No Compromise with Slavery

De: William Lloyd Garrison

Narrado por: Jeremy Gage

An address delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, February 14, 1854

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was a prominent United States abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and as one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

When he was 25, he joined the Abolition movement. For a brief time, he became associated with the American Colonization Society, an organization that believed free blacks should immigrate to a territory on the west coast of Africa. Although some members of the society encouraged granting freedom to slaves, the majority saw the relocation as a means to reduce the number of free blacks in the United States and thus help preserve the institution of slavery. He ended the run of The Liberator at the end of 1865, and in May of that year announced that he would resign the Presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and proposed a resolution to declare victory in the struggle against slavery and dissolve the Society.

After the abolition of slavery in the United States, Garrison continued working on other reform movements, especially temperance and women's suffrage.

Public Domain (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

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Abolitionist communicates with extreme passion and clarity for cause of freeing all slaves without compromise. A must read for everyone.

Timeless truth...

The words of Garrison are passionate and full of truth. Gage does a great job of narration as you can feel the emotion and conviction as if Garrison himself were speaking.

Time travel is possible with this speech.

Reading this speech completely shatters the tired “Lost Cause” excuse that people in the antebellum era just didn’t understand slavery was wrong, or that we shouldn’t “judge their society by modern standards.” Garrison understood. Many did. And here, in 1854, he dismantles every pro-slavery argument of his day—moral, economic, political, and especially religious—with precision and moral fire.

He starts deliberately, laying out the familiar defenses of slavery, only to knock them down one by one. By the end, the speech feels less like a political address and more like a prophetic sermon. The line that struck me as the essence of his position was:

“Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man stealer. By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no purchase, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable. While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest.”

This is not polite, incremental abolitionism—it is absolute, uncompromising moral clarity. It leaves no place to hide, no fig leaf for those seeking gradualism or half-measures. Reading it today is both inspiring and sobering. Inspiring, because it shows the depth of conviction some Americans held long before emancipation. Sobering, because it reminds us how many heard speeches like this and still clung to an evil they knew was wrong.

If you want to understand the moral urgency of the abolitionist movement—not in hindsight, but as it thundered from the mouths of its leaders—this speech is essential reading.