, critical theory, and literary criticism.

Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; 1st edition (November 15, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312103867
• ISBN-13: 978-0312103866
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #420,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD." *, May 4, 2008

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Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Bedford Series in History & Culture) (Paperback)

It's safe to say that William Lloyd Garrison was the leading abolitionist voice for an entire generation of Americans. He launched his famous newspaper "The Liberator" on 1 January 1831, and continued churning out weekly copies until 29 December 1865, when he voluntarily closed shop. During that period, Garrison also traveled thousands of miles to make hundreds of speeches, including a famous one on 4 July 1854 when he dramatically burned a copy of the Constitution, claiming that its defense of slavery made it a "covenant with death, an agreement with hell" (p. 37). He lived on a small salary and worked like a demon to change the hearts and minds of the country when it came to slavery and racism. Unlike many of his fellow-abolitionists, Garrison was convinced that blacks deserved not just freedom, but equal legal rights and privileges.

William Cain has provided a good resource for students of the years leading up to the Civil War in his William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery. His 50-page introduction carefully and interestingly recounts the facts of Garrison's life, the social and political contexts in which Garrison operated, and the particulars of Garrison's own brand of abolitionism--his distrust of politics, his espousal of disunion, his call for moral transformation as a necessary condition for social change, and his fidelity to "nonresistance"--the principles of which occasioned ruptures with other abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass. Following the Introduction, Cain reproduces 130-odd pages from "The Liberator" that provides a representative sampling of topics. Cain also provides a short (and now somewhat outdated) bibliography, and a very helpful chronology (pp. 186-194).

Garrison is a frustrating author. His pieces are frequently wordy and so polemical that it's difficult to find his argument (although an argument is almost always present and discoverable by patient readers). At other times, despite his avowal of Christian pacifism, his pieces are breathlessly vituperative (his obituary of President Polk is an illustration, p. 120). At still other times, he can lapse into the mawkish. And always, everywhere, there's the unresolved tension between Garrison's espousal of nonresistance, and his incendiary rhetoric that the South (correctly) saw as inducements to violence. (A sustained scholarly comparison of the pacifism of Garrison and, say, an Adin Ballou would be fascinating.) So one can only imagine the task William Cain undertook when he sifted through the 35 volumes of "The Liberator" to compile this selection.

A fine complement to Cain's anthology is Henry Mayer's All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (1998), published after Cain's book.
________
Garrison's famous editorial promise in the first issue of "The Liberator" (quoted on p. 72).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fanatic or Patriot, June 1, 2007

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Barrie W. Bracken "Researcher" (Daytona Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Bedford Series in History & Culture) (Paperback)

William Lloyd Garrison is one of our most flamboyant and mis-understood folk heroes. The revolutions in the thinking of our country leave us with multifaceted pictures of this man. From the exposure given by historians and biographers we can conjure up an individual to fit our pown tastes and needs. As closeas we can come to seeing Garrison through his own eyes is to read what he wrote and said. This book proves very helpful in this way.

It would be wonderful if someone or some organization would make available the full test of all the issues of "The Liberator" as we now have of "DeBow's Review" but in the mean time this dollection offers a wonderful and appreciated start. Many thanks to the editoral staff and the publisher.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This American Hero Had No Time for Patriotism, October 14, 2008

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Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Bedford Series in History & Culture) (Paperback)

My five-star rating is not for William Lloyd Garrison's writing, which ranges from turgid to intemperate, but for his integrity. No abolitionist but John Brown put his own neck on the block as courageously as Garrison, and none had more sustained impact on the conscience of America. One might say that Garrison was the tinder and Brown the spark that set off the War Over Slavery (my new coinage to designate the rebellion and suppression thereof in the 1860s).

Garrison was perceived in the Slaveocracy as a terrorist, an inciter of "servile rebellion", a fanatic willing to see southern women violated and southern families hacked to bits. The fear and loathing that abolitionists like Garrison inspired in the South was unquestionably a precipitant of the crisis mentality that arose in the 1850s, when Southrons concluded that aggressive expansion of slavery was their only hope for maintaining their 'peculiar institution.'

Garrison was not a patriot -- not in the usual current "America First" sense, anyway. He was the guy who burned the US Constitution in public, a far stronger statement than burning a mere flag, and who called it a compact with Hell. He was essentially the first major figure to say that a Union tainted with slavery was not worth preserving. On the other hand, his bravery in maintaining a position of non-violent protest, of pacifism, brought even his enemies to acknowledge his grit.

There's no more appropriate way to approach Garrison than by reading his own words in these selections from his newspaper, The Liberator. It's quite revealing to find Garrison, John Brown, Thoreau, and other heroes of American intellectual history stating criticisms of America as vituperative and "treasonous" as any jeremiad preached from the pulpit by modern-day foes of racial hypocrisy.