The final paragraph he typeset himself and fitted into the page form laid out on the
Liberator's old imposing stone. As he did, and as the page was locked up, the little group of printers gathered around, silently and sadly, to witness the end of an era.
Later, Garrison recalled the symbolism of the imposing stone. "How many days and nights have I wearily bent over it in getting ready the paper," he wrote to an old friend. "What a 'stone of stumbling' and a 'rock of offense' it was to all the enemies of emancipation." Yet, in another sense, this old stone and the sadness in the print shop that last night also symbolize the centrality of journalism to the career of William Lloyd Garrison. He is remembered today not as a great journalist but as a radical abolitionist and reformer. But his reformist philosophy was intimately connected to his character as a journalist and to his understanding of the function of journalism in a good society. The Liberator's old imposing stone was not merely a "stone of stumbling" for abolition's enemies; it was an anchor, a rock of ages for Garrison. Indeed, it was the rock upon which he built his abolitionist church.
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