The Liberator (Boston, Mass.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,828 issues from 1831 to 1865, published in Boston, Massachusetts, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Liberator was a radical abolitionist newspaper published from 1831-65 in Boston, Massachusetts. A weekly four-page paper, it was the most influential abolitionist publication in the United States during the nineteenth century. At its peak, the Liberator was circulating 3,000 copies a week, primarily across the free North. It was funded and read largely by the free Black population in the North.
The paper was published and edited by radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) and was affiliated with the interracial organization the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison founded in 1832. Garrison believed in immediate abolition of slavery and integration of previously enslaved people into American society, an extremist position even among other abolitionists at the time.
The Liberator was organized as a forum for political debate and public discussion on slavery and abolition. The paper included letters from anti-abolitionists, “agents” (touring abolitionists), free Black people, and women. Along with letters, the paper published fiction, sermons, poetry, as well as articles on the inhumanity of slavery in the South and recent politics.
In some Southern states, having a copy of the Liberator in one’s possession was a crime. Garrison received death threats and attacks regularly; at one point, he was indicted in North Carolina for distributing antislavery material, and the Georgia Legislature offered a significant reward for his capture. These…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress