William Lloyd Garrison trained in printing and entered journalism before committing himself to immediate abolition of slavery. Work with Benjamin Lundy and experiences in Baltimore helped move him away from gradual emancipation and colonization schemes. In 1831 he founded The Liberator in Boston, declaring that slavery required an urgent moral response. Black supporters were crucial to the newspaper's early financial survival and public standing.

Garrison helped establish the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and promoted persuasion, petitions, meetings, and denunciation of institutions implicated in slavery. A Boston mob attacked him in 1835, demonstrating the hostility abolitionists faced in northern states. He supported women's participation, contributing to divisions over leadership and reform priorities. His commitment to nonresistance and opposition to conventional political action separated him from abolitionists who sought electoral or constitutional strategies.

By the 1840s Garrison argued that the Constitution protected slavery and advocated disunion rather than cooperation with that system. His public burning of the Constitution in 1854 became a famous expression of the position. Relations with Frederick Douglass deteriorated as Douglass came to believe the Constitution could be used against slavery and pursued a more independent course. The disagreement illustrates the diversity of abolitionist thought; Garrison's prominence should not turn a broad movement, especially Black activism, into the achievement of one editor.

The Civil War and emancipation changed the conditions of his work. Although earlier committed to nonviolent reform, Garrison welcomed slavery's destruction through the Union war effort and supported Lincoln as policy developed. After ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, he ended The Liberator and favored concluding the antislavery organization's principal work, while others sought to continue it against racial inequality. He remained active in women's voting rights and other causes and died in 1879. Abolition did not establish equal citizenship in practice, making the end of his newspaper a milestone within a continuing struggle. His initial rejection of gradualism was shaped by engagement with Black Americans who demanded immediate freedom and regarded the United States as their homeland, rather than accepting removal to Africa as a solution.