SOURCE: Chapman, John Jay. “The Man of Action.” In William Lloyd Garrison, pp. 158-98. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1913, Chapman describes Garrison's forceful political activism, highlighting the unswerving religious and theoretical principals that guided his reformist course.

Garrison was a man of action, that is to say, a man to whom ideas were revealed in relation to passing events, and who saw in ideas the levers and weapons with which he might act upon the world. A seer on the other hand is a man who views passing events by the light of ideas, and who counts upon his vision, not upon his action, for influence. The seer feels that the mere utterance of his thought, nay the mere vision of it, fulfills his function. Garrison was not a man of this kind. His mission was more lowly...