UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Story of the Garrison Children

Harriet Hyman Alonso

Winner of the Warren F. Kuehl Prize from the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations

A portrait of a close-knit family dedicated to ending slavery and social injustice

Much has been written about the life of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), but relatively little attention has been paid to his wife, Helen Benson Garrison, and their seven children. In Growing Up Abolitionist, Garrison's public image recedes into the background and the family's private world takes center stage.

The lives of the Garrison children were shaped within the context of the great nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery, racism, violence, war, imperialism, and the repression of women. As children, they became apprentices of these movements and grew up adoring their dissident parents. Collectively and individually, they carried on their parents' values in distinctive ways.

Their path was not always easy. When the Civil War erupted, the entire family had to come to grips with a basic contradiction in their lives. While each member passionately yearned for the end of slavery, all but the eldest son, George, who served as an officer with the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, opposed military participation.

The Civil War years also brought four marriage partners into the Garrisons' lives-Ellen Wright, Lucy McKim, and Annie Anthony (all abolitionist daughters) and Henry Villard, a German-born journalist who later became a railroad magnate and publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation.

Raised by loving parents to be political activists, the Garrison children, as adults, assumed positions as leaders or participants in those radical causes of their day that most closely reflected their upbringing: racial justice, women's rights, anti-imperialism, and peace.

"This major historical and biographical study is not only highly informative but also unusually well written. It will appeal to both academics and general readers interested in history and biography."

Dee Garrison, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
"This book will find an audience among historians of reform, the family, and political culture. Because it is a concrete and enjoyable read, it could readily be assigned in courses on any of these subjects."

E. Anthony Rotundo, Phillips Academy, Andover

Photograph of Harriet Hyman Alonso

Harriet Hyman Alonso is professor of history at the City College of New York, CUNY.

American History
432 pp., 17 illus.
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-233-X
$27.50s paper, ISBN 1-55849-381-6
November 2002
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