"Truth Stronger and Stranger Than Fiction": Reexamining William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator

In the words of James Russell Lowell, fellow abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison “knew how types were set, / He had a dauntless spirit and a press.” ¹ What we have yet to fully appreciate is the extent to which Garrison and his newspaper, the Liberator (1831–65), influenced American literary culture. Propelled by his own dictum to be “as harsh as truth,” Garrison published many slave narratives, including the famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). ² Through such editorial decisions, as well as innovative publishing practices, Garrison helped to crystallize a taste for the “real,” and thus to influence the development of literary realism as a genre.

The longest running abolitionist newspaper, Garrison’s Liberator was the product of a nineteenth-century marketplace concerned with money, morality, and veracity. The print emissary of Garrisonian abolitionism, the Liberator epitomized “the vanguard of capitalist liberalism”: by virtue of their connection to the abolitionist cause, objects of everyday use—from candy to shoes—were sold in its pages as advertisers increasingly linked moral and consumer choices. ³ Emphasizing a book’s relationship to abolitionist agendas, for example, was a common advertising technique. Every section of the paper called for active participation in the cause of abolition through social, political, commercial, and consumer practices. ⁴ The Liberator’s dual relationship with liberal capitalism and moral suasion makes it an ideal vehicle for the study of what I call humanitarian realism, whose roots are in what Thomas Laqueur refers to as the “humanitarian narrative,” which uses the body and its suffering to engender moral action in readers. ⁵

“I Will Be as Harsh as Truth”

Abolitionist culture, fostered by antislavery societies and their publications, gave rise to all manner of cultural production, which created, in turn, a new marketplace for ideas, goods, and services related to the cause. As important products of the age, William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator express one of the historical tensions at the center of abolitionism: the need to make a living in a capitalist economy without violating the evangelical morality of the mid-nineteenth century. ⁶ In making the antislavery cause his career, Garrison demonstrated a remarkable business sense. He recognized the appeal of the abolitionist movement to a large public eager to support another spokesman for the cause. Unlike gentlemen reformers like Wendell Phillips, Garrison grew up knowing he would have to support himself and his family. After his father, a seaman with a taste for rum, deserted the family when Garrison was three years old, his mother, a strong-willed Baptist, struggled to keep the family together. Garrison began contributing to the household at age five by selling homemade molasses candy on the street corners in Newburyport, Massachusetts. ⁷ The abolitionist cause offered Garrison a unique way to make a living and satisfy his moral principles simultaneously. While it addressed the theoretical contradictions between slavery and democracy, the movement’s immediate concern was for real people suffering under a real oppression. It was the undeniable materiality of slavery and its effects on people in bondage that drove Garrison to adopt business skills to promote abolition.

From the days of his first pseudonymous writings in the Newburyport Herald in 1818, Garrison knew that his success depended on learning to sell himself in the marketplace of ideas. According to James Brewer Stewart, Garrison was driven at an early age by the Franklinian ideal of the self-made man, who measured his success in terms of his ability to create and adjust to market conditions. ⁸ But Garrison’s efforts to build a career took shape in a way unique to the nineteenth century. His personal need to make a living was intimately linked with his culture’s emphasis on doing so in a deeply moral way. ⁹ Understanding the need to balance his welfare with that of the cause, he never allowed concerns about money to eclipse his moral values...