Wm. Lloyd Garrison

Wm. Lloyd Garrison. . Born and raised in poverty in the early 1800s in Newburyport, Garrison received almost no formal schooling. He apprenticed at The Newburyport Herald at age 12 and later established his own abolitionist paper The Liberator at age 25. , William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 on School Street in Newburyport. His family experienced deep poverty after his sailor father, Abijah Garrison, deserted them in 1808. At age five, Garrison sold candy on the streets and begged for food at the houses of the wealthy, and then worked making shoes and cabinets as a boy. Garrison's mother, Fanny, moved to Lynn and other cities looking for work, while Garrison grew up in Newburyport living with friends. She died in 1823 when he was 17. At age 12 Garrison became an apprentice at The Newburyport Herald. He was almost entirely self-taught, learning reading and writing plus the business of printing and journalism, and was soon promoted to foreman. At 20, he established his own newspaper called The Newburyport Free Press. His zeal for reform antagonized his fellow citizens and the newspaper failed. Five years later, he established his long-running anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston. , In 1830 Garrison returned to Newburyport to make an abolitionist speech at the Congregational Church on Brown Square. Many strongly disapproved, and the congregation refused to allow him back for his next scheduled address. In 1836, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society held its annual meeting in Brown Square, but when the Society tried in 1837 to hold an anti-slavery convention in a garden off of Brown Square, a mob broke up the meeting, beating tin pans, blowing horns, howling, cutting the buttons off the coat of one of the speakers, and throwing rotten eggs and sticks. , Although several residents participated in the Underground Railroad, much of Newburyport was conservative and not supportive of Garrison or the Abolitionists during the pre-war period. In 1859, Representative Spofford of Newburyport spoke out against abolitionists' “constant and useless agitation of the slavery question.” After the Civil War, however, Garrison was generally hailed as a prophet in the North. In 1893, fourteen years after his death in 1879, Newburyport erected a bronze statue honoring him here in Brown Square. , [Caption (bottom right)] Birthplace of William Lloyd Garrison. Photo courtesy of Geordie Vining