(Host)
This week commentator and historian Jill Mudgett has been thinking
about the latest media depiction of the American past, and about the
character traits of one of our most cherished historical figures.
(Mudgett)
The new three-part PBS documentary, "The Abolitionists," is the latest
media production released to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the
Civil War.
PBS’s Abolitionists narrows the broad topic of
antislavery activism by focusing on five major figures, including the
great newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison. Here viewers are
reintroduced to the Garrison of U.S. history courses: serious,
principled, and unyielding in his growing calls for immediate abolition.
PBS’s Garrison is a likeable figure – admirable in his
unwillingness to compromise – but in life he was not above burning
bridges or ending friendships with other abolitionists over differences
of strategy.
The documentary picks up Garrison’s story in Boston
in 1828, early in his newspaper career. What viewers don’t learn is
that Garrison left shortly thereafter for Bennington, Vermont, where he
spent nearly seven months editing a political newspaper called The
Journal of the Times. Only 22 when he arrived in Vermont, Garrison was
already keenly interested in antislavery and managed while in Bennington
to secure 2,000 signatures for an antislavery petition to Congress.
But
Garrison was frustrated. Publicly in the pages of the paper he praised
the landscape and the common sense of his Vermont readership, but in
truth he didn’t love Bennington or the newspaper job. After resigning
from the paper, he wrote to a friend about his commitment to antislavery
and about the state he intentionally misspelled as "Varmaount," –
V-A-R-M-A-O-U-N-T – claiming to care "not whether I again see an inch of
its territory" and promising what he called "a queer description of
Green Mountain bipeds and quadrupeds" upon his return to Boston.
Letters
like that one reveal a fact about Garrison that’s usually left out of
textbooks and documentaries: Garrison was funny… and punny. In that same
letter he teased his friend, "I have been debating how to address you…
As I feel just in the mood for barking and scratching, methinks I will
be both dog-matical and cat-egorical. Bow-wow-wow-wow!" Really, if you
want a well-rounded picture of Garrison, I think you have to imagine him
barking.
It’s important to keep in mind that Garrison was young
and single, and Bennington hadn’t done much for his love life. He
looked forward to seeing young women at an upcoming social event in
Boston, writing, "Oh, the thought is most exhilarating, to one who has
been encompassed by ugly mountains for about seven months, and hardly
seen a human being, or a bearable phiz," – that is: face – the whole
time. Poor Lloyd!
In later years, as Vermont ‘s commitment to
the abolition of slavery grew, Garrison would say plenty of nice
things-publicly and privately-about Vermont. Though he remained a
lifelong punster, in those later correspondences about Vermont Garrison
is the serious activist we’ve come to recognize: sober, earnest, and on
message. I appreciate that about him, just as I do the blend of
playfulness and purpose that characterized a younger Garrison, who
departed Bennington for bigger things.