Dwight Lowell Dumond

William Lloyd Garrison was one of the most prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement. He founded the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator in 1831 and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. However, many historians have depicted Garrison in a negative light, maintaining that his extreme views on the sinfulness of slavery alienated Northerners and Southerners alike and thus hindered the abolitionist movement. Historian Dwight Lowell Dumond, for example, in the following excerpt from his 1961 book Antislavery: Crusade for Freedom in America, describes Garrison as a zealot whose contributions to the abolitionist movement were far less constructive than those of more conservative and less visible opponents of slavery.

Garrison was twenty-two years of age [in 1827]. He had learned the printer’s trade on the Newburyport Herald, then had edited and published the...