William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison, who lived from 10 December 1805 to 24 May 1879, was an American abolitionist, journalist and social reformer who founded the antislavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and published it in Boston until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States in 1865. He also supported women's rights and became a prominent voice for women's suffrage during the 1870s. Garrison promoted what he called no governmentism, an early strand of anarchism, rejecting the American government's legitimacy on the grounds that its involvement in war, imperialism and slavery made it corrupt and tyrannical, a stance later scholars have linked to modern libertarian thought; he initially opposed violence on Christian pacifist grounds but came to accept armed struggle as necessary once the Civil War broke out, supporting President Abraham Lincoln's efforts to end slavery. He was among the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society and pressed for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people rather than a gradual, compensated approach. A trained typesetter, Garrison composed many of his own editorials directly while setting type for The Liberator, without first writing them out on paper.