3

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 631

for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of
Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the
paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to
close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants
of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal
based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand
of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery,
including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme
aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the
public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an
almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and
black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately
opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and
organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists
to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped
found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with
English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and
notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also
dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere
by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition
to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's
American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks.
However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention
of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement
and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in
the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed
women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke
with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so
closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery
Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's
work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of
the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips
Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The
Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 1885- 89); Henry Mayer,
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998);
James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation
(Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd
Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York,
1928-36), 7:168-72.
4.3 Gerrit Smith] Gerrit Smith (1797-1874), a New York businessman and land