Garrison, William Lloyd

1805 – He was born on the 12th day of December of this year. He is best known as the editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He became famous for his 1,820 issues of "The Liberator"

1828 - Garrison had rejected the programs of the American Colonization Society.

1830 - Garrison joined the Abolition movement. For a brief time he became associated with the American Colonization Society, an organization that believed free blacks should immigrate to a territory on the west coast of Africa.

1831 - Garrison returned to New England and founded a weekly anti-slavery newspaper of his own, The Liberator. Garrison started a 30-year war with words through his writings.

1832 – He founded the New-England Anti-Slavery Society. One year later, he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society.

1833 – He also visited the United Kingdom and assisted in the anti-slavery movement there. He intended that the Anti-Slavery Society should not align itself with any political party and that women should be allowed full participation in society activities.

1834 - Garrison married Helen Eliza Benson, the daughter of a retired abolitionist merchant. The couple had five sons and two daughters, of whom a son and a daughter died as children.

1839 - Two brothers, Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, left and formed a rival organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which did not admit women. A segment of the Society also withdrew and aligned itself with the newly founded Liberty Party, a political organization that named James G. Birney as its Presidential candidate.

1853 - Garrison credited Reverend John Rankin of Ohio as a primary influence on his career, calling him his "anti-slavery father".

1865 - After the abolition of slavery in the United States, he continued working on other reform movements, especially temperance and women's suffrage. He ended the run of The Liberator at the end of this year, and in May of the same year, announced that he would resign the Presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and proposed a resolution to declare victory in the struggle against slavery and dissolve the Society.

1873 - While working with the AWSA in this year, he finally healed his long estrangements from Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, affectionately reuniting with them on the platform at an AWSA rally organized by Kelly and Stone on the one hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party (Mayer 614).

1874 – This year, Charles Sumner died, some Republicans suggested Garrison as a possible successor to his Senate seat; Garrison declined on grounds of his moral opposition to taking government office (Mayer 618).

1879 - Garrison, ailing from kidney disease, continued to weaken during April of this year, and went to live with his daughter Fanny's family in New York City. In late May, his condition worsened, and his five surviving children rushed to join him. Garrison was buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on May 28, 1879, after a public memorial service with eulogies by Theodore Dwight Weld and Wendell Phillips.

2005 - Honoring Garrison's 200th birthday, in December of this year his descendants gathered in Boston for the first family reunion in about a century. They discussed the legacy and impact of their most notable family member.

• "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."