Why Williams Garrison Supported The Civil War

“Williams Garrison was born on December 10, 1805. He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts” (Ehrlich Eugene and Gorton Carruth, 2010) He was raised in poverty, after his father deserted his three children. “He was later apprenticed to a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, and finally to the printer and editor of the Newburyport Herald. He worked as a printer in Boston and in 1827 helped edit a temperance paper, the National Philanthropist. Some people believed slavery should be abolished gradually, some immediately; some believed slaves should be only partly free until educated and capable of being absorbed into society. There were those who saw slavery as a moral and religious issue; others considered abolition a problem to be decided by legal and political means. Garrison opposed both means as slow and impractical, asking in his first editorial in the Genius for "immediate and complete emancipation" of slaves”
Garrison’s paper got himself in trouble for his militancy. He got sued for libel, and spent 44 days in jail. “Garrison supported the Civil War for he believed it an act of providence to destroy slavery” (http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/social-reformers/william-lloyd-garrison). Garrison’s influence was restricted to New England. Garrison eventually became the symbol of abolitionism. “He was influential in relating it to issues of free speech, free press, and the rights of assembly and petition and to the powerful religious evangelism of the times. In his harsh and tactless way, he forced popular awareness of the gap between what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution said and what the nation did, constantly challenging the country to put its ideals into practice”