REPLAY: ‘I Will Be Heard'

what they heard. Garrison told them that Independence Day was quote the worst and most disastrous day and the whole three hundred and sixty five He said he was ashamed of his country and the distance between its ideals and its practices. This is Bruce Laurie, a professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He makes the argument that the key document in the US was

not the Constitutions, a declaration of independence. Garrison asked his audience to imagine something how American slaves might make their own declaration of independence from a tyrannical rule. Then he adopted the exact cadence of Thomas Jefferson's original list of grievances against King George the Third in the Declaration of Independence. Garrison read out his own list on behalf of the American slave He bellowed quote, they have sold us in

their market places like cattle. They have lacerated our bodies with whips. In a word, what that speech did is he read African Americans into the Declaration of Independence for the first time. Garrison ended by asking the congregation to imagine one more thing. Suppose he asked that the slave should suddenly become white, would you keep quiet in the face of their suffering? Then, answering his own question, Garrison roared, no, your voice would peel like deep thunder. I'm an abolishicitionist,

high glory in the name. I'm Sean Braswell. Welcome to the thread. This season, we've traced the ore of an idea that has shaken the foundations of power across the world for almost two centuries now. It is the principle of non violent resistance, the counterintuitive notion that the best way to overcome your enemies is to love them. The best way to counter their blows is to absorb them. We began the season with Martin Luther King Jr. And

his path to non violence. We then pulled on a thread that took us backwards through time to South Africa and India and Russia. And now four episodes later, we are back in the United States and the early eighteen hundreds to learn about the American who inspired the non violent approach of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist we covered in the last episode. If you're joining us for the first time, we encourage you to go back and listen

to episode one. I am anabolishist, then urged me not to pause for joyfully I do in missed in freedom, sacred cause, the world and a soldier for Martin Luther King Jr. Liked to talk about a promissory note that the American founders had written to all Americans and the Declaration of Independence. Well in the early days of the New Republic, and at a time when very few Americans cared to pay attention to that promise, William Lloyd Garrison waived that note in the streets and hollered about it

at the top of his lungs. Garrison's searing words and non violent protestations against slavery, like the civil rights protests King would lead across the South over one hundred years later, grabbed the collar of America and forced it to look at itself in the mirror. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newberry, Massachusetts, in eighteen o five. He came from humble origins Bruce Laurie again. His father was a mariner, his mother a housekeeper and a devout Baptist. He um

He had a common school education. Like most Massachusetts children, uh never went on to higher education. Almost nobody did in those days. Instead, um young young men, almost never a young women were either sent to live with relatives, to work on farms, or to um serve apprenticeships and the skilled trades. Garrison became an apprentice printer. He later referred to himself as a New England mechanic. He moved

to Boston in the late eighteen twenties. He met a man named Benjamin Lundy who was a Quaker abolitionist, and Lundy had a huge impact on him. Benjamin Lundy was a harness maker who took up the printing trade just so he could decry the evils of slavery. Lundie had endured beatings, charges of libel and harsh public opinion. The Quaker zeal And abolitionist views captivated Garrison, and the young

man began to write for Lundie's newspaper. Actually He served two apprenticeships, if you think about it, one as a printer and the other as an abolitionist. Lundie opened Garrison's eyes to the evils of slavery. Garrison yearned to fight the good fight and become an apostle of public virtue like Lundie. Lundie was a Quaker, and you know, the Quaker position is, you don't need you don't need a clergy to tell you the word of God. Every person his is his or her own church, his or her

own own inner light. And you can see that as the beginnings of Garrisonian non resistance. Garrison was a Christian, but he challenged the Church just as he did all authorities, and you were either with him or against him. Garrison was convinced that abolitionists should be asking for nothing less than a media and complete emancipation for all slaves, and he dedicated himself to the cause entirely. He even said quote, I should deserve to be a slave myself if I

shrunk from that duty or danger. Slavery was abolished in the US on fifty years ago, and it's difficult to imagine what life was like in the eighteen twenties and thirties and to appreciate the mindset of those times. It was hard to find a national politician, even in the North, who did not think that slavery should be left to the individual states. Most American presidents had been slave owners.

Slavery was abolished by statute in many Northern states, but a profound apathy towards the practice set in America's moral indifference was deafening, and even among those opposed to slavery, there was little appetite for granting African Americans equal rights. The important thing about that abolitionist movement was it was very qualified, ever conceded political rights to African Americans. Even most abolitionists preached liberation without equality. Garrison changed all that.

With um knowledge he gained from local African Americans and some nationally prominent African Americans, he combined equality with political rights. Garrison attributed the American public's apathy towards slavery and the abolitionist movements aversion to racial equality to ignorance, and he set out to enlighten as many minds and change as many hearts as he could. He just needed a vehicle. You had to have an oregan Yeah, you had to have a newspaper, and so he launches his in eighteen

thirty one. In a small office in Boston, the twenty five year old Garrison pieced together his new newspaper on a large oak table in a room with ink splattered windows. He slept on a palette on the floor and worked odd jobs during the day so he could produce the newspaper at night. The first issue You of the Liberator, came off the press on New Year's Day eighteen thirty one. Garrison pledged in his paper quote, I will be as

harsh as truth and as uncompromising his justice. He promised to rouse the apathetic in America with a trumpet call that would resurrect the dead, and in large capital letters, he proclaimed, I will be heard now. Thus began one of the most remarkable ventures in American journalism. This is historian and Garrison biographer Henry Mayer from a speech on c SPAN he gave before his death in two thousands. No American before Garrison had so dramatically challenged his government's

failure to realize its ideals. No citizen before Garrison at staked the survival of a nation upon a spiritual revolution accomplished by a minority, liberated from conventional politics and armed only with a righteous conviction of truth. Garrison was a wiry man with glasses who was going prematurely bald. He wrote many of the early columns and editorials himself, mixing in poems, meeting reports, and harrowing accounts of slavery. The

Liberator described in detail the living conditions of slaves. It printed regular reports of kidnappings, whippings, and murders of African Americans. It gave a voice to those who previously had none. Bruce Laurie, the most important thing about The Liberator is that it had a letter's page. The Liberator collects letters and commentaries from all kinds of people, and so students of abolitionism who want to hear the voice of more obscure people need to consult The Liberator. Garrison attacked not

just slavery, but racial prejudice for at large. He advocated for the immediate unconditional release of all two and a half million slaves in America and to improve the living conditions of all Africa in Americans. His newspaper routinely proclaimed the principles that Garrison was willing to fight for, but he still had to figure out what the nature of that fight might be. Garrison really had not much to say about violence early on in his career, but several

things happened to change his mind. Perhaps the most important was a near death experience with a Boston mob in eighteen thirty five. It was October. Local women were gathered for a meeting of the Boston Female Anti Slavery Society. A crowd of angry pro slavery protesters gathered outside. Police escorted the women from the building for their safety. Garrison and a few other male organizers were left behind. The mob soon learned the outspoken Garrison was in the building,

they chanted out with him. Garrison escaped into a back alleyway with a colleague and ducked into a carpenter's workshop to avoid the crowd, but they found him. They wrapped a rope three times around his chest and then marched him into the street like an animal on a leash. Hang him, someone yelled. The mob tore his clothes, broke his glasses, and dragged him through the streets while they debated whether to hang the abolitionist or tar and feather him.

At some point, the police intervened and shoot away the mob, and he was his life was saved. The mayor of Boston was forced to put him in jail for his own protection. Garrison was shaken by the experience, but it also stirred in awakening within him that made a huge impression on him. Needless to add, was sort of a one of those terminal moments in his life that that

I think turned him to a non violent resistor. Garrison's firsthand experience of the mob's brutality opened his eyes even further to the violence that lurked all around him in American society, and he landed upon a new method for combating that violence, one grounded in the Christian injunction to resists not evil. What had in mind is for anti slave people to resist violence of any kind, not to engage in violence. Violence begot violence. Garrison became convinced of

the powerful relationship between abolitionism and pacifism. He realized that abolitionists could not just publish protestations against slavery. They had to refuse to cooperate with the system that perpetuated it. But he becomes an advocate of what he called non resistance, and that's the doctrine of non resistance that is one of the cornerstones of the abolitionist movement in the United States.

He really does invent nonresistance out of whole cloth. Like Gandhi, Garrison found that he had the courage to face the mob, and so he redoubled his efforts to provoke them. Garrison realized, as doctor King later did in Birmingham, that you had to make injustice palpable to the public. You had to make it vivid and real, and so, even without the medium of television to serve as a megaphone, Garrison set out to make Americans ashamed of their connection to slavery

in thirty years before the Civil War. Garrison kindled a fire of outrage that would slowly spread across the country. William Lloyd Garrison was a man ahead of his times. The philosopher Henry David Threau first published his famous essay on civil disobedience in eighteen forty nine. He argued that individuals have a duty not to cooperate with unjust governments. It is required reading in most American high schools today. But William Lloyd Garrison preached and pursued civil disobedience for

more than a decade before Thorreau's famous work appeared. In eighteen thirty eight, Garrison established the New England Non Resistance Society. The group adopted a declaration that is likely the first formal commitment to non violent resistance in history. The members of the society vowed that they would not serve in the military, that they would not even vote for public

official whose authority derived from physical force. The declaration, written by Garrison condemned the use of violence in war, for the death penalty and even in self defense. Bruce Laurie, it's very, very powerful. Some people think it's the most powerful thing ever said on non violence. It's quite starring. I mean, he talks about the evils of violence, how violence begets violence, and the importance of non violence as

a Christian doctrine. When the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy first heard about Garrison's Non Resistant Society and its declaration more than fifty years later, he said that he experienced a spiritual joy. Tolstoy said that Garrison would be remembered as one of the quote great reformers of true human progress. Still, at the time, Garrison remained a lone voice in the wilderness,

which suited the crusading abolitionists just fine. Garrison may have thought of himself as a latter day Jesus right, a man basically without a church, someone who uh moves in and and and and and calls for peace among the tribes and a higher order of morality. Garrison traveled the country, giving lectures like a revival preacher, even at black churches. His vivid, lurid depictions of the lives of American slaves impressed the details of human bondage into the minds of

his audience. Once a good friend told Garrison that he should take it easy, that he was quote all on fire. Garrison took him by the shoulder and replied, I have need to be all on fire. I have mountains of ice about me to melt. Garrison could also be as harsh as he was uncompromising. He could be um, extremely egocentric, and difficult to deal with. He was a vicious correspondent if um. If he did not like you, or he disagreed with you, he would call you every name in

the book uh short of swearing so um. As a writer, he was uncompromising, hectoring, disrespectful. He was sort of an extremist, but with his wife and children. He was about as extreme as a big puppy dog. In his private life, he was the direct opposite. He was a loving husband and father. His daughter liked to warm her hands on his bald head in winter. Garrison would joke that at least a hot blooded fanatic was good for something. He's

sort of a contradiction, provably tender, publicly impossible. And part of being publicly impossible was Garrison's insistence that the issue of slavery could not be resolved to the usual channels. Garrison believed in what he called moral suasion. He believed that the argument should be taken directly to the people. Politics as usual was not an option. But really the eighteen thirties, Garrison argues, politicians are corrupt. Most people really

don't care much about politics. You couldn't rely on politicians to get your work done for you because they were distracted by other issues and triss So he developed this idea that the most effective way of agitating for slavery is outside of politics. The key to this where the anti slavery societies that started to spring up around the country during the eighteen thirties. By eighteen forty, over two hundred thousand Americans, including some Southerners, belonged to abolitionist societies.

Garrison had his own movement. Like Tolstoy, Gandhi, Rustin, and King, Garrison realized that non resistance did not mean retreat. It meant courting conflict, extracting violence from society so as to bring it fully into public view. It was not easy. One big obstacle facing the anti slavery movement, including Garrison's newspaper,

The Liberator, was the American government itself. By eighteen thirty seven and thirty eight, the The Liberator was banned in most Southern states, and also President Jackson prohibited it from being mailed, so they shut down the U. S. Mails and finally, from eighteen thirty seven until the early eighteen forties, Congress refused to debate the question of slavery. This forced

Garrison and his fellow abolitionists to get creative. The Abolitionists were the first American activists to figure out what publicity is. What the Garrisonians did was they figured out that if you want to have people involved in the movement, you have to give them something to do, even the most seemingly trivial things to do in order to give the movement publicity, so they launched things like called fancy fairs.

They would set up on the town common and sell things to people with with abolitionists labels on them, and they also gave people things to sign. Abolitionists would would go around in communities with these petitions printed in advance with lines on it so you could enter your name, pishing, for instance, to have Congress debate slavery, petitioning against the War with Mexico, petition against enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The abolitionists also filled the mail with newspapers, declarations, and propaganda sheets. By eighteen thirty seven and thirty eight, they had produced over a million pieces of mail, and as a result of the petitioning and the mail, the movement looked a lot bigger than it was. In fact, some Northerners thought that all Yankees were abolitionists, largely on a basis of abolitionist propaganda, the abolitionists were very effective for

a relatively small activist community. By the eighteen fifties, they succeeded at shaping the terms of a nationwide debate about the practice of slavery. Garrison caught in America's attention in a way that no agitator before ever had. Still, as the nation grappled with its most violent institution, it became clear to many that nonviolent resistance was not going to be enough to free America's slaves. Up next, we look at how the American Civil War vindicated and decimated Lilliam

Lloyd Garrison's life work. At age twenty three, William Lloyd Garrison wrote racial equality into the Declaration of Independence at the Park Street Church in Boston, and throughout his career, the firebrand continued to create spectacles with his words and deeds. Sometimes, however, he overplayed his hand At a famous rally, He once put a match to the Futuitive Slave Act and the

Constitution and abolitionists. Political abolitionists really didn't like that. They thought it was sort of counterproductive because most Americans thought of the Constitution as a sacred document. That's right, Garrison set fire to a copy of the Constitution in public. Garrison also continued to preach non violent resistance as the means for accomplishing abolition, even as the growing rhetoric between North and South made such a means very unlikely. As

the eighteen fifties wears on. More and more abolitionists in Garrison's camp decide, look, we've got to compromise on two things. One is on non resistance. It's not working right than the other's politics. What happens is more and more abolitionists, except for the hardline Garrisonians, endorsed Abraham Lincoln, and more and more of them endorsed the idea that it will take violence to end slavery. Garrison could not be persuaded.

He continued to argue for the power of moral suasion, the need to convince a critical mass of Americans that slavery was untenable, and he did so even as many of his former followers, including the slave turned social reformer Frederick Douglas, abandoned him in the years before the Civil War. People like Frederick Douglas argued that moral suasion is a

very limited form. You can't reach enough people, first of all, and second, it's not gonna end slavery because slavery was created by politics, the Constitution, for instance, and we'll have to end through politics or through violence. And so Garrison is really abandoned on the platform of moral suasion and non resistance. The weight of the movement is running against him. Yet Garrison was steadfast. Of course, he was wrong. It

took violence to end slavery, a lot of it. The ending of slavery through violent warfare was a bitter irony for Garrison. He ended up reluctantly supporting the war, sacrificing one set of his principles in order to pursue another. And while the war took its toll on the pacifist the result was what he had been fighting to achieve

for decades. Indeed, just after the war ended, thirty years after he was attacked by a mob in Boston, Garrison was raised affectionately by crowds of liberated blacks in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina. He becomes a huge figure when he goes there in eighteen six, right after the war, and he's he's really celebrated like a hero. It's like sort of like a Roman triumph of adoration um and really wild, wild respect. But the Civil War also destroyed

the non violent movement that Garrison so carefully built. One month after the Civil War ended, the abolitionist declared his life's work at an end. In eighteen six, Garrison announces that um there's no there's nothing more for abolitionists to do. That their goal all along was simply to liberate the slaves, and so he collapsed as a liberator and argues that the Americans Anti slavery society should close its doors. But

other leaders, including Frederick Douglas, voted down that resolution. African Americans could not yet vote, and we're still not. It took another hundred years before leaders like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King were able to advance the causes of

freedom and racial equality further. In doing so, however, they rediscovered the power of non violence with a big assist from Gandhi and Tolstoy, and ensured that William Lloyd Garrison's most revolutionary idea outlived its apparent demise during the Civil War. Garrison died in eighteen seventy nine at age seventy three. Black hands intertwined with white ones to carry his casket

at his funeral. During the memorial service, Frederick Duclas said, it was the glory of this man that he could stand alone with truth and calmly await the result Garrison stood up for in America conceived an equal citizenship when few others dared to. Bruce Laurie Garrison was about as Sara going an egalitarian um as there is in the nineteenth century, and like Martin Luther King, Garrison managed to build a social movement grounded in thousands of individual acts

of non cooperation. He learned how to face the mob, to stand up for justice, and how not to fight back. He learned how to combine radical politics with love, and how to provoke confrontation in order to grow awareness. He's iconic in in passive resistance circles um and probably justly so. I'm unaware of any thinker he appealed to in order to develop this strategy. He really is an original thinker

and a most powerfully influential figure in American history. Garrison's own story, however, still depends on the hands of fate, including some timely help at a key moment. Garrison's influential newspaper, The Liberator, might never have made it to its second issue without the assistance of another largely forgotten figure from

American history. Next week, in the final episode of this season, we complete our thread with the story of a remarkable African American businessman whose generosity saved Garrison's newspaper and his revolutionary idea, and in doing so, altered the course of history. We also learned about the surprising trait that King Rustin

Gandhi and other non violent figures share. I am an abolitionist, Hi glory in the name Oh now by slaveries, men and his and covered or with shame it lovelight and how much word of the free who sponsis in the truck co Craven Soul The Threat is produced by Libby Coleman, Robert Coulos, Sophia Perpetua and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show. This episode features the Duchess Anti Slavery Singers performing a song by William Lloyd Garrison called Song

of the Abolitionist. To learn more about the thread, visit ausi dot com, slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out at ausi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of AUSI dot com. That's o z y dot com. Name no now by slaveries, men, and covered or with shame.

Love lives, watchword of the free. Craven soul is hea