All on Fire

Finished my first book for the 2019 Goodreads challenge, a somewhat windy but eminently enjoyable William Lloyd Garrison biography. I learned almost nothing about this feisty, balls-out gent in school, but I'd seen him referenced in other antebellum and Civil-War era books, so when I realized he had a book all to himself by an author whose previous work I had enjoyed, I leapt on it.

Mr. Garrison was a stone-cold hardass. He wasn't perfect, mind, and occasionally veered into the obliviously paternalistic when it came to how best to help the freed slaves in the post-emancipation years, but the man never wavered in his convictions, and he wasn't afraid to speak truth to power and call slavery what it was, which was a terrible sin and moral blight and festering stain of hypocrisy on the lofty, golden promise of the country. He wasn't afraid to tell Henry Ward Beecher, possibly the most powerful and popular preacher in the country where to stick his bombastic bloviations when he tried to sniff and temporize about the issue. Anybody who's willing to go to jail at twenty-five for their beliefs has one gleaming, brass set, and the puling, so-called "activists" of today, who shy from anything stronger than a half-assed text to Resistbot because they have anxiety or don't want to risk the dead-end retail drudgery that doesn't even offer the grim comfort of financial security, could stand to take a few lessons.