Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

[56] engaged in reading and study and literary composition. Crocker had been on the shoemaker's bench for a time, but afterwards went into the office of the Gilmans as an apprentice, probably succeeding, in that capacity, a youth named Isaac Knapp, who, like Crocker, was warmly attached to Lloyd and greatly influenced by his strong magnetism. Others felt this, also, and a debating society known as the Franklin Club, before which Lloyd one year delivered a Fourth of July oration, was really founded by him.¹ The intimacy between him and Crocker waned after they separated and left Newburyport, the one to seek a journalistic career, and the other to enter a theological school;² but that with Knapp, as will abundantly appear, was more enduring and of the highest importance.

Though Lloyd was not, like Crocker, a communicant in the church, he was a constant attendant at its meetings, and had become, as his mother had fondly anticipated, ‘a complete Baptist as to the tenets.’ He had never been baptized, himself, but he was yet zealous for³ immersion as the only acceptable baptism; he believed in the clerical order and the organized church as divinely instituted, and was a strict Sabbatarian. He early became familiar with the Bible, and could repeat scores of verses by heart, but he did not realize their full meaning and power until his consecration to the cause of the slave led him to study the book anew.

It was during the year 1824 that he first discovered his near-sightedness, and when he one day chanced to try the spectacles of Miss Betsey Atkinson, an old friend of his mother, and discerned things that he had never seen