William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts was a man of causes: temperance, women's rights, pacifism, and the protection of Native Americans. But he fought longest and loudest for the abolition of slavery, long before abolition was fashionable. Garrison's journal, The Liberator, remained the best known abolitionist publication in the country, and Garrison brought it out faithfully from 1831 until the end of the Civil War. In his editorials and speeches, Garrison never compromised his belief that slavery was a great wrong that should be abolished at any cost, even the cost of outright warfare with the slaveowning interests of the South. His beliefs led Garrison to denounce the Constitution, renounce his allegiance to the United States, and at one point propose the secession of an entire region of the country—the North.

In urging the complete and immediate abolition of...