William Lloyd Garrison | Page 3

loved her and
his little ones but the love of travel and change was strong within him.
He was ever restless and changeful. During one of his roving fits he
emigrated with his family from Nova Scotia to the United States. It was
in the spring of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport. The
following December his wife presented him with a boy, whom they
called William Lloyd Garrison. Three years afterward Abijah deserted
his wife and children. Of the causes which led to this act nothing is
now known. Soon after his arrival in Newburyport he had found

employment. He made several voyages as sailing-master in 1805-8
from that port. He was apparently during these years successful after
the manner of his craft. But he was not a man to remain long in one
place. What was the immediate occasion of his strange behavior we can
only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for liquor had led to
domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature would not brook.
Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was not a man in whom
the moral sense was uppermost. He was governed by impulse and she
by fixed moral and religious principles. He drank and she abhorred the
habit. She tried first moral suasion to induce him to abandon the habit,
and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly indignation, she broke
up one of his drinking parties in her house by trying the efficacy of a
little physical suasion. She turned the company out of doors and
smashed the bottles of liquor. This was not the kind of woman whom
Abijah cared to live with as a wife. He was not the sort of man whom
the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman.
And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he
would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The
condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and
family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and father.
Bitter days now followed and Fanny Garrison became acquainted with
grief and want. She had the mouths of three children to fill--the
youngest an infant at her breast. The battle of this broken-hearted
woman for their daily bread was as heroic as it was pathetic. She still
lived in the little house on School street where Lloyd was born. The
owner, Martha Farnham, proved herself a friend indeed to the poor
harassed soul. Now she kept the wolf from the door by going out as a
monthly nurse--"Aunt Farnham" looking after the little ones in her
absence. She was put to all her possibles during those anxious years of
struggle and want. Even Lloyd, wee bit of a boy, was pressed into the
service. She would make molasses candies and send him upon the
streets to sell them. But with all her industry and resource what could
she do with three children weighing her down in the fierce struggle for
existence, rendered tenfold fiercer after the industrial crisis preceding
and following the War of 1812. Then it was that she was forced to
supplement her scant earnings with refuse food from the table of "a

certain mansion on State street." It was Lloyd who went for this food,
and it was he who had to run the gauntlet of mischievous and
inquisitive children whom he met and who longed for a peep into his
tin pail. But the future apostle of non-resistance was intensely resistant,
we may be sure, on such occasions. For, as his children have said in the
story of his life: "Lloyd was a thorough boy, fond of games and of all
boyish sport. Barefooted, he trundled his hoop all over Newburyport;
he swam in the Merrimac in summer, and skated on it in winter; he was
good at sculling a boat; he played at bat and ball and snowball, and
sometimes led the 'Southend boys' against the Northenders in the
numerous conflicts between the youngsters of the two sections; he was
expert with marbles. Once, with a playmate, he swam across the river
to 'Great Rock,' a distance of three-fourths of a mile and effected his
return against the tide; and once, in winter, he nearly lost his life by
breaking through the ice on the river and reached the shore only after a
desperate struggle, the ice yielding as often as he attempted to climb
upon its surface. It was favorite pastime of the boys of that day to swim
from one wharf to another adjacent, where vessels from the West Indies
discharged their freight of molasses, and there to indulge in stolen
sweetness, extracted by a smooth stick inserted through the bung-hole.
When detected