William Lloyd Garrison | Biography

William Lloyd Garrison is generally considered to be, more than any other person of his time, the leading figure in the American antislavery movement. Because of his absolute dedication to his cause and his tendency to offer caustic, unsparing, and sometimes ferocious denunciations of both pro-slavery apologists and fellow reformers who disagreed with any of his positions, opinions of the man differed greatly among his contemporaries. Early biographers, however, were uniformly laudatory of his accomplishments. Thus, John Jay Chapman, in his early study William Lloyd Garrison (1913), refers to his subject as "the central figure in American life" during his time and insists that "the day Garrison established the Liberator he was the strongest man in America. . . . Tide and tempest served him." Modern biographers have been more critical and discriminating, but all agree that Garrison was without a doubt the most significant single force for reform in...
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