The pressure of their needs upon the husband sometimes, simple as indeed they were owing to the good sense and prudence of Mrs.
Garrison, seemed to exceed the weight of the atmospheric column to the square inch.

The fight for bread was one of the bitterest battles of the reformer's life.

The arrangement made in 1837, whereby the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society assumed the responsibility of the publication of the _Liberator_, Garrison rescinded at the beginning of 1838, for the sake of giving himself greater freedom in the advocacy in its columns of the several other reforms in which he had enlisted, besides Abolitionism.

But Garrison and the paper were now widely recognized as anti-slavery essentials and indispensables.

Many of the leaders of the movement perceived, as Gerritt Smith expressed it in a letter enclosing fifty dollars for the editor, that "Among the many things in which the Abolitionists of our country should be agreed, are the two following: (1) The _Liberator_ must be sustained; (2) its editor must be kept above want; not only, nor mainly, for his own or his family's happiness; but that, having his own mind unembarrassed by the cares of griping poverty, he may be a more effective advocate of the cause of the Saviour's enslaved poor." A new arrangement, in accordance with this suggestion for the support of the paper and the preservation of the editor from want, was made in 1839, and its performance taken in charge by a committee of gentlemen, who undertook to raise the necessary funds for those objects.