Garrison, William Lloyd

(1805-79) Garrison founded the antislavery newspaper the Liberator in 1831 and published it until 1865, when slavery was abolished. He helped organize the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, serving as its president from 1843 to 1865. Once almost lynched by an angry Boston mob because of his extreme abolitionist views and such tactics as burning the Constitution and urging northern secession from the Union, Garrison railed against the federal government for years but eventually supported Abraham Lincoln after he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.

Grimké Sisters

Sarah (1792-1873) and Angelina (1805-79), abolitionists and women’s rights activists. Members of a distinguished South Carolina slaveholding family, the Grimké sisters moved north because they disliked living in a slave society. Defying the prohibition against women speaking in public, they made lecture tours promoting abolitionism and women’s rights. Angelina, in 1838, became the first American woman to address a legislative body: she presented to the Massachusetts legislature thousands of antislavery petitions the sisters had gathered on a lecture tour for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Both women also published important books and pamphlets laying the foundations for abolitionism and what later became feminist theory.

Related posts

• The Institution of Slavery (0)
• Sectionalism in the United States (0)
• Issues Before the Civil War (0)
• History Quizzes (0)
• Comparative Essays for History Class (IB style included) (0)