hindered emancipation and the struggle for equal rights for the Negro.
For colonization assumed the inferiority of the Negro and regarded
his presence in this country as a danger to white American society
and thus reinforced the very arguments which were being used to
keep him in slavery and to deprive him, when free, of the rights of
a white man.

The resulting situation has been perceptively summarized by Albert
Bushnell Hart. ¹

When Jackson became president, in 1829, anti-slavery seemed,
after fifty years of effort, to have spent its force. The voice of the
churches was no longer heard in protest; the abolitionist societies
were dying out; there was hardly an abolitionist militant in the field;
the Colonization Society absorbed most of the public interest in the
subject, and it was doing nothing to help either the free Negro or the
slave; in Congress there was only one anti-slavery man, and his
efforts were without avail. It was a gloomy time for the little band
of people who believed that slavery was poisonous to the south,
hurtful to the north, and dangerous to the Union.

It was at this point that William Lloyd Garrison appeared with a
revolutionary philosophy that challenged every basic assumption of
the existing anti-slavery societies, and building upon new foundations,
created a movement which ultimately brought about the destruction
of slavery. Harriet Martineau, the English author, in her little volume
entitled The Martyr Age of the United States, has called Garrison
"the mastermind of the great revolution." He was indeed that and
more. Born in 1805 to a mother who was a pious Baptist and a father
who deserted his family when the boy was three years old, Garrison
early sought to prepare himself for the profession of writing. A news-
paper apprentice at thirteen, he later edited newspapers in Newbury-
port, Boston and Bennington. In 1827, in Boston, he met Benjamin
Lundy, a New Jersey Quaker who had been carrying on a one-man
crusade against slavery for more than fifteen years. Lundy had formed
anti-slavery societies throughout the country, had promoted schemes
for Negro colonization in Mexico and Haiti, and had been editing the

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