The establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their lives.

John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as Garrison's, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission.

Benezet, Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind.

What his predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree--the undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied.
They were all his, but there was another besides--immediatism.

This element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the emancipation of the slaves in the Union.
This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not original with Garrison, nor was he the first to enunciate it.