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The Liberator, Volume VII, 1837, Cornhill masthead

William Lloyd Garrison · 1837

The first page of the 1837 volume of The Liberator, the Boston anti-slavery newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, with a masthead showing an enslaved family.

Shows the anti-slavery newspaper Garrison edited in 1837, with its masthead making the enslaved family the paper's central image.

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Scan of the first page of The Liberator, Volume VII, 1837, edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The masthead shows a vignette of a slave family under a tree, with dense newspaper columns of text below.
The Liberator, Volume VII, 1837, edited by William Lloyd Garrison. Published by Isaac Knapp, Cornhill, Boston, Massachusetts. Scan of first page.

About this source

What it is

This is a scan of the first page of The Liberator, Volume VII, from 1837. The record gives the paper as edited by William Lloyd Garrison and published by Isaac Knapp at Cornhill, Boston, Massachusetts. The page is a printed newspaper, not a handwritten document.

The masthead includes a vignette showing a slave family under a tree. Below it are dense columns of newspaper text. The description comes from the media record for this scan.

Why it matters

The Liberator was Garrison's own anti-slavery paper, and this 1837 volume shows what his readers saw each week in the late 1830s. The masthead's image of an enslaved family placed the fight against slavery at the front of the paper. The paper also shows Isaac Knapp, the publisher, working with Garrison.

Look closer

  • What does the masthead image show, and how does its placement at the top of the page affect how a reader would see the paper?
  • Who was the paper written for, and what does the dense text suggest about its audience?
  • What voices of enslaved people, or of readers who disagreed, are missing from this single page?

This newspaper article is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of William Lloyd Garrison on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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