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All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
In All on Fire, William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) emerges as an American hero, arguably on par with Abraham Lincoln, who forced the nation to confront the explosive issue of slavery.
Mayer maintains that Garrison, a self-made man of scanty formal education who founded and edited the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, not only served as the catalyst for the abolition of slavery, but inspired two generations of activists in civil rights and the women's movement.
Through Garrison, tragically torn between pacifism and abolitionist advocacy, we also meet a rich pageant of great 19th-century historical figures, including Frederick Douglass, John Quincy Adams,and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mayer's consequential biography will be read for generations to come.
Mayer maintains that Garrison, a self-made man of scanty formal education who founded and edited the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, not only served as the catalyst for the abolition of slavery, but inspired two generations of activists in civil rights and the women's movement.
Through Garrison, tragically torn between pacifism and abolitionist advocacy, we also meet a rich pageant of great 19th-century historical figures, including Frederick Douglass, John Quincy Adams,and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mayer's consequential biography will be read for generations to come.
707 pages, Paperback
First published February 22, 1998
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May 3, 2011
Reading National Book Award finalist "All on Fire," Henry Mayer's fine biography of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, makes me want to do something with my life. Find a cause. Agitate. Repeat.
Garrison's role in the abolition of slavery was a prominent one but, Mayer asserts, is underappreciated today. This mild, personable man from humble beginnings pledged himself to abolition at age 24, eventually editing his own antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, that he would publish for 35 years — lasting through the end of slavery he had so long sought — and more than 1,800 issues. Mayer spends a great deal of time on Garrison's tempestuous early days, when he spoke, wrote and published at great physical risk. He thrillingly escapes from a mob, is jailed, is reviled in the South (of course) but also around Boston, where he did most of his great work. To a staunch defender of slavery, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, he was a dangerous man who wouldn't shut his trap. Garrison was astonishing in his ceaseless agitation and singlemindedness. Surely, many in New England and around the world — Garrison made several trips to England — welcomed and supported him, and Garrison was far from a lone voice in the wilderness. But that voice called many important people to action. Mayer's contention is that Garrison's unbending zealotry today clouds people's minds as to what an influence he really had.
Mayer relates that Garrison's relationship with the world's most famous ex-slave, Frederick Douglas, was a close one for a time but would grow frosty as the Civil War neared, with the bond breaking between the two pre-eminent spokesmen of radical abolition in 1847. Many of the women who would become leading lights in the women's suffrage movement started out as antislavery agitators, and Mayer writes in detail about how Garrison's unusual insistence on involving women in the abolitionist cause (allowing them to attend meetings! Make speeches! Horrors!) created great friction and resistance even among other antislavery people. In fact, the schisms created between people who generally were on the same side takes up big chunks of Mayer's book. Early on, it's the backers of immediatism like Garrison battling colonizationists, who oppose slavery but think they would be doing blacks (and themselves) a favor by sending them back to Africa. Garrison had no patience for such backdoor racism, nor for gradualists who saw slavery as a bane whose elimination could wait for a better time. I wasn't aware of Garrison's "nonresistance" stance, in which he essentially refused to politicize abolition, choosing not to vote at all or compromise his values for minor gains or political expediency. Interestingly, his willingness to do just that during the Civil War led to further splits with the abolitionists who thought the balding firebrand had gone soft. Garrison was understandably skeptical about Abraham Lincoln's resolve (Lincoln himself was a backer of colonization) in ending the great sin, but as Lincoln gradually came around, Garrison was there to embrace the change.
Mayer's biography of Garrison touches on the slavery clash as the main cause of the Civil War, of course, from the 3/5 compromise that gave the South a disproportionate representation that helped keep slavery going, to the push-pull of the carving of the ever-expanding U.S. territory and whether the new states would become slave or free.
Mayer presents too few extensive passages from The Liberator to suit me. He does quote from the publication, but I would have preferred more of Garrison's direct words from the newspaper into which he poured his soul for so long. That said, "All on Fire" is a very long work; 626 packed pages of text that, while readable, is not for quickie mainstream consumption. So it does go on a bit. But that only means we're in it for the long haul, just like Garrison; at journey's end is the satisfaction of doing right.
Garrison's role in the abolition of slavery was a prominent one but, Mayer asserts, is underappreciated today. This mild, personable man from humble beginnings pledged himself to abolition at age 24, eventually editing his own antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, that he would publish for 35 years — lasting through the end of slavery he had so long sought — and more than 1,800 issues. Mayer spends a great deal of time on Garrison's tempestuous early days, when he spoke, wrote and published at great physical risk. He thrillingly escapes from a mob, is jailed, is reviled in the South (of course) but also around Boston, where he did most of his great work. To a staunch defender of slavery, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, he was a dangerous man who wouldn't shut his trap. Garrison was astonishing in his ceaseless agitation and singlemindedness. Surely, many in New England and around the world — Garrison made several trips to England — welcomed and supported him, and Garrison was far from a lone voice in the wilderness. But that voice called many important people to action. Mayer's contention is that Garrison's unbending zealotry today clouds people's minds as to what an influence he really had.
Mayer relates that Garrison's relationship with the world's most famous ex-slave, Frederick Douglas, was a close one for a time but would grow frosty as the Civil War neared, with the bond breaking between the two pre-eminent spokesmen of radical abolition in 1847. Many of the women who would become leading lights in the women's suffrage movement started out as antislavery agitators, and Mayer writes in detail about how Garrison's unusual insistence on involving women in the abolitionist cause (allowing them to attend meetings! Make speeches! Horrors!) created great friction and resistance even among other antislavery people. In fact, the schisms created between people who generally were on the same side takes up big chunks of Mayer's book. Early on, it's the backers of immediatism like Garrison battling colonizationists, who oppose slavery but think they would be doing blacks (and themselves) a favor by sending them back to Africa. Garrison had no patience for such backdoor racism, nor for gradualists who saw slavery as a bane whose elimination could wait for a better time. I wasn't aware of Garrison's "nonresistance" stance, in which he essentially refused to politicize abolition, choosing not to vote at all or compromise his values for minor gains or political expediency. Interestingly, his willingness to do just that during the Civil War led to further splits with the abolitionists who thought the balding firebrand had gone soft. Garrison was understandably skeptical about Abraham Lincoln's resolve (Lincoln himself was a backer of colonization) in ending the great sin, but as Lincoln gradually came around, Garrison was there to embrace the change.
Mayer's biography of Garrison touches on the slavery clash as the main cause of the Civil War, of course, from the 3/5 compromise that gave the South a disproportionate representation that helped keep slavery going, to the push-pull of the carving of the ever-expanding U.S. territory and whether the new states would become slave or free.
Mayer presents too few extensive passages from The Liberator to suit me. He does quote from the publication, but I would have preferred more of Garrison's direct words from the newspaper into which he poured his soul for so long. That said, "All on Fire" is a very long work; 626 packed pages of text that, while readable, is not for quickie mainstream consumption. So it does go on a bit. But that only means we're in it for the long haul, just like Garrison; at journey's end is the satisfaction of doing right.
September 15, 2013
All On Fire is a handbook for abolition. Tolstoy wrote that William Lloyd Garrison deserved to be remembered among “the greatest reformers and promoters of true human progress” (251). Yet, to modern commentators, Garrison’s agitation against slavery appears “shrill, weird, and counterproductive” (xiv). Now that we are all abolitionists, many historians place him on the lunatic fringe and critics accuse him of retarding the movement helped create. Henry Mayer sets out to reconstruct “a less stereotyped version of Garrison’s life” (xvii) in his biography All On Fire.
Born to a deeply religious family in Massachusetts, William found his true love as an apprentice in a Newburyport print shop: the newspaper. Garrison heeded the call to editorship and took charge of his first paper upon being released from his indenture. A Boston Quaker soon opened Garrison’s eyes to the wickedness of slavery and he committed himself to its abolition. Garrison advocacy managed to “shift the political center in a manner seldom matched in our history” (xv). Of all the antebellum proposals for dealing with slavery—three-fifths clause, Missouri Compromise, Free Soil toleration but non-extension, states’ rights, and popular sovereignty—“it was Garrison's program of immediate emancipation through the repudiation of the proslavery constitutional compromises and a union dissolved and reconstructed that prevailed” (xv).
In the 1830s, few wanted immediate emancipation and most thought agitation on the subject would do more harm than good. Garrison’s first task was to awaken the moral conscience of the Northern people who tolerated slavery. He told a friend, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt” (120). To ignite action and melt complacency, Garrison began to dismantle the false philanthropy of colonization. His 1829 Park Street Address and subsequent book condemning colonization “shattered the establishment's liberal and philanthropic self-image” (77) by exposing the underlying racism of repatriation schemes and attacking the cover it gave to politicians. Colonization, he insisted, “would only perpetuate slavery” (103). The growing popularity of the abolitionist societies consigned the decrepit American Colonization Society to the dustbin of irrelevance.
Garrison soon realized that gradual abolition also tended to undercut the moral argument for abolition, for “there could be no just middle ground between slavery and freedom” (68). Despite the political impracticability of immediate abolition, Garrison believed “the question of expedience has nothing to do with that of right” (72). Rather than change his principles, Garrison set about the task of changing minds. Founding The Liberator and the New England Antislavery Society in 1831, Garrison began a crusade for immediate abolition and emancipation lasting over thirty years.
Garrison was a gadfly who “pointedly encouraged conflict” (xiii). He wanted controversy and considered it a vital social process toward reform. As an agitator, Garrison could clarify the perils of wrong or weak choices in a way that many politicians could not (316). He constantly pushed the well-intentioned to firmer statements and action. Garrison knew abolition had to accomplish a moral revolution before it could effect a political one, for “only an aroused public conscience could persuade legislators to withdraw protection from slavery” (65).
Garrison exhorted abolitionists to, “Agitate the subject on every suitable occasion . . . talking will create zeal—zeal, opposition—opposition will drive men to inquiry—inquiry will induce conviction—conviction will lead men to action—action will demand union—and then will follow victory” (126). Endorsed by William Wilberforce and emulating the strategy of British abolitionists, the antislavery societies scattered “tracts like raindrops, over the land, filled with startling facts and melting appeals” (127) and circulated petitions until Congress finally adopted a gag rule to prevent them from being introduced. The Liberator’s role in raising the slavery question created exactly the sort of “moral earthquake” Garrison believed was necessary to end slavery (243).
Garrison’s radical abolitionism provided a foil to Calhoun’s brazen defense of slavery as a positive good. While modern commentators might be tempted to brand them both equally as extremists, Wendell Phillips wrote that while Webster and Clay “shrank from [Clay] and evaded his assertion. Garrison alone . . . met him face to face” (218). Calhoun was determined to hold the union hostage to slavery by threatening secession, but Garrison refused to hold abolition captive to union. To be clear, Garrison was not fundamentally opposed to union. He believed (correctly) that slavery and union could not coexist indefinitely, and preferred disunion to the indefinite perpetuation of slavery. He sought rectification of the Founding sin of the Constitution and desired a new national compact reflecting the ideal of the Declaration. Garrison argued that tacit approval of the soul-corrupting evil of slavery was too high a price to pay for Union. When Webster’s call for “liberty and Union” in 1850 rang hollow in the ears of many Northerners, it was a Garrisonian audience that began to question the viability of union as long as slavery continued.
Despite presenting a generally favorable picture of Garrison, Mayer is conscious of the man’s faults. Garrison’s political and religious iconoclasm on other issues cost him strategic influence in his effort toward abolition. His dabbling in non-traditional theology isolated him from much of mainline protestantism and his insistence on advocating for feminism deterred some would-be supporters. Garrison thought the abolition movement would have to take “a decided stand for all truths, under the conviction that the whole are necessary to the permanent establishment of any single one,” but perhaps he should have been more attentive to Waldo Emerson’s rejoinder that “man can only extend his attention to a certain finite amount of claims” (235). Nevertheless, Garrison managed to relegate some of his views to second-tier status and declined to make his personal views a litmus test for abolitionist society membership.
The Liberator awakened an entire generation through its tireless call to action. In recognition of Garrison’s contribution, Lincoln extended the humble printer an invitation to raise the Union flag once more over Fort Sumter. At the ceremony, Garrison was met by hundreds of freedmen thanking him for his relentless pursuit of abolition and equality. On January 1, 1866, The Liberator’s press stopped running. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Garrison welcomed the year of Jubilee:
“On! till from every vale, and where the mountains rise,
The beacon lights of Liberty shall kindle to the skies!” (599)
Born to a deeply religious family in Massachusetts, William found his true love as an apprentice in a Newburyport print shop: the newspaper. Garrison heeded the call to editorship and took charge of his first paper upon being released from his indenture. A Boston Quaker soon opened Garrison’s eyes to the wickedness of slavery and he committed himself to its abolition. Garrison advocacy managed to “shift the political center in a manner seldom matched in our history” (xv). Of all the antebellum proposals for dealing with slavery—three-fifths clause, Missouri Compromise, Free Soil toleration but non-extension, states’ rights, and popular sovereignty—“it was Garrison's program of immediate emancipation through the repudiation of the proslavery constitutional compromises and a union dissolved and reconstructed that prevailed” (xv).
In the 1830s, few wanted immediate emancipation and most thought agitation on the subject would do more harm than good. Garrison’s first task was to awaken the moral conscience of the Northern people who tolerated slavery. He told a friend, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt” (120). To ignite action and melt complacency, Garrison began to dismantle the false philanthropy of colonization. His 1829 Park Street Address and subsequent book condemning colonization “shattered the establishment's liberal and philanthropic self-image” (77) by exposing the underlying racism of repatriation schemes and attacking the cover it gave to politicians. Colonization, he insisted, “would only perpetuate slavery” (103). The growing popularity of the abolitionist societies consigned the decrepit American Colonization Society to the dustbin of irrelevance.
Garrison soon realized that gradual abolition also tended to undercut the moral argument for abolition, for “there could be no just middle ground between slavery and freedom” (68). Despite the political impracticability of immediate abolition, Garrison believed “the question of expedience has nothing to do with that of right” (72). Rather than change his principles, Garrison set about the task of changing minds. Founding The Liberator and the New England Antislavery Society in 1831, Garrison began a crusade for immediate abolition and emancipation lasting over thirty years.
Garrison was a gadfly who “pointedly encouraged conflict” (xiii). He wanted controversy and considered it a vital social process toward reform. As an agitator, Garrison could clarify the perils of wrong or weak choices in a way that many politicians could not (316). He constantly pushed the well-intentioned to firmer statements and action. Garrison knew abolition had to accomplish a moral revolution before it could effect a political one, for “only an aroused public conscience could persuade legislators to withdraw protection from slavery” (65).
Garrison exhorted abolitionists to, “Agitate the subject on every suitable occasion . . . talking will create zeal—zeal, opposition—opposition will drive men to inquiry—inquiry will induce conviction—conviction will lead men to action—action will demand union—and then will follow victory” (126). Endorsed by William Wilberforce and emulating the strategy of British abolitionists, the antislavery societies scattered “tracts like raindrops, over the land, filled with startling facts and melting appeals” (127) and circulated petitions until Congress finally adopted a gag rule to prevent them from being introduced. The Liberator’s role in raising the slavery question created exactly the sort of “moral earthquake” Garrison believed was necessary to end slavery (243).
Garrison’s radical abolitionism provided a foil to Calhoun’s brazen defense of slavery as a positive good. While modern commentators might be tempted to brand them both equally as extremists, Wendell Phillips wrote that while Webster and Clay “shrank from [Clay] and evaded his assertion. Garrison alone . . . met him face to face” (218). Calhoun was determined to hold the union hostage to slavery by threatening secession, but Garrison refused to hold abolition captive to union. To be clear, Garrison was not fundamentally opposed to union. He believed (correctly) that slavery and union could not coexist indefinitely, and preferred disunion to the indefinite perpetuation of slavery. He sought rectification of the Founding sin of the Constitution and desired a new national compact reflecting the ideal of the Declaration. Garrison argued that tacit approval of the soul-corrupting evil of slavery was too high a price to pay for Union. When Webster’s call for “liberty and Union” in 1850 rang hollow in the ears of many Northerners, it was a Garrisonian audience that began to question the viability of union as long as slavery continued.
Despite presenting a generally favorable picture of Garrison, Mayer is conscious of the man’s faults. Garrison’s political and religious iconoclasm on other issues cost him strategic influence in his effort toward abolition. His dabbling in non-traditional theology isolated him from much of mainline protestantism and his insistence on advocating for feminism deterred some would-be supporters. Garrison thought the abolition movement would have to take “a decided stand for all truths, under the conviction that the whole are necessary to the permanent establishment of any single one,” but perhaps he should have been more attentive to Waldo Emerson’s rejoinder that “man can only extend his attention to a certain finite amount of claims” (235). Nevertheless, Garrison managed to relegate some of his views to second-tier status and declined to make his personal views a litmus test for abolitionist society membership.
The Liberator awakened an entire generation through its tireless call to action. In recognition of Garrison’s contribution, Lincoln extended the humble printer an invitation to raise the Union flag once more over Fort Sumter. At the ceremony, Garrison was met by hundreds of freedmen thanking him for his relentless pursuit of abolition and equality. On January 1, 1866, The Liberator’s press stopped running. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Garrison welcomed the year of Jubilee:
“On! till from every vale, and where the mountains rise,
The beacon lights of Liberty shall kindle to the skies!” (599)
January 5, 2022
Henry Mayer’s All on Fire revisits the life of William Lloyd Garrison, antebellum America’s preeminent abolitionist. Mayer revises the common portrait of Garrison as an unreasonable fanatic who hurt rather than helped the abolition movement. From his early 20s as a young printer onward, Garrison put his talents and formidable energy to agitating against slavery: first as a columnist in Baltimore (where his writings earned him a brief stint in prison), then in Boston as editor of The Liberator, the country’s leading abolitionist paper, then as the movement’s unofficial leader. Through it all, Garrison weathered legal prosecution, ridicule, infighting, death threats and, in 1835 a full-scale mob that tried to murder him. One comes away impressed with Garrison’s ceaseless energy, physical courage and moral certainty that’s easier to appreciate it hindsight. At a time when abolitionism was a fringe even within the antislavery movement, he proved decades ahead of his time: he rejected colonization of freed Blacks to Africa, excoriated the “containment” of slavery through compromise and denounced gradual emancipation as a half-measure. Mayer’s portrait is clearly admiring, though he doesn’t stint on showing Garrison’s beliefs that ranged from eccentric (his embrace of various quack health fads) to counterproductive (burning a copy of the Constitution at one speech, describing it as a “covenant with death”). Certainly it’s easy to see why other abolitionists, from Wendell Phillips to Frederick Douglass, grew disillusioned with Garrison’s refusal to vote, disparagement of armed slave resistance or, in one speech, even advocated the secession of free states from the slaveholding Union. But Garrison’s fiery speeches, cutting rhetoric and stubborn clarity helped mainstream the idea that all men (and women - he was an outspoken feminist at a time when that was even more a fringe issue) are created equal, achieving apotheosis the Union victory in the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. Garrison went to his grave having seen his lifelong campaign vindicated, but recognizing that the postwar status quo was better only by degree. A remarkable biography of a figure often vilified or overlooked, but worthy of greater recognition as a model for radical activism.
March 1, 2012
This is another case of a book deserving five stars for accomplishing everything it could possibly really do. If you power through all 630 pages of this, there will be no need for you to ever read a book specifically about William Lloyd Garrison ever again. You will have covered the man, thoroughly. And it reads well too- this isn't a history book, really, it's a biography and written for a general audience, so Mayer takes a certain literary license in his storytelling. It was a welcome change for me, since academic history books aren't usually written to pull at the heartstrings, exactly...I admit, I got a little misty eyed at certain parts of this book. Where you'd expect, you know, Frederick Douglass standing up for the first time to tell his story at a meeting led by Garrison on Nantucket, the march of the 54th Massachusetts down to the docks to join the fight, Garrison meeting freed slaves in Charleston right after the war ended. It also was really fascinating to me how modern Garrison and his friends seemed. They were talking about human rights, civil rights for all, way back when. They were freedom riding around Massachusetts in the 1840s, trying to integrate public transit. Pretty impressive. There were still some issues I was a little confused about at the end of the book (for example, if Garrison didn't want to have anything to do with politics, then how exactly did he think slavery was actually going to get abolished, anyway? Did he think millions of people would just have a simultaneous change of heart?) but I don't think my confusion was the fault of the book, I think Garrison was just somewhat inexplicable sometimes. People are funny. Even in a 600 page biography, you aren't ever going to be able to explain a person completely.
Also, to be fair, this is not a history of the abolition movement. It is a biography of Garrison. There are a lot of other facets of abolitionism that are not covered here because there was so much of Garrison.
Reading history like this makes me proud to be a Mainer/Massachusettsite (they were the same state until 1820 after all).
Also, to be fair, this is not a history of the abolition movement. It is a biography of Garrison. There are a lot of other facets of abolitionism that are not covered here because there was so much of Garrison.
Reading history like this makes me proud to be a Mainer/Massachusettsite (they were the same state until 1820 after all).
August 12, 2014
The book deserves five stars for its scholarship, fine writing, and importance of its subject, William Lloyd Garrison, who started an antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, when almost nobody thought slavery should be abolished. Garrison considered slavery to be evil, and he wanted slavery abolished immediately, rather than gradually. This ideal led him to be called a radical, and even people in favour of abolition considered him to be too extreme. He had no patience for those who, even if they knew slavery was wrong, still thought slavery should be maintained for political expediency. By the end of his life, Garrison was a witness to Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the Thirteen Amendment.
The book is especially good at documenting Garrison's early career, when he and his few supporters faced mob attacks at his speaking engagements, and when few established churches or politicians gave Garrison and radical abolitionists support. The book aims to restore Garrison's reputation, which has been damaged by criticism that he was an egotist who wanted to destroy America's institutions.
Indeed, he did want to destroy America: he wanted to destroy a nation that allowed slavery to continue. He wanted a new America that treated all people as equal, as the Declaration of Independence claimed.
The United States needs someone like Garrison to agitate for the revocation of the Second Amendment.
The book is especially good at documenting Garrison's early career, when he and his few supporters faced mob attacks at his speaking engagements, and when few established churches or politicians gave Garrison and radical abolitionists support. The book aims to restore Garrison's reputation, which has been damaged by criticism that he was an egotist who wanted to destroy America's institutions.
Indeed, he did want to destroy America: he wanted to destroy a nation that allowed slavery to continue. He wanted a new America that treated all people as equal, as the Declaration of Independence claimed.
The United States needs someone like Garrison to agitate for the revocation of the Second Amendment.
September 30, 2013
This is quite a tome but well written and moves fast. If anybody should believe that standing up for something is pointless but still feels compelled to do so than this book is a must read.
Garrison was a man who stuck to a single point: immediate, unqualifed abolition of slavery. He faced abuse, was lassoed and almost linched.
The abolition movement was always there but, until Garrison came along, it existed beneath the surface and was considered too emotional and volatile an issue to address. He brought it to the surface. He started out in near poverty circumstances but his belief carried him forward.
There were those who felt as he felt but when he started the Liberator his rhetoric and editorials inflamed public opinion and made people uncomfortable with their lukewarm feelings about it.
Garrison made northerners feel guilty about their temporizing with slavery. People could no longer simply wish slavery to go away. They were forced to talk about it. They were forced to accept or deny it. Complacency over such a visceral issue was no longer allowed. In so doing, over a span of thirty years, Garrison took the issue of slavery from a topic one did not talk about in polite society to one where everybody began talking about it and began taking sides.
It was a cause. It was a fight. It was ongoing and Garrison never flagged in agitating for his fellow man. He agitated for his fellow woman. When most other men thought that women should take a backseat in politics and momentous issues he supported the first real suffragettes in America. Where slavery was concerned, he would not let it die or go away. He was virtually alone when he began but, by the time he died, he counted many among his friends and many among the converted.
Garrison was a man who stuck to a single point: immediate, unqualifed abolition of slavery. He faced abuse, was lassoed and almost linched.
The abolition movement was always there but, until Garrison came along, it existed beneath the surface and was considered too emotional and volatile an issue to address. He brought it to the surface. He started out in near poverty circumstances but his belief carried him forward.
There were those who felt as he felt but when he started the Liberator his rhetoric and editorials inflamed public opinion and made people uncomfortable with their lukewarm feelings about it.
Garrison made northerners feel guilty about their temporizing with slavery. People could no longer simply wish slavery to go away. They were forced to talk about it. They were forced to accept or deny it. Complacency over such a visceral issue was no longer allowed. In so doing, over a span of thirty years, Garrison took the issue of slavery from a topic one did not talk about in polite society to one where everybody began talking about it and began taking sides.
It was a cause. It was a fight. It was ongoing and Garrison never flagged in agitating for his fellow man. He agitated for his fellow woman. When most other men thought that women should take a backseat in politics and momentous issues he supported the first real suffragettes in America. Where slavery was concerned, he would not let it die or go away. He was virtually alone when he began but, by the time he died, he counted many among his friends and many among the converted.
January 9, 2009
The vivid writing makes this history particularly exciting, not just the high drama of arson at Pennsylvania Hall, but *all* the political and ideological infighting. If you, like me, find abolitionism fascinating, though, I also recommend _The Liberator_, the beautiful biography of Garrison by my late advisor, Jack Thomas. One warning about _All on Fire_ for those who actually read citations: the format is the most annoying among all the options, I mean the one with no footnote numbers and no page numbers, just boldface excerpts of the quotations. I choose to believe the style was forced upon Mayer and not the preference of his individual conscience. (Publishers, why do you not end this scourge?)
January 7, 2019
Finished my first book for the 2019 Goodreads challenge, a somewhat windy but eminently enjoyable William Lloyd Garrison biography. I learned almost nothing about this feisty, balls-out gent in school, but I'd seen him referenced in other antebellum and Civil-War era books, so when I realized he had a book all to himself by an author whose previous work I had enjoyed, I leapt on it.
Mr. Garrison was a stone-cold hardass. He wasn't perfect, mind, and occasionally veered into the obliviously paternalistic when it came to how best to help the freed slaves in the post-emancipation years, but the man never wavered in his convictions, and he wasn't afraid to speak truth to power and call slavery what it was, which was a terrible sin and moral blight and festering stain of hypocrisy on the lofty, golden promise of the country. He wasn't afraid to tell Henry Ward Beecher, possibly the most powerful and popular preacher in the country, where to stick his bombastic bloviations when he tried to sniff and temporize about the issue. Anybody who's willing to go to jail at twenty-five for their beliefs has one gleaming, brass set, and the puling, so-called "activists" of today, who shy from anything stronger than a half-assed text to Resistbot because they have anxiety or don't want to risk the dead-end retail drudgery that doesn't even offer the grim comfort of financial security, could stand to take a few lessons.
Mr. Garrison was a stone-cold hardass. He wasn't perfect, mind, and occasionally veered into the obliviously paternalistic when it came to how best to help the freed slaves in the post-emancipation years, but the man never wavered in his convictions, and he wasn't afraid to speak truth to power and call slavery what it was, which was a terrible sin and moral blight and festering stain of hypocrisy on the lofty, golden promise of the country. He wasn't afraid to tell Henry Ward Beecher, possibly the most powerful and popular preacher in the country, where to stick his bombastic bloviations when he tried to sniff and temporize about the issue. Anybody who's willing to go to jail at twenty-five for their beliefs has one gleaming, brass set, and the puling, so-called "activists" of today, who shy from anything stronger than a half-assed text to Resistbot because they have anxiety or don't want to risk the dead-end retail drudgery that doesn't even offer the grim comfort of financial security, could stand to take a few lessons.
August 9, 2021
This was a great biography. I wrote an earlier post suggesting that it was a little dull, and it was for a bit when covering the 1820s and 1830s when the abolitionist movement was relatively small. The book really picked up steam as the movement did, and Garrison comes off very admirable and impressive.
May 16, 2018
William Lloyd Garrison is one of those nineteenth-century American figures about whom most people know a little, realizing they are important to American history, but whom few can discuss with expertise. Into that same category I’d put men like Henry Clay, John Fremont, perhaps even Stephen Douglas, and quite a few others. Garrison is probably even more neglected than those figures. But this book is an excellent corrective, not only showing the importance of Garrison for his time, but showing us how his principles apply today in a similarly fraught moral climate, and offering lessons in how society’s powerful approach, or fail to approach, moral issues, then and now.
The title comes from Garrison’s mantra, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” The book’s author, Henry Mayer (who died suddenly in 2000, only two years after this book was published, and a year short of sixty), introduces his subject with a look back over past decades. He says his purpose is to rescue Garrison’s reputation, not from those who view him as a fanatic, since by most definitions he was, in fact, a fanatic, but from those, the majority of historians over the modern period, who have viewed him as a lunatic. As Mayer says, “Our political culture is not kind to those who challenge its norms, and as abolition has come to seem inevitable, so has Garrison’s nonconformist agitation come to seem shrill, weird, and counterproductive.” But abolition was not inevitable, because the arc of the moral universe does not bend, on this earth, toward justice unless it is bent by human action, and it was that action that Garrison supplied in America, more than any other person.
My only complaint about this book, which manages to be gripping despite the enormous amount of detail and large cast of characters, is that it never really tells us why Garrison became a fanatic abolitionist. It may simply be that information on his early life, or his thoughts in early life, is lacking to the historian. Or maybe it is not complicated, any more than one has to explain a man intervening to stop a child being beaten in the street—it is just what someone of a certain moral makeup and upbringing does. Maybe it was that combined with his personality: “Opposition always intensified his defiance and heightened his own sense of worth. Like his mother, Garrison took pleasure in feeling embattled.” At the end of the day, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter, and perhaps there is no simple explanation.
Garrison was born in 1805 of recent immigrant British stock, in a town north of Boston. His father was a wastrel merchant seaman who abandoned the family; his mother was a devout Baptist who impressed her Christian faith on her son, a faith which he never lost but which became ever more personalized and inward-driven during his life. At thirteen, he became apprenticed to a printer in town, a fortunate event, for his spent his entire life in the trade, able to spread his message without having to use intermediaries—similar, perhaps, to being able to use the Internet today, although there was less of a cacophony with which to compete back then. Newspapers, of course, were the lifeblood of American cities and towns of the early nineteenth century, commonly a mixture of political action, reprinted material, bad poetry and mediocre fiction, and the ability to disseminate knowledge and opinion was invaluable to Garrison’s cause. So, at twenty-one, Garrison started his own generalist newspaper, but lasted only six months before being effectively forced out because of local politics, whereupon he moved to Boston, the center of his professional existence for the rest of his life.
Although he was firmly Baptist, Garrison fell in with the circles around Lyman Beecher, the noted Presbyterian minister. Temperance, not slavery, was the issue of the day, and Garrison was soon asked to edit a temperance-focused newspaper. By chance, Garrison was introduced to a Quaker harness maker, Benjamin Lundy, who, incensed by the sight of slaves being sold in Virginia, had taught himself printing and started an anti-slavery newspaper, the "Genius of Universal Emancipation." While the northern states had abolished slavery, that movement had no impact on the southern states where there were larger numbers of slaves, and in practice only the Quakers cared about abolition. This lack of interest was both because the plain text of the Constitution guaranteed the right to chattel slavery, and because, as Mayer notes, “For most Americans, however, a fatalism had set in that regarded slavery as an immutable feature of the landscape, an unlooked-for evil that had been fastened upon them by generations long past and whose resolution had to be left to enlightened generations not yet born.”
Lundy’s purpose, therefore, was to force Americans to face up to the reality of slavery, leading them to take action rather than ignoring its evil, and Garrison immediately became a convert to the cause, never looking back. He began by editing the Genius, in 1829, joining Lundy in full-time anti-slavery activism through speeches and organizing as well. There was little interest among Boston’s educated classes. On the other hand, there was initially little opposition, since this was a new thing. Mostly, there was indifference—people recognized that slavery was bad, but they preferred not to talk about it, holding fast to the fatalism that Mayer identifies. To the extent that there was any organized focus on addressing slavery, it was through the American Colonization Society, which wanted to ship American blacks back to Africa (to modern-day Liberia, mostly). The ACS wanted to ship all black people back to Africa, free and slave, and was even supported by some slaveholders who thought getting rid of free blacks would help preserve the system of slavery. Garrison quickly rejected the ACS’s views, which were irredeemably racist, and demanded immediate, unconditional emancipation, a creed that became known as “immediatism.”
Immediatism was quickly identified by those in power in the North and in the South as a threat to their interests. So, already in 1830, Garrison was prosecuted for criminal libel in Baltimore, for allegedly defaming a Massachusetts ship captain by printing details of his shipments of slaves. This was part of a burgeoning legal campaign to suppress anti-slavery speech in the South, coupled with informal actions to suppress such speech in the North. In the South this was driven by an increasing fear of slave revolts, pumped up by a newfound sense of radicalism among slaves, such as that put into print by David Walker’s Appeal, and fed (in the following year) by Nat Turner’s rebellion. In the North it was driven by “commercial interests” afraid of disrupting trade. Garrison was sentenced to six months in jail, of which he served nearly two months, in comfortable conditions, before an anti-slavery New York philanthropist, Lewis Tappan, paid the considerable fine—and offered more money to support the "Genius."
It doesn’t take much to realize that these same suppression techniques haven’t changed in modern times, and are used today against Garrison’s moral successors. Witness, for example, the indictment of pro-life activists such as David Daleiden for activities that would be celebrated as “whistleblowing” if done in the service of leftist causes. The Left today, and for the past fifty years, has controlled the courts (and, in many states, the entire justice system) with respect to social issues, just as the moral equivalents of today’s leftist judges controlled the courts in the antebellum South. Such control allows suppression of dissenting viewpoints by harnessing the might of the State, and has no good response short of violence. On the other hand, I suppose we should be grateful that we did not see, at least not yet, the huge expansion of such abuses that would inevitably have characterized a Hillary Clinton administration.
Conservatives, though, should not congratulate themselves overmuch on their apparent heroic parallels to Garrison. Yes, pro-life activists are morally indistinguishable from Garrison, and equally deserving of our praise. But other bitterly contested conservative stands today, such as against same-sex “marriage,” are less clearly analogous, though also driven by religious beliefs. The abolition of slavery was something in which Christian and Enlightenment beliefs were aligned, even if non-Christian and Deist Enlightenment figures like Thomas Jefferson only paid lip service to ending slavery. And to the extent that the abolition of slavery is tied to the emancipatory drive that is part of the philosophy of the Enlightenment much more than of Christianity, and which is nearing its logical atomized conclusion today, it fits better with the program of the Left. Thus, an honest historical observer would place Garrison mostly on the Left of his day, not on the Right, although that’s analogy, not typology. His religiosity masks this point, given that the Left has abandoned any form of real religiosity (though today’s Right is well on its way to doing so as well). Really, I think, given changed circumstances, other than pro-life advocates, nobody today can correctly claim Garrison as a moral predecessor.
That aside, and back to history, Lundy had moved on to other forms of activism by the time Garrison got out of jail, so Garrison went around speaking and trying to raise money for a new newspaper. By this time, people in the North were mostly hostile, or at least the ruling classes were. The doors of lecture halls and churches were shut to him, so he ended up speaking in barns and warehouses. He was viewed as a dangerous, fanatic agitator by the established churches and by the merchants who dominated Northern society, who were afraid of Garrison’s rocking the boat of commerce with the South. They correctly viewed him as a man who cared nothing for their pocketbooks, or his own pocketbook, and, more philosophically, who thought that if the Constitution guaranteed the rights to slavery, that was a failing in the Constitution which must give way to the moral absolutes Garrison championed. Thus, the rich and powerful saw him as a danger to the Union and as a man with a crazy glint in his eye. Still, getting support from black leaders in Boston and Philadelphia, some of whom were wealthy merchants themselves, Garrison managed, in January, 1831, to put out the first issue of "The Liberator"—which he would publish for thirty-five years, until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Few newspapers have been as influential.
"The Liberator" was meant to persuade. Unlike today’s media, which pretend neutrality while aggressively advancing a political agenda, nineteenth-century newspapers had an editorial slant which directed the content of the paper. And while for decades Garrison sometimes emphasized one set of issues and other times another, or adopted varying positions on pacifism or social changes other than slavery, he never wavered in his core demand, based explicitly on his Christian principles—immediate emancipation for all African Americans, and their equal treatment both in society and at law. But his newspaper was only one part of his strategy and his work—the other part was organized activism, conducted through the new American Anti-Slavery Society, replacing the old ACS, which Garrison and his allies effectively destroyed as a lukewarm, worthless tool in the existential fight against slavery. The new AAS cried that “Slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God” and demanded its “immediate abandonment without expatriation.” They destroyed the ACS by gradually eroding its support, including through the publication of a book-length polemic by Garrison, "Thoughts on African Colonization" (they were not favorable thoughts), until, abandoned in a middle ground nobody wanted to occupy, it became totally irrelevant except as a slaveholder’s front (although it only was officially dissolved in 1964).
As is well known, even through the Civil War and for that matter beyond, most white people opposed to slavery thought that black people were inferior, but Garrison from the very beginning maintained without flinching the unpopular and socially isolating view that a black man was every bit the equal of a white man, in all ways and without distinction. In this and all his views, Garrison never trimmed his sails. For him, the truth was what the truth was, and his job was not find a political compromise, but to bring others to the truth. Therefore, Garrison was, almost always, opposed to political action. Not only did "The Liberator" rarely cover politics, Garrison and most of his allies in the AAS refused to vote at all, instead pressing “moral suasion” (although this issue caused a variety of splits in later years, with some third parties being formed and failing miserably).
Garrison grew to be violently opposed to the Constitution, at one point publicly burning a copy. He was not philosophically opposed to the Constitution in the abstract, but rather followed the logical path that if, as was generally agreed, the text of the Constitution protected slavery, and slavery must be destroyed, the Constitution, if it could not be amended (which it could not be), would have to go. And, again logically, the only mechanism for that would be “disunion”—the formation of two new countries. This was the position Garrison espoused prior to the Civil War: “Abolition or Disunion.” (By the same token, retail political action was pointless, since it was never going to lead to either.) This was a radical position, but of course, Garrison was right, perhaps a lesson for us in these days of fraying ties and massively incompatible and increasingly divergent positions among different groups of Americans.
Mayer covers all this, and the subsequent thirty years, in great but interesting detail. He discusses Garrison’s trips to, and alliances with, British abolitionists, who (again led exclusively by vigorous Christians) had managed to obtain abolition in Britain and its West Indian colonies, through Parliamentary action. He met with the aged William Wilberforce and the main English abolitionists, including George Thompson. Garrison noted that in England black people did not have the social debilities they had in America, reinforcing Garrison’s vigorous distaste for the near universal view of Americans to the contrary. Mayer covers the mob violence repeatedly directed at Garrison, in Boston and Philadelphia. Along the way Garrison got married and had several children—despite his well-deserved reputation as a firebrand, in person Garrison was mild, humorous and fun to be around, and even his speeches were fiery more in content than in delivery, although they always had a glowing iron core. He worked with scores of other influential anti-slavery activists, white and black, including Frederick Douglass (with whom he ultimately came into some conflict) and Harriet Tubman. Ultimately, Mayer covers the gradual dominance of abolitionist sentiment in the North, the hardening of Southern defense of slavery, the run-up to the Civil War, including Bleeding Kansas, the Fugitive Slave Law, Dred Scott, the disintegration of the Whigs, the elections of 1856 and 1860, and the Civil War itself, all viewed through the lens of Garrison’s life.
"All on Fire" concludes with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment (and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth), and Garrison’s subsequent closure of "The Liberator," its purpose accomplished. He also covers the old abolitionist’s remaining years, in which he was often viewed as suspect by his old allies because he regarded the Liberator’s, and the AAS’s, goal accomplished, and did not view new “political” matters relating to Reconstruction, though very important, as having the same moral gravity as abolition itself (true enough, though also a failure to anticipate that abolition would be far from enough to accomplish complete emancipation for African Americans). He died in 1877, full of years and with a happy family, a man who set his mind to a God-given task and accomplished the charge he had been given.
While all this is important history, we can see that some of the challenges Garrison faced are still faced today by those who engage in moral crusades, all of which are conservative in content (every single modern Left crusade, except, perhaps, certain ones related to African Americans, is mere cannibalistic identity politics or insanity lacking any actual moral content). Most notably, we can see that it is still an uphill battle to challenge the interests of the powerful. In Garrison’s time, the powerful were concentrated in the upper classes, in business and in the mainline churches. Today more power is located in a variety of other groups who get are able to decide what is “news”; or who can direct opprobrium onto disfavored groups through social media and its censorship; or who, as I mention above, control the courts; or who are professional agitators, such as the extremist hate group, the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. Most powerful of all is when these combine with big corporations, either because their leaders want to virtue signal or because their leaders perceive it as in their economic interest to cooperate, to gain business or to avoid attacks that may lead to lost sales.
Thus, for example, pressure groups demanding acceptance and celebration of homosexual “marriage” have been very successful at vicious campaigns to restrict religious freedom, such as the notorious and successful effort to prevent Mike Pence’s Indiana from passing a “religious freedom restoration act,” a RFRA, identical to the federal law that has been in effect for decades. Commercial leaders such as those who opposed Garrison were instrumental in that success, viewing anyone who held Christian beliefs as distasteful, and being deathly afraid of their acquaintances in Left-dominated areas looking down their noses at them. At the time of Pence’s disgraceful knuckling under to such pressure, I was on the board of directors of a small publicly traded bank, and the spineless sniveling of the other board members was really a sight to behold. They (none of whom would describe themselves as Left) crawled all over each other to complain about RFRA and to spend money advertising the bank’s implicit repudiation of it, even though certainly very few of the customers cared what the bank thought, and those that did care most definitely heavily favored RFRA. No matter—virtue signaling was the order of the day, and the same men (with one token woman) would have turned up their noses at William Garrison in just the same way.
[Review completes as first comment.]
The title comes from Garrison’s mantra, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” The book’s author, Henry Mayer (who died suddenly in 2000, only two years after this book was published, and a year short of sixty), introduces his subject with a look back over past decades. He says his purpose is to rescue Garrison’s reputation, not from those who view him as a fanatic, since by most definitions he was, in fact, a fanatic, but from those, the majority of historians over the modern period, who have viewed him as a lunatic. As Mayer says, “Our political culture is not kind to those who challenge its norms, and as abolition has come to seem inevitable, so has Garrison’s nonconformist agitation come to seem shrill, weird, and counterproductive.” But abolition was not inevitable, because the arc of the moral universe does not bend, on this earth, toward justice unless it is bent by human action, and it was that action that Garrison supplied in America, more than any other person.
My only complaint about this book, which manages to be gripping despite the enormous amount of detail and large cast of characters, is that it never really tells us why Garrison became a fanatic abolitionist. It may simply be that information on his early life, or his thoughts in early life, is lacking to the historian. Or maybe it is not complicated, any more than one has to explain a man intervening to stop a child being beaten in the street—it is just what someone of a certain moral makeup and upbringing does. Maybe it was that combined with his personality: “Opposition always intensified his defiance and heightened his own sense of worth. Like his mother, Garrison took pleasure in feeling embattled.” At the end of the day, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter, and perhaps there is no simple explanation.
Garrison was born in 1805 of recent immigrant British stock, in a town north of Boston. His father was a wastrel merchant seaman who abandoned the family; his mother was a devout Baptist who impressed her Christian faith on her son, a faith which he never lost but which became ever more personalized and inward-driven during his life. At thirteen, he became apprenticed to a printer in town, a fortunate event, for his spent his entire life in the trade, able to spread his message without having to use intermediaries—similar, perhaps, to being able to use the Internet today, although there was less of a cacophony with which to compete back then. Newspapers, of course, were the lifeblood of American cities and towns of the early nineteenth century, commonly a mixture of political action, reprinted material, bad poetry and mediocre fiction, and the ability to disseminate knowledge and opinion was invaluable to Garrison’s cause. So, at twenty-one, Garrison started his own generalist newspaper, but lasted only six months before being effectively forced out because of local politics, whereupon he moved to Boston, the center of his professional existence for the rest of his life.
Although he was firmly Baptist, Garrison fell in with the circles around Lyman Beecher, the noted Presbyterian minister. Temperance, not slavery, was the issue of the day, and Garrison was soon asked to edit a temperance-focused newspaper. By chance, Garrison was introduced to a Quaker harness maker, Benjamin Lundy, who, incensed by the sight of slaves being sold in Virginia, had taught himself printing and started an anti-slavery newspaper, the "Genius of Universal Emancipation." While the northern states had abolished slavery, that movement had no impact on the southern states where there were larger numbers of slaves, and in practice only the Quakers cared about abolition. This lack of interest was both because the plain text of the Constitution guaranteed the right to chattel slavery, and because, as Mayer notes, “For most Americans, however, a fatalism had set in that regarded slavery as an immutable feature of the landscape, an unlooked-for evil that had been fastened upon them by generations long past and whose resolution had to be left to enlightened generations not yet born.”
Lundy’s purpose, therefore, was to force Americans to face up to the reality of slavery, leading them to take action rather than ignoring its evil, and Garrison immediately became a convert to the cause, never looking back. He began by editing the Genius, in 1829, joining Lundy in full-time anti-slavery activism through speeches and organizing as well. There was little interest among Boston’s educated classes. On the other hand, there was initially little opposition, since this was a new thing. Mostly, there was indifference—people recognized that slavery was bad, but they preferred not to talk about it, holding fast to the fatalism that Mayer identifies. To the extent that there was any organized focus on addressing slavery, it was through the American Colonization Society, which wanted to ship American blacks back to Africa (to modern-day Liberia, mostly). The ACS wanted to ship all black people back to Africa, free and slave, and was even supported by some slaveholders who thought getting rid of free blacks would help preserve the system of slavery. Garrison quickly rejected the ACS’s views, which were irredeemably racist, and demanded immediate, unconditional emancipation, a creed that became known as “immediatism.”
Immediatism was quickly identified by those in power in the North and in the South as a threat to their interests. So, already in 1830, Garrison was prosecuted for criminal libel in Baltimore, for allegedly defaming a Massachusetts ship captain by printing details of his shipments of slaves. This was part of a burgeoning legal campaign to suppress anti-slavery speech in the South, coupled with informal actions to suppress such speech in the North. In the South this was driven by an increasing fear of slave revolts, pumped up by a newfound sense of radicalism among slaves, such as that put into print by David Walker’s Appeal, and fed (in the following year) by Nat Turner’s rebellion. In the North it was driven by “commercial interests” afraid of disrupting trade. Garrison was sentenced to six months in jail, of which he served nearly two months, in comfortable conditions, before an anti-slavery New York philanthropist, Lewis Tappan, paid the considerable fine—and offered more money to support the "Genius."
It doesn’t take much to realize that these same suppression techniques haven’t changed in modern times, and are used today against Garrison’s moral successors. Witness, for example, the indictment of pro-life activists such as David Daleiden for activities that would be celebrated as “whistleblowing” if done in the service of leftist causes. The Left today, and for the past fifty years, has controlled the courts (and, in many states, the entire justice system) with respect to social issues, just as the moral equivalents of today’s leftist judges controlled the courts in the antebellum South. Such control allows suppression of dissenting viewpoints by harnessing the might of the State, and has no good response short of violence. On the other hand, I suppose we should be grateful that we did not see, at least not yet, the huge expansion of such abuses that would inevitably have characterized a Hillary Clinton administration.
Conservatives, though, should not congratulate themselves overmuch on their apparent heroic parallels to Garrison. Yes, pro-life activists are morally indistinguishable from Garrison, and equally deserving of our praise. But other bitterly contested conservative stands today, such as against same-sex “marriage,” are less clearly analogous, though also driven by religious beliefs. The abolition of slavery was something in which Christian and Enlightenment beliefs were aligned, even if non-Christian and Deist Enlightenment figures like Thomas Jefferson only paid lip service to ending slavery. And to the extent that the abolition of slavery is tied to the emancipatory drive that is part of the philosophy of the Enlightenment much more than of Christianity, and which is nearing its logical atomized conclusion today, it fits better with the program of the Left. Thus, an honest historical observer would place Garrison mostly on the Left of his day, not on the Right, although that’s analogy, not typology. His religiosity masks this point, given that the Left has abandoned any form of real religiosity (though today’s Right is well on its way to doing so as well). Really, I think, given changed circumstances, other than pro-life advocates, nobody today can correctly claim Garrison as a moral predecessor.
That aside, and back to history, Lundy had moved on to other forms of activism by the time Garrison got out of jail, so Garrison went around speaking and trying to raise money for a new newspaper. By this time, people in the North were mostly hostile, or at least the ruling classes were. The doors of lecture halls and churches were shut to him, so he ended up speaking in barns and warehouses. He was viewed as a dangerous, fanatic agitator by the established churches and by the merchants who dominated Northern society, who were afraid of Garrison’s rocking the boat of commerce with the South. They correctly viewed him as a man who cared nothing for their pocketbooks, or his own pocketbook, and, more philosophically, who thought that if the Constitution guaranteed the rights to slavery, that was a failing in the Constitution which must give way to the moral absolutes Garrison championed. Thus, the rich and powerful saw him as a danger to the Union and as a man with a crazy glint in his eye. Still, getting support from black leaders in Boston and Philadelphia, some of whom were wealthy merchants themselves, Garrison managed, in January, 1831, to put out the first issue of "The Liberator"—which he would publish for thirty-five years, until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Few newspapers have been as influential.
"The Liberator" was meant to persuade. Unlike today’s media, which pretend neutrality while aggressively advancing a political agenda, nineteenth-century newspapers had an editorial slant which directed the content of the paper. And while for decades Garrison sometimes emphasized one set of issues and other times another, or adopted varying positions on pacifism or social changes other than slavery, he never wavered in his core demand, based explicitly on his Christian principles—immediate emancipation for all African Americans, and their equal treatment both in society and at law. But his newspaper was only one part of his strategy and his work—the other part was organized activism, conducted through the new American Anti-Slavery Society, replacing the old ACS, which Garrison and his allies effectively destroyed as a lukewarm, worthless tool in the existential fight against slavery. The new AAS cried that “Slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God” and demanded its “immediate abandonment without expatriation.” They destroyed the ACS by gradually eroding its support, including through the publication of a book-length polemic by Garrison, "Thoughts on African Colonization" (they were not favorable thoughts), until, abandoned in a middle ground nobody wanted to occupy, it became totally irrelevant except as a slaveholder’s front (although it only was officially dissolved in 1964).
As is well known, even through the Civil War and for that matter beyond, most white people opposed to slavery thought that black people were inferior, but Garrison from the very beginning maintained without flinching the unpopular and socially isolating view that a black man was every bit the equal of a white man, in all ways and without distinction. In this and all his views, Garrison never trimmed his sails. For him, the truth was what the truth was, and his job was not find a political compromise, but to bring others to the truth. Therefore, Garrison was, almost always, opposed to political action. Not only did "The Liberator" rarely cover politics, Garrison and most of his allies in the AAS refused to vote at all, instead pressing “moral suasion” (although this issue caused a variety of splits in later years, with some third parties being formed and failing miserably).
Garrison grew to be violently opposed to the Constitution, at one point publicly burning a copy. He was not philosophically opposed to the Constitution in the abstract, but rather followed the logical path that if, as was generally agreed, the text of the Constitution protected slavery, and slavery must be destroyed, the Constitution, if it could not be amended (which it could not be), would have to go. And, again logically, the only mechanism for that would be “disunion”—the formation of two new countries. This was the position Garrison espoused prior to the Civil War: “Abolition or Disunion.” (By the same token, retail political action was pointless, since it was never going to lead to either.) This was a radical position, but of course, Garrison was right, perhaps a lesson for us in these days of fraying ties and massively incompatible and increasingly divergent positions among different groups of Americans.
Mayer covers all this, and the subsequent thirty years, in great but interesting detail. He discusses Garrison’s trips to, and alliances with, British abolitionists, who (again led exclusively by vigorous Christians) had managed to obtain abolition in Britain and its West Indian colonies, through Parliamentary action. He met with the aged William Wilberforce and the main English abolitionists, including George Thompson. Garrison noted that in England black people did not have the social debilities they had in America, reinforcing Garrison’s vigorous distaste for the near universal view of Americans to the contrary. Mayer covers the mob violence repeatedly directed at Garrison, in Boston and Philadelphia. Along the way Garrison got married and had several children—despite his well-deserved reputation as a firebrand, in person Garrison was mild, humorous and fun to be around, and even his speeches were fiery more in content than in delivery, although they always had a glowing iron core. He worked with scores of other influential anti-slavery activists, white and black, including Frederick Douglass (with whom he ultimately came into some conflict) and Harriet Tubman. Ultimately, Mayer covers the gradual dominance of abolitionist sentiment in the North, the hardening of Southern defense of slavery, the run-up to the Civil War, including Bleeding Kansas, the Fugitive Slave Law, Dred Scott, the disintegration of the Whigs, the elections of 1856 and 1860, and the Civil War itself, all viewed through the lens of Garrison’s life.
"All on Fire" concludes with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment (and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth), and Garrison’s subsequent closure of "The Liberator," its purpose accomplished. He also covers the old abolitionist’s remaining years, in which he was often viewed as suspect by his old allies because he regarded the Liberator’s, and the AAS’s, goal accomplished, and did not view new “political” matters relating to Reconstruction, though very important, as having the same moral gravity as abolition itself (true enough, though also a failure to anticipate that abolition would be far from enough to accomplish complete emancipation for African Americans). He died in 1877, full of years and with a happy family, a man who set his mind to a God-given task and accomplished the charge he had been given.
While all this is important history, we can see that some of the challenges Garrison faced are still faced today by those who engage in moral crusades, all of which are conservative in content (every single modern Left crusade, except, perhaps, certain ones related to African Americans, is mere cannibalistic identity politics or insanity lacking any actual moral content). Most notably, we can see that it is still an uphill battle to challenge the interests of the powerful. In Garrison’s time, the powerful were concentrated in the upper classes, in business and in the mainline churches. Today more power is located in a variety of other groups who get are able to decide what is “news”; or who can direct opprobrium onto disfavored groups through social media and its censorship; or who, as I mention above, control the courts; or who are professional agitators, such as the extremist hate group, the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. Most powerful of all is when these combine with big corporations, either because their leaders want to virtue signal or because their leaders perceive it as in their economic interest to cooperate, to gain business or to avoid attacks that may lead to lost sales.
Thus, for example, pressure groups demanding acceptance and celebration of homosexual “marriage” have been very successful at vicious campaigns to restrict religious freedom, such as the notorious and successful effort to prevent Mike Pence’s Indiana from passing a “religious freedom restoration act,” a RFRA, identical to the federal law that has been in effect for decades. Commercial leaders such as those who opposed Garrison were instrumental in that success, viewing anyone who held Christian beliefs as distasteful, and being deathly afraid of their acquaintances in Left-dominated areas looking down their noses at them. At the time of Pence’s disgraceful knuckling under to such pressure, I was on the board of directors of a small publicly traded bank, and the spineless sniveling of the other board members was really a sight to behold. They (none of whom would describe themselves as Left) crawled all over each other to complain about RFRA and to spend money advertising the bank’s implicit repudiation of it, even though certainly very few of the customers cared what the bank thought, and those that did care most definitely heavily favored RFRA. No matter—virtue signaling was the order of the day, and the same men (with one token woman) would have turned up their noses at William Garrison in just the same way.
[Review completes as first comment.]
March 14, 2020
Great book! At over 600 large pages of dense type, it's like reading a Ron Chernow biography. You'll only make progress if you devote some time to it on a regular basis.
"All on Fire" presents enough detail to make the case that Garrison was perhaps the greatest activist of the nineteenth century. It also humanizes a figure who's often stereotyped as a prim, finger wagging moralist. Yes, Garrison used moral suasion in his anti-slavery newspaper "The Liberator," which he published for thirty years, to generate sympathy with the enslaved and fiery denunciation of Cotton Whigs, Copperheads, and Democrats who would compromise with the slave power to preserve the Union. And Garrison certainly called down the wrath of God on a sinful nation. But all in the cause of reform.
Hating the sin but loving the sinner, Garrison preferred that slaveowners offer freedom voluntarily. The pacifist editor and agitator only embraced the violence of the Civil War as a necessary evil. Afterwards, when racist "redeemers" clawed back power from weak Reconstruction state governments across the South, Garrison keenly regretted that slavery had to be abolished by force rather than by mutual agreement.
Mayer also presents a tender, funny and warm side of Garrison that makes the editor come off less as an Old Testament prophet and more as a truly American type who believed in the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the ability of true hearts to make progress against great obstacles. Truly, an inspiration for Americans today.
I wish Steven Spielberg would follow his excellent movie "Lincoln" with a film about Garrison and "The Liberator," to help the editor enter the icon gallery of American heroes.
"All on Fire" presents enough detail to make the case that Garrison was perhaps the greatest activist of the nineteenth century. It also humanizes a figure who's often stereotyped as a prim, finger wagging moralist. Yes, Garrison used moral suasion in his anti-slavery newspaper "The Liberator," which he published for thirty years, to generate sympathy with the enslaved and fiery denunciation of Cotton Whigs, Copperheads, and Democrats who would compromise with the slave power to preserve the Union. And Garrison certainly called down the wrath of God on a sinful nation. But all in the cause of reform.
Hating the sin but loving the sinner, Garrison preferred that slaveowners offer freedom voluntarily. The pacifist editor and agitator only embraced the violence of the Civil War as a necessary evil. Afterwards, when racist "redeemers" clawed back power from weak Reconstruction state governments across the South, Garrison keenly regretted that slavery had to be abolished by force rather than by mutual agreement.
Mayer also presents a tender, funny and warm side of Garrison that makes the editor come off less as an Old Testament prophet and more as a truly American type who believed in the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the ability of true hearts to make progress against great obstacles. Truly, an inspiration for Americans today.
I wish Steven Spielberg would follow his excellent movie "Lincoln" with a film about Garrison and "The Liberator," to help the editor enter the icon gallery of American heroes.
December 3, 2024
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 for sheer volume of original research and sources and thoroughness.
This book was DENSE. So full of very good info and insights, though. It was fascinating to read through all of the nuances of the politics and shifting of popular thought in this timeframe. It was especially interesting reading it in the time period up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, as indeed some of the quotations Mayer cites, if I didn't KNOW they were from Civil War period, I would have thought were current headlines today!
I'd had no idea that many of the amendments that we laud so highly today (abolishing slavery, etc) that were enacted after the war, really only were enacted because the confederate states hadn't been readmitted to the union yet, and therefore couldn't vote them down! Not to mention all the political scheming and conniving that resulted in the particular presidents we ended up with during that period, how it affected which states were admitted to the Union and when, etc. There are so many details that I never learned in school, and am definitely the better off for knowing some of it now.
I did find some of the narration of Garrison's early years to be a bit tedious at times, and for a layperson, some of it could have been edited more. But it was thoroughly researched and informative and I was very glad I had read it (although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone unless you're just really interested in the topic).
This book was DENSE. So full of very good info and insights, though. It was fascinating to read through all of the nuances of the politics and shifting of popular thought in this timeframe. It was especially interesting reading it in the time period up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, as indeed some of the quotations Mayer cites, if I didn't KNOW they were from Civil War period, I would have thought were current headlines today!
I'd had no idea that many of the amendments that we laud so highly today (abolishing slavery, etc) that were enacted after the war, really only were enacted because the confederate states hadn't been readmitted to the union yet, and therefore couldn't vote them down! Not to mention all the political scheming and conniving that resulted in the particular presidents we ended up with during that period, how it affected which states were admitted to the Union and when, etc. There are so many details that I never learned in school, and am definitely the better off for knowing some of it now.
I did find some of the narration of Garrison's early years to be a bit tedious at times, and for a layperson, some of it could have been edited more. But it was thoroughly researched and informative and I was very glad I had read it (although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone unless you're just really interested in the topic).
July 7, 2023
Attempting to polish the complicated legacy of Garrison is a daunting challenge, but Mayer swings for the fences and knocks it out of the park - truly compelling, occasionally grip-your-seat material as you watch the abolitionist movement form around Garrison's pulpit. An emergent flair for the dramatic on occasion, but it's in character with our subject anyways.
July 24, 2025
“everyone who comes into the world should do something to repair its moral desolation, and to restore its pristine loveliness; and he who does not assist, but slumbers away his life in idleness, defeats one great purpose of his creation.”
legitimately cried multiple times while reading this. i love & miss you mr garrison 😢
legitimately cried multiple times while reading this. i love & miss you mr garrison 😢
January 14, 2023
I thought this book was excellent. Well written, thought proving, and also an incredibly fascinating dive into very tumultuous decades.
Also incredibly sobering to realize that Garrison's vision of a truly equal society has not been truly realized yet, even 150 years later.
Also incredibly sobering to realize that Garrison's vision of a truly equal society has not been truly realized yet, even 150 years later.
January 26, 2021
This is a very thorough biography and, as a result a very thorough telling of the history of abolition of slavery from 1820 to 1870.
September 29, 2024
One of the best biographies I've read. I am a civil war buff but not religious and I really appreciated the amount of scholarly work that went into this book.
November 18, 2024
In his 20’s, just starting out as a printer after growing up in poverty , William Lloyd Garrison met Quaker Benjamin Lundy who had been self-publishing a one sheet condemning the evils of slavery. In that moment, he decided something must be done about the evil of slavery and then dedicated his life to its abolition. Instead of pursuing a political solution, Garrison decided to appeal to the American people to do what was right. In order to do this, he created The Liberator, a weekly newspaper that exclusively focused on slavery and its horrific effect on society. Garrison’s name comes up quite a bit when you delve into the history of the Civil War, but he is often portrayed as a scold instead of a crusader, and this book does a great job of correcting that perception. Mayer basically has created such a detailed biography that it seems unlikely that it will need a reappraisal. While the focus is on his abolition work, with examinations of his interactions with such figures as Frederick Douglass, who got his start because of Garrison’s support of his autobiography and how he came to resent Garrison’s influence and other important figures in abolition and women’s rights, another area that Garrison leant his support to but refused to be distracted from his main goal of abolition much to the annoyance of suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony. The detail can be overwhelming at times and occasionally the prose gets a bit dry, but the compelling cause and the Garrison’s quest ultimately make this an important addition to any close examination of what was going on in America in the pre-Civil War years and how one man made it his life’s work to show America the need for slavery to end.
September 2, 2011
Incredible. Do I love Garrison himself or is it this book that I love. The detail is tremendous so that you learn a great deal about the period. In many ways the history of Garrison is the history of the antislavery movement in America. So from 1830 to maybe 1850 the book is completely authoritative. As the movement grows and other major figures come into it like Wendell Phillips there are some things the books has too gloss over and you want even more. That there could be people more principled than Garrison in the 1860s and causing faction fights in the society to the left of him is fascinating. Maybe we need another book on that. But, to see one person's principled struggle over 40 years have the dramatic payoff that it did, without him ever compromising with the party system, the churches, sexists... is magnificent. Maybe I want to believe too much and someone will write a book that points out compromises with the racist slave power system that Garrison made but for now this book establishes him as possibly the greatest true American hero.
August 8, 2010
This is a well-written biography about an important, underrated figure in US history. Garrison edited The Liberator for 30 years, spoke all over the country and in England, and agitated against slavery. He criticized the U.S. Constitution for protecting that evil institution; at one 4th of July event, he burned a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Constitution. Garrison also supported the inclusion of women in anti-slavery meetings and their equal rights, including the right to vote. He bravely criticized churches and ministers who waffled on the slavery issue, and despite his deep faith in the God of justice and love, he stopped attending church, seeing it as a flawed, hypocritical institution. God's work was not confined to a stuffy, self-congratulating Sunday service. Mayer rightly equates Garrison's work to that of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a biography that will inspire you, enrage you, and engage your mind, heart, and spirit.
June 28, 2008
Garrison was one of the true great American heroes. And this is a great biography of him. He was a pacifist and egalitarian who basically started the abolition movement in the early 1830's when the only anti-slavery people were re-colonialists (a movement he helped discredit) and a few scattered Quakers. While some Free-Soilers were somewhat racist and other anti-slavery leaders tried to keep woman from speaking out, Garrison stood firm on woman's rights and supporting full civil rights for newly freed slaves. As this book shows, a movement requires radicals agitating from the outside as well as moderates working within the system to make change. Speaking as an atheist, William Lloyd Garrison is the kind of religious fanatic I can get behind.
December 25, 2014
Amazing! After reading such a great book as this about a life lived so purposely, it's really challenging for me decide what to read next.
Once, the book quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying, "A man can only extend his attention to a certain finite amount of claims." (p. 235) Later, he refers to Garrison as one of "the faithful men of one idea." (p. 301)
But what an idea! The idea was of course that chattel slavery was wrong and the only correct action was an immediate end to it.
So perhaps the challenge for me is not what to read next, but maybe what to do or write next?
Once, the book quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying, "A man can only extend his attention to a certain finite amount of claims." (p. 235) Later, he refers to Garrison as one of "the faithful men of one idea." (p. 301)
But what an idea! The idea was of course that chattel slavery was wrong and the only correct action was an immediate end to it.
So perhaps the challenge for me is not what to read next, but maybe what to do or write next?
August 14, 2016
a great book about a great, great man, utterly admirable, an example for us all. A long book that reminds us how many years it took for activists to make abolition of slavery possible. What endurance! This fierce public advocate for equal rights was a sweet and loving husband and father at home - look for the photograph of Garrison and his daughter Fanny, very unusual in 19th c. photographs for its playful affection. Wonderful book!
September 8, 2010
I loved this masterful biography of Garrison.Good to see the great aboltionist get his due. The author,who btw,is from the SaN Francisco
Bay area. He stated that Lincoln and Garrison were the 2 greatest
Americans of the 19th century.After reading this book I agree!
PS Garrison put into action nonviolent protest 50 years before
Ghandi.
Bay area. He stated that Lincoln and Garrison were the 2 greatest
Americans of the 19th century.After reading this book I agree!
PS Garrison put into action nonviolent protest 50 years before
Ghandi.
November 19, 2008
Garrison dedicated his life to bringing about reform by forcing the American people to confront ethical dilemmas, primarily but not exclusively slavery, while shunning 'high' politics. After reading this book, I want to reread the Socratic dialogues with the benefit of the Garrisonian perspective.
February 7, 2009
Truly fascinating, both as a followup to reading "Days of Defiance" and to me as a Bostonian. It helped cement which type of crazy fanatics I like, even if this may be Mayer's illusion of a Garrison.
November 28, 2008
May have been a zealot but a passionate and clear voice in a time of need.
September 10, 2009
It's impossible to overstate Garrison's impact on American politics and culture. This book is a carefully researched, highly detailed of his life and his journey in abolition.
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September 23, 2010All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery by Henry Mayer (2008)
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April 23, 2013Great author ! Great fighter for human freedom !
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