William Lloyd Garrison and American Abolitionism in Literature and Memory

For nearly 150 years, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the famed antislavery newspaper The Liberator , has been represented by scholars, educators, politicians and authors as the founder of the American abolitionist movement. Yet the idea that Garrison was the leader of a coherent movement was strongly contested during his lifetime. Drawing on private letters, diaries, newspapers, novels, memoirs, eulogies, late 19th century textbooks, poetry and monuments, this study reveals the dramatic soci