while Ephraim Allen supported Caleb Cushing, a former Herald employee. Garrison and Allen had disagreed on other issues in their respective newspapers; however, this time the sparring became personal and consequences ensued. On September 21, 1826, with no warning, Garrison sold the Free Press to a newspaperman who quickly aligned it with the editorial point of view of the Herald. Garrison said he sold his newspaper for personal reasons, but one historian concluded that “it seems inescapable” that Ephraim Allen ran out of patience with his not so deferential protégé and called in his loan.97 Garrison learned a bitter lesson in the ways of business and politics. After only six months he lost his newspaper. As a small consolation, Caleb Cushing lost the race for U.S. Congress.98
Garrison left Newburyport for Boston and took up residence in a boardinghouse owned by William Collier, a Baptist minister who published religious newspapers. Collier’s newspapers promoted two popular social movements: the temperance campaign to curb alcohol consumption and the new religious revivalism. Collier asked Garrison to manage the National Philanthropist, a temperance newspaper with the slogan, “Moderate drinking is the downhill road to intemperance and drunkenness.”99 While editing the National Philanthropist, Garrison met Benjamin Lundy, a friend of Collier.100
Lundy needed wealthy patrons to help finance his antislavery newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy found little support even among progressive businessmen and clergy. Many reformers preferred to concentrate on less-contentious issues such as ridding society of public drunkenness.
Prior to meeting Benjamin Lundy, Garrison considered slavery as one of many issues worthy of reform. Garrison described himself as a friend to the poor, “a lover of morality, and an enemy to vice,” and supported the temperance movement, antigambling efforts, and reform in local politics.101 He had a high opinion of his own potential. “My name shall one day be known to the world,” Garrison wrote in a letter to the Boston Courier in 1827. “This, I know, will be deemed excessive vanity—but time shall prove it prophetic.”102 Lundy’s accounts of the evils of slavery helped Garrison conclude that slavery was the single most important problem in the United States, a moral outrage that demanded opposition and justice.
Garrison impulsively quit his job at the National Philanthropist, hoping to join Lundy in Baltimore. Lundy, however, could not afford to take on a partner, and Garrison scrambled to find another job. He traveled to Bennington, Vermont, to edit the Journal of the Times, a political newspaper created for the sole purpose of supporting John Quincy Adams in his 1828 reelection bid for president. While Garrison was essentially a hired political operative, he did find ways to write about slavery. Garrison attacked Adams’s opponent, Andrew Jackson, and worked slavery into the story line, reminding readers that Jackson owned slaves.103 The rival and well-established Vermont Gazette, which supported Andrew Jackson, accused Garrison of being a paid mouthpiece for the Adams campaign and said the Journal was nothing more than a broadsheet for John Quincy Adams, which was all true. Garrison denied the charges. “The blockheads who have had the desperate temerity to propagate this falsehood have yet to learn our character,” he wrote.104 The Gazette also claimed that Garrison and the Journal supported ending slavery through immediate emancipation, which the Gazette said would ruin the South and the nation. Garrison denied that charge as well. Immediate emancipation was “out of the question,” Garrison wrote.105 On election day, John Quincy Adams won Vermont and all of the New England states, but the South and the Midwest solidly supported Jackson, and Andrew Jackson was elected president. Garrison, still hoping to work with Benjamin Lundy, left the Journal and returned to Boston.
Surviving on a variety of temporary printing jobs, Garrison won an invitation from the Boston Society of Congregational Churches to deliver an address on Independence Day 1829 at the Park Street Church. The American Colonization Society sponsored the event and received donations collected at the service.106 “The American Colonization Society has effected much good,” Garrison wrote, “and deserves unlimited encouragement.”107 Garrison acknowledged, however, that colonization alone could not bring about the end of slavery.
Garrison wanted to utilize the speech to make a name for himself in Boston. He spent weeks working on the text and laying out the evils of slavery. A few days before the address he predicted his speech “will offend some, though not reasonably.”108 His dire financial circumstances provided extra motivation. “I am somewhat in a hobble, in a pecuniary point of view, and must work like a tiger,” he wrote.109 If the speech did not help him find employment in Boston, he told a friend he would return to Newburyport and plead with his former mentor, Herald publisher Ephraim Allen, for a job.110
The Park Street Church, which had seating for more than one thousand parishioners, was nearly full when Garrison delivered his address on the afternoon of July 4, 1829. Garrison startled his audience by demanding not only an end to slavery, but also full citizenship and equal rights for slaves and free blacks. “A very large proportion of our colored population were born on our soil, and are therefore entitled to all the privileges of American citizens,” Garrison said. “Their children possess the same inherent and unalienable rights as ours.”111 He challenged the audience to consider the humanity of the slaves. “Suppose that … the slaves should suddenly become white. Would you shut your eyes upon their sufferings and calmly talk of constitutional limitations?”112
The only significant response to his speech appeared in the American Traveler, a Boston newspaper that summarized Garrison’s speech as a combination of anti-American sentiment and procolonization advocacy. Garrison seemed destined to return to Newburyport. At this low point, Garrison received a letter from Benjamin Lundy. Lundy asked Garrison to join him in Baltimore to help publish his antislavery newspaper. On September 2, 1829, Garrison joined Lundy as the editorial assistant for the Genius of Universal Emancipation.
The differences between the two men were apparent from the outset of their partnership. At twenty-three, Garrison was seventeen years younger than Lundy, yet he had more practical experience in the newspaper trade. He had mastered the mechanics of typesetting and publishing at the Herald and served as the principal writer and editor for the National Philanthropist. While at the Free Press, Garrison drafted most of the articles and editorials without writing them out in advance; he acquired the mental discipline necessary to compose his stories as he set the type. In 1828 Garrison wrote in a more abrasive and fearless style compared to Lundy. Lundy once embraced slashing attacks on slavery and slaveholders, and paid a severe price. In December 1826, Lundy published an article that referred to a Baltimore slave trader as a “demon” and a “monster in human-shape.”113 Shortly thereafter, the man attacked Lundy—he choked him and repeatedly kicked Lundy in the head.114 “I was assaulted and nearly killed,” Lundy said.115 Lundy’s assailant was charged with assault, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty; the judge imposed a fine of one dollar. After defending slavery and noting its importance to Maryland’s economy, the judge told Lundy, “If abusive language could ever be a justification for battery, this was that case.”116 Lundy realized those who challenged slavery had few protections; from that point forward he tempered his antislavery commentaries.
The two editors did agree that ending slavery would take time; Garrison, Lundy, and nearly all opponents of slavery supported a gradual approach and colonization. Even that point of agreement, however, soon changed. While in Baltimore, Garrison discovered Lundy’s extensive library of antislavery literature. Garrison read The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, written by George Bourne in 1816. Bourne’s book, together with David Walker’s Appeal and a pamphlet written in 1824 by British abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick, dramatically changed Garrison’s thinking about slavery.
George Bourne is regarded by some as the first man in America to call for the immediate emancipation of the slaves.117 In The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, the “book” was the Bible, and Bourne equated slavery with sin. “A gradual emancipation is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice,” Bourne wrote. “If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed for ever; and if it be inequitable,