Celebrating Rights and 
Responsibilities
Baltimore & the Fifteenth Amendment, May 19, 1870
An Interactive Historical Investigation by David Troy © 1996

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Portrait taken from the book The Liberator, A Biography.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON was born in 1805, in Massachusetts where he became a printer's apprentice. By 1829, he was printing his own anti-slavery publication, The Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore. Baltimore was then a capital of the slave trade in the country. (Coincidentally, Frederick Douglass was in Baltimore at the same time). Garrison's uncompromising stance aroused great animosity, and a slave trader sued him for libel. He was fined for the offense, was unable to pay it, and was jailed. After this debacle, he returned to New England where in 1831 he and partner Isaac Knapp began printing The Liberator. He fought hard for emancipation. After the Civil War, he advocated the dissolution of anti-slavery groups as they had already served their purpose. From then on he fought for negro suffrage, then for womens' suffrage and other causes. He died in 1879. Source: Summarized from Microsoft Encarta.

© 1996 David C. 
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