Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/155

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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 319 kiel Bartlett and was sent to the Grammar School until, at the age or nine, he joined his mother in Lynn and was taught shoemaking in the shop of Gamaliel W. Oliver, a kind and excellent member of the Society of Friends, where his elder brother James was already an apprentice. In 1815, Mr. Paul Newhall, a shoe manufacturer of the same town, deciding to establish business in Baltimore, invited Mrs. Garrison and her two boys to accompany him. There Lloyd was employed as an errand-boy and James was again apprenticed at shoe-making. Mr. Newhall's venture proving unsuccessful, Mrs. Garrison was constrained to resume nursing and Lloyd was sent back to Newburyport, his brother betaking himself to the sea. From Newburyport he was sent to Haverhill to learn cabinet-making ; but, in spite of kind treatment, he disliked the occu- pation and ran away from his master, returning to Newburyport to live again with his mother's old friend, Deacon Bartlett. In 1818, Ephraim W. Allen, pro- prietor of the Newburyport Herald, accepted Lloyd, then thirteen years of age, as an apprentice and taught him the printer's trade. Here at once he found a vocation suited to his tastes and became a rapid and accurate compositor. The printing-office proved an excellent school for the young man, developing his lit- erary taste and ambition. Fie was fond of reading, and delighted in poetry and fiction. Politics especially attracted him, and at the age of sixteen he wrote anonymous articles for the columns of the Herald. His first contribution was over the signature of "An Old Bachelor ' He was an ardent Federalist and his political articles attracted attention by their forcible reasoning and direct style. Caleb Cushing, then editor of the Herald, discovering the lad's abilities, encour- aged and befriended him. In 1826, Mr. Garrison, closing his apprenticeship with the Herald, became editor and publisher of the Free Press (Newburyport), within a few months of his majority. It was to this paper that Whittier made his first poetical contributions anony- mously, and, upon the discovery of his true name, Mr. Garrison sought him out and encouraged him in his youthful efforts. After a brief existence of six months, the Free Press was sold and Mr. Gar- rison again became a journeyman printer, soon seeking employment in Boston, where, after various vicissitudes, he was employed by Rev. William Collier, a Baptist city missionary, upon The National Philanthropist, devoted to the " sup- pression of intemperance and kindred vices," becoming its editor in 1828. The paper had the distinction of being the first temperance journal ever printed, and among the earliest evidences of Mr. Garrison's interest in the slavery question was an editorial article by him commenting severely on the bill passed by the House of Assembly of South Carolina to forbid the teaching of reading and writing tc the colored people.