Slavery has always been a controversial and debatable issue in the United States. No one attacked the African-American slavery of the southern states with greater vehemence than a group of young, radical abolitionists. Frustrated at the betrayal of the revolutionary promise that all forms of bondage would disappear in the new land and marshalling all the religious revivals that swept the country, abolitionists demanded no less than the immediate emancipation of all slaves. Bursting upon the American political system in the early 1830s, abolitionists not only opposed any reparation of slaveholders, but they also demanded full political rights for all African-Americans, North and South.

The most prominent and spiteful of those abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison. Born on December 10, 1805, he was the son of a drunken sailor who abandoned his family when Garrison was only three years old. His mother, a person of education and refinement plunged into...