William Lloyd Garrison Garrison, William Lloyd (1805-79), American abolitionist, who founded the influential antislavery newspaper The Liberator. Garrison was born December 10, 1805, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Indentured at the age of 14 to the owner of the Newburyport Herald, he became an expert printer. The struggles of oppressed peoples for freedom engaged his sympathies in his youth. In articles written anonymously or under the pseudonym Aristides, in the Herald and other newspapers, he attempted to arouse Northerners from their apathy on the question of slavery in the U.S. In 1829 Garrison entered into partnership with the American antislavery agita