William Lloyd Garrison Sums Up His Life’s Work and Motivations in Seeking to End Slavery, and His Identification With the Slave

This letter is apparently unpublished and has been in a private collection for at least 2 generations.

In 1831, Garrison began publishing the abolitionist paper, The Liberator, and two years later helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. In speaking engagements and through his newspaper and other publications, Garrison advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and favored the break-up of the Union rather than cooperation with the slaveholders. This was an unpopular view during the 1830’s, even with northerners who were unsympathetic to slavery. From the 1840’s to 1854, Garrison continued to hammer at his theme of freedom for blacks, and his views began to gain some traction in the north. However, the nations’s attention at the time was mainly focused on Texas, the Mexican War, the newly-acquired West, and the attempts to adjust differences between the sections that led to the Compromise of 1850. All that changed when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress on May 30, 1854. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´, and infuriated many in the North who considered that Compromise line to be permanent. In the South the new law was supported and pro-slavery men rushed in to settle Kansas.

This situation brought Abraham Lincoln out of retirement from politics, and made Garrison, if anything, increasingly radical. On July 4, 1854, he scandalized everybody by burning the U.S. Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act at an Anti-Slavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts. The Civil War forced Garrison to choose between his pacifist beliefs and emancipation. Placing freedom for the slave foremost, he supported Abraham Lincoln faithfully and in 1863 welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation as the fulfillment of his hopes.

Maurice Wakeman wrote Garrison, asking for a signed photograph and saying that as a result of Garrison’s efforts, his opinion had changed on the slavery question. In response, Garrison wrote back, summing up his belief that God had delivered freedom to the slaves and that he had tried to imagine himself in shackles.

This letter is apparently unpublished and has been in a private collection for at least 2 generations.

Autograph letter signed, Boston, December 22, 1866, to Maurice Wakeman. “Dear Sir, Yours of the 12th inst. was duly received. Enclosed, I send you the only remaining card photograph of myself in my possession. Gratified with the statements contained in your letter respecting your change of views on the Anti-slavery question, claming only that I have faithfully tried to remember those in bonds as bound with them, and rejoicing at the great deliverance which has been wrought by the hand of God not only for the oppressed but for our whole country… P.S. I need not say how highly I think of such noble men as John Bright and T. Milnor Gibbs.” Bright was a prominent British opponent of slavery.