s was an unhappy boyhood,
for his father, a sea-captain of intemperate and adventurous habits,
left his family, soon after the boy was born, and was never seen again.
The mother, a woman of unusual strength of character, went to work to
earn a living for herself and her son, and it was to her careful
training that his development was due. At fourteen years of age, he was
apprenticed to a printery and served until he was of age. From the first
he was remarkable for his firmness of moral principle and for an
inflexible adherence to his convictions, no matter at what cost to
himself.

He soon showed, too, that he was destined for something more than a
printer--a man who puts in print the ideas of others--that he had ideas
of his own. His apprenticeship over, he started a paper of his own, but
it was too reformatory for the taste of the day, and proved a failure.
The most noteworthy thing in connection with it was the publication of
some poems which had been sent in anonymously, and which Garrison,
recognizing their merit, discovered to be the work of John G. Whittier,
then entirely unknown. He visited the poet, encouraged him to keep on
writing, and laid the foundation of a friendship which was broken only
by death.

Going to Boston after the failure of his paper, Garrison for a time
edited the "National Philanthropist," devoted to prohibition. This
paper, too, was a failure, but at Boston Garrison met a man whose
influence changed the whole course of his life. His name was Benjamin
Bundy. He was a Quaker, and at that time thirty-nine years of age. He
was a saddler by trade, but for thirteen years had devoted his life to
the anti-slavery cause, forming anti-slavery societies and editing a
little monthly paper with a portentous name--"The Genius of Universal
Emancipation." Bundy, whose home was in Baltimore, had journeyed to New
England in the hope of interesting the clergy in the cause. In this he
was bitterly disappointed, but he mightily stirred the heart of young
Garrison, who soon became his ally and afterwards his partner in the
conduct of the paper. His vigorous editing of it was soon a national
sensation. He had seen with dismay the indifference with which the north
regarded the great issue--an indifference grounded on the belief that
slavery was intrenched by the constitution and that all discussion of it
was a menace to the Union. He realized that this indifference could be
broken only by heroic measures, and he