Genius of Universal Emancipation since 1821. Lundy persuaded
Garrison to move to Baltimore in the fall of 1829 and join him is
editing his newspaper, which then became a weekly. Several months
later the partnership was interrupted when Garrison, convicted of
libel by a Baltimore jury for excoriating a Massachusetts shipowner
who had been transporting slaves for the South, was jailed upon failure
to pay the fine of $50 and costs. Upon his release -- the fine having
been paid by Arthur Tappan, a New York merchant and anti-slavery
philanthropist -- he made plans to issue his own newspaper, which he
realized with the appearance of the Liberator in Boston on January 1,
1831. Starting without capital and aided by Isaac Knapp, a printer,
Garrison relied for financial support primarily upon Negro contribu-
tions and subscriptions, supplemented by those of a few white sym-
pathizers.

The revolutionary nature of Garrison's thought, made manifest in
the first pages of the Liberator, was summarized years later by
Wendell Phillips in his comment that Garrison "undertook to look
at the slave question as the Negro looked at it." Identifying himself
completely with the slave, Garrison saw and felt slavery in all its
terror and misery, refused to accept as valid any excuse for its con-
tinuance, and demanded its immediate and total abolition. Identifying
himself, too, with the free Negro, he affirmed the latter's right to
complete equality of opportunity and condemned the American Col-
onization Society for viewing the Negro as a danger to American
society, to be freed from slavery only if he left the country. Indeed,
within a few years after he had begun to expose the pernicious nature
of this philosophy, an anti-slavery man who defended the American
Colonization Society became a rarity. One aspect of Garrison's
philosophy was his refusal to bate one jot or tittle from the deserved
condemnation of either slavery or the slaveholder. Viewing slavery
as a crime against millions of human beings which contravened the
established moral and religious principles of decent humanity, to
Garrison the slaveholder was a criminal whose piety as a Christian
and respectability as citizen, husband and father, did not palliate in
the slightest the horror of his action toward the slave. So accustomed
was American society of that day -- including many who were hon-
estly anti-slavery -- to speak in soft tones of slavery and the slave-
holder, that Garrison's language seemed outlandish and violent. Yet
what he wrote was never coarse or vulgar, and to the fair-minded

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