All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.

• Author: HUMMEL, JEFFREY ROGERS
• Position: Review

All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery By Henry Mayer New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 707. $32.50, cloth; $18.95, paper.

No one attacked the black slavery of the southern states with greater vehemence than a group of young, radical abolitionists who burst upon the American landscape in the early 1830s. Exasperated at the betrayal of the revolutionary promise that all forms of human bondage would disappear in this new land of liberty, and marshaling all the evangelical fervor of the religious revivals then sweeping the country, they demanded no less than the immediate emancipation of all slaves. They not only opposed any compensation of slaveholders and any colonization of freed slaves outside the country, but they also demanded full political rights for all blacks, North and South.

The most prominent and vitriolic of those abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison. The son of a drunken sailor who had abandoned his family, Garrison grew up in a poor but piously Baptist household in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He served as a printer's apprentice and then made his first notable mark on antislavery activism when he went to jail rather than pay a fine for libeling as a "highway robber and murderer" a New England merchant who shipped slaves between Baltimore and New Orleans. From Boston on January 1, 1831, the near-sighted, prematurely balding, twenty-five-year-old editor brought out the first issue of a new weekly paper, The Liberator. Garrison left no doubt about his refusal to compromise with the sin of slavery:

I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm: tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;--but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD. (The Liberator, January 1, 1831) Garrison conceded that the actual elimination of slavery would take time but that concession should not inhibit forthright condemnation of moral evil. "Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought...