America has probably never had a more influential journalist than William Lloyd Garrison. A social activist by calling, Garrison railed against intemperance (his father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family), gambling and war. But his real passion was the fight against slavery. He originally advocated gradual emancipation, but his beliefs evolved, and he eventually championed immediate and complete emancipation. While in his mid-20s, he organized the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, and for decades ran the widely circulated newspaper The Liberator, using it to shape the national slavery debate and help provide the political climate that President Lincoln needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. 

But, in 1828, all that was in the future. Garrison was then a 22-year-old newspaperman living in Boston and in need of a job. He had until recently been editor of the National Philanthropist, a social reform newspaper. He’d left the Philanthropist to take a different job, which hadn’t materialized. 

Fortunately for him, a group of prominent men from Bennington decided that this fiery young journalist was just who they needed to run a newspaper they planned to launch. The group traveled to Boston and offered Garrison the editorship of the Journal of the Times. The job would provide Garrison experience, an income and a venue to promote the many social causes he supported. 

The Bennington men asked one thing of Garrison: that the newspaper strongly support the re-election of President John Quincy Adams. This was during America’s “party press era,” roughly lasting from 1783 through the 1830s, when newspapers served essentially as adjuncts to political parties. Recipients of party and governmental printing contracts, the newspapers aligned themselves with one of the political parties, and with the political views of their owners.

The Bennington group intended the Journal of the Times to serve as a counterweight to the Vermont Gazette, which backed Democratic challenger Andrew Jackson. Vermonters heavily supported Adams and his National Republican party, but organizers of the Journal weren’t taking chances. They hated Jackson and what he stood for. 

Adams and Jackson disagreed over the role of government. Adams supported the so-called “American System” in which a strong federal government would impose high tariffs and sell public lands to fund internal improvements, principally roads and canals that would knit the country together. In contrast, Jackson was skeptical of centralized power and argued it would lead to monarchy. He therefore opposed the high tariffs and infrastructure projects. Similarly, Adams supported creation of a national bank to help the economy, while Jackson opposed it. 

The candidates also differed in personality. Adams was the highly educated son of the second president, John Adams, and was a former U.S. secretary of state. Jackson was born poor and received a limited education, but grew rich through his marriage, legal career, land speculation and use of slave labor on his plantation. He was heralded as a war hero after leading the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. 

Adams’ supporters portrayed Jackson as illiterate and violent, saying he was a man of “blood and carnage.” They publicized that he had ordered the execution of men under his command over disputed claims that they had mutinied. They also told of how, during a military campaign in the Southeast against Native Americans, Jackson’s troops had slaughtered noncombatants and razed villages.  

Garrison accepted the Bennington job, signing a six-month contract that covered the election season. At the time, in order to accommodate local needs and harvest times, federal law allowed states to hold elections anytime during a 34-day period before the first Wednesday in December. In 1828, Vermont’s elections were scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 11. 

William Lloyd Garrison was only 22 years old when he was recruited to became editor of a newspaper being launched in Bennington. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Garrison moved to Vermont and on Oct. 3 published the newspaper’s first edition. In it, the new editor introduced the journal to the public by explaining its values and the reasons for its existence. He ridiculed editors who lacked the courage “to hunt down popular vices, to combat popular prejudices, to encounter the madness of party, to tell the truth and maintain the truth, cost what it may, to attack villainy in its higher walks, and strip presumption of its vulgar garb, to meet the frowns of the enemy with the smiles of a friend….” 

Unlike the common practice of the era to print editorials in larger type than the rest of the paper in order to draw the reader’s attention, Garrison chose a smaller font, so he could write longer pieces. He had lots to say.

The rest of his editorial detailed the causes the Journal would promote. He called for “the suppression of intemperance and its associate vices, the gradual emancipation of every slave in the republic, and the perpetuity of national peace.” The newspaper would also advocate for education “not the tinsel, the frippery, and the incumbrance of classical learning, so called—but a popular, practical education.” Key to the nation’s economic future, Garrison added, was continuation of the “American System” to protect national industry and build transportation infrastructure. 

Only at the end of the editorial did Garrison mention President Adams, the man whose re-election he was hired to promote. In truth, Garrison wasn’t so much a supporter of Adams, as an opponent of Jackson. 

Though he was confident that the vast majority of Bennington County’s voters would vote to re-elect the president, Garrison wrote that Adams’ supporters have had their confidence “abused, their views misrepresented, their feelings insulted…they have been upbraided with apostasy, with treachery, with insincerity; and they have in their meekness borne till endurance has passed its bounds, and the pen of the slanderer become intolerable.” 

A few days before the election, Garrison wrote in the Journal that whatever the vote’s outcome, “we shall thank God on our bended knees that we have been permitted to denounce, as unworthy … a man whose hands are crimsoned with innocent blood, whose lips are full of profanity, who looks on ‘blood and carnage with philosophic composure,’” a ”slaveholder,” “a military despot, who has broken the laws of his country,” and who has held many offices and “failed in all.”

Steeling Adams supporters to the possibility of losing to this man, Garrison wrote that being “in the minority against him would be better than to receive the commendations of a large and deluded majority. Since the existence of this republic, the chance of its continuance has never seemed so precarious.”  

In the end, Adams’ supporters would have to console themselves by feeling they had at least voted for the better man. Jackson handily lost Bennington County and the rest of Vermont, but won the national vote and Electoral College to defeat Adams.

In the election’s aftermath, Garrison wrote grimly: “The great national conflict has terminated in a manner so utterly unexpected and disastrous, as to almost annihilate the hopes of every friend of his country. We have seen the triumph of turbulence over order, and of ignorance over knowledge. The passions of the multitude, cunningly inflamed to violence, have taken reason by force.”

The Journal continued to criticize Jackson, saying that “(w)ere it not for the ridicule of our transatlantic scorners,” it would be entertaining to hear the uneducated Jackson deliver an inaugural address that he himself had written. Fortunately for Jackson, however, his speech was being written by an associate who would “dictate flaming sentiments in very passable language.”

With the election behind him, Garrison was able to turn his attention to other social reform issues dear to him. Significantly, he devoted his Dec. 12 editorial to praising the work of Quaker antislavery activist Benjamin Lundy, sometimes now referred to as “The First Abolitionist.”

“The history of this individual will furnish a theme for the admiration and gratitude of posterity,” Garrison wrote. “If we survive him, he shall not lack a biographer.” In recent months, Garrison noted, the tireless Lundy had travelled 2,400 miles around New England and New York, including 1,600 on foot, to host 50 antislavery gatherings. 

Garrison had met Lundy at a Boston boardinghouse several months before being offered the editorship in Bennington. Over dinner, Lundy, who was on a lecture tour, shared his strong anti-slavery views. The conversation persuaded Garrison to take up the issue as one of his main social reform causes. But whereas Lundy called for immediate emancipation, Garrison at the time supported gradual emancipation and “colonization,” a social movement that called for relocating formerly enslaved people to settlements in West Africa, primarily Liberia.

While Garrison was working in Bennington, Lundy received copies of the Journal at his home in Baltimore. He was pleased with what he read: Garrison was using his position to argue forcefully and eloquently for slavery’s eradication. Lundy was so pleased, in fact, that he walked from Baltimore to Bennington to meet with Garrison. Lundy walked so much because it was cheaper than riding a horse or booking passage on a stagecoach, and he wanted to conserve what little money he had to further the abolitionist cause. This meeting probably occurred in early 1829.  

In Bennington, Lundy offered Garrison the editorship of his antislavery newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. When his six-month contract in Bennington expired at the end of March, Garrison returned to Boston, while Lundy was on a mission to Haiti. (Traveling with a dozen formerly enslaved people, Lundy was exploring whether the island country would be a suitable site for additional “colonization” efforts.)

A couple of months later, on July 4, 1829, Garrison gave his first major public speech on the evils of slavery before a crowd of roughly 1,500 at Boston’s Park Street Church. Paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, he highlighted the hypocrisy of slavery existing in a country founded on the principle of freedom, remarking that “I do not claim the discovery as my own, that ‘all men are born equal,’ and that among their inalienable rights are ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Garrison was now fully committed to the antislavery cause. He would soon leave Boston to join Lundy in Baltimore and devote the next three and a half decades to fighting the scourge of slavery. When Garrison died in 1879, Frederick Douglass, the famed African American social reformer, abolitionist, orator and writer, gave the eulogy.

“Let us guard his memory as a precious inheritance,” Douglass said, “let us teach our children the story of his life, let us try to imitate his virtues, and endeavor as he did, to leave the world freer, nobler and better than we found it.”