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 social and political forces of the postwar period which transformed our perceptions of Garrison, the abolitionist movement and the first histories of the Civil War.

"William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was one of the most militant and uncompromising abolitionists in the United States. As the editor of the abolitionist paper The Liberator and cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison spent most of his life arguing against slavery on strictly moral grounds. This engrossing-book presents six essays that reevaluate Garrison's legacy, his accomplishments, and his limitations. Eminent scholars and a distinguished journalist, Lloyd McKim Garrison, who is Garrison's direct descendant, reflect on Garrison as a political activist, an internationalist, an advocate of feminism, and more."--BOOK JACKET.