Word: abolitionists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...attack on segregation has revived interest in Douglass. His early autobiography, published in 1845, has now been reissued. Written when Douglass was 27 or 28 (he was never certain of his age, since the births of slaves were rarely recorded), it is a classic of abolitionist literature without the steamy rhetoric of much abolitionist writing...
...Liberator, by John L. Thomas. The great abolitionist emerges from this objective biography as a fanatic who infuriated his fellow abolitionists as much as the slaveowners...
William Lloyd Garrison has been cast by historians as the great Abolitionist, a role he warmly welcomed. In point of fact, Garrison was only the best publicized of the abolitionists, as this biography-the most objective yet written-makes clear. John L. Thomas, assistant history professor at Harvard, shows that the vituperative Garrison was less a leader of the abolitionists than an eccentric outcast who gave the whole movement a taint of fanaticism it did not deserve. Despite his dedication, in the end Garrison was more hindrance than help in ultimately freeing the Negro slaves...
...worse than drink: slavery. All his other concerns were sidelined while he concentrated on this one. Moving from newspaper to newspaper, he impudently courted libel suits with his inflammatory editorials against slaveowners and traders. Convicted in one case, he spent 49 days in jail. Urged by a fellow abolitionist to calm down, Garrison snapped: "I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." In 1831 he launched his newspaper, The Liberator, which so infuriated the South that the Georgia legislature offered $5,000 reward to anyone who brought them Garrison...
...content to let the South keep its "peculiar institution." He was heckled when he spoke, and sometimes mobbed. But when the South, 25 years before the Civil War, began to make arbitrary arrests and to stamp out other civil liberties in its efforts to preserve slavery. Northern opinion turned abolitionist. Instead of welcoming the converts, Garrison quarreled with them. While other abolitionists interpreted the Constitution as an anti-slavery document,* Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death," and in the most theatrical gesture of his career burned a copy of it at a mass meeting. "By 1837," writes...