SOURCE: Merrill, Walter M. Introduction to I Will Be Heard! 1822-1835: The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Volume I, edited by Walter M. Merrill, pp. vii-ix. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, The Belknap Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Merrill encapsulates critical reaction to Garrison from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s and briefly characterizes the content of Garrison's correspondence.

If Garrison could have looked across the century and witnessed the publication of the first volume of his letters, he would have considered the event propitious. In his nonviolent agitation for the black man he always had an uncanny sense of timing, a serendipitous capacity to guide fortuitous circumstances. And the appearance in print of his early letters at this juncture gives him, in effect, an opportunity to enlist once more in the cause for which he struggled for half a century. Indeed, in these letters he communicates with...