Timothy Pifer

The Philosopher Abolitionist Timothy Pifer

This book provides a brief biographical and historiographical examination of the noted Immediate Abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison using chiefly his own words. The book is intended for both casual readers and researchers looking for a cited and scholarly work on the abolitionist movement. Particularly those students of history looking to understand the abolition movement's philosophy during the decades just before the American Civil War. Garrison was the focus because of his unique position at the heart of the immediate abolitionist movement. In fact, Garrison (1805-1879) was at the time the best-known and most radical immediate abolitionist of the antebellum period, and was closely associated at various times with other notables such as Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. Some historians have even described his role as being uniquely indispensable to the early days of abolitionism, viewing him as the movement's spiritual leader and the center of philosophical discord within the movement's hierarchy. In fact, the key philosophical differences within the movement have even been characterized by academic journals as divisions between Garrisonian and anti-Garrisonian factions. Simply put, no study of the antebellum period and abolitionists is complete without a study of Garrison's life and personal philosophy as found in this book. Research for this book was founded on observations by his contemporaries, period publications such as the newspaper The Liberator, and related published observations in journals and books by later historians. In the absence of an actual autobiography a six volume set of Garrison's correspondence running almost the entirety of his life served as the primary source for most of the findings in this book. The six volumes span Garrison's life from 1822 until his death in 1879. In all, the six volumes contain 1,527 separate pieces of correspondence which were presented in a chronological sequence. The first four volumes contain all the known letters by Garrison that were available at the time of the volumes' publication. The correspondence presented consisted of private letters to family, friends and associates as well as public letters to editors of publications and civic leaders. This book is a comprehensive and documented attempt to draw from those six volumes of correspondence as well as other sources the belief structure and ideology behind the philosopher abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.