William Lloyd Garrison

What it is

William Lloyd Garrison is a biography by Lindsay Swift, published in 1911 by George W. Jacobs and Company in Philadelphia as part of the American Crisis Biographies series. The copy here is a scanned PDF from the Internet Archive. The preface says the book was written jointly with Henry Burrowes Lathrop, although only Swift's name appears on the title page. The bibliography is listed on pages 387 to 390.

Why it matters

Swift wrote about Garrison decades after the anti-slavery struggle he described. Books like this shaped how later readers remembered abolitionists, and they show how an early twentieth-century author chose to frame a figure of the 1800s. The biography connects Garrison to the wider anti-slavery movement and to the period's arguments over slavery and the Civil War.

Look closer

• Why might an author in 1911 choose to write about an abolitionist who had died in 1879?
• What does the preface reveal about how the book was made, and who had a part in it?
• Which sources does the author rely on, and how might a biography built on earlier accounts shape the picture it gives?