SOURCE: Fanuzzi, Robert A. “‘The Organ of an Individual’: William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 23 (1998): 107-27.

In the following essay, Fanuzzi regards the tension between sentiments expressed by Garrison in his newspaper the Liberator and his self-portrayal as a disinterested public advocate who favored abolitionism and other social reforms in nineteenth-century America.

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711,277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of...