Relative importance

When Nancy Scripture read about the Civil War, she fell in love with William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston abolitionist. It was an unusual romance. She was 16, and he'd been dead for 67 years.

One night in 1952, when she was 22, a friend arranged a blind date for her with someone named Frederick Garrison. Moments after they were introduced, she asked if he was related to William Lloyd Garrison. He was startled.

''You know about William Lloyd Garrison?" she recalls him asking.

''Yes, of course."

''Well, not everybody does."

''I do," she said. ''I've been in love with him since I was 16."

In the ensuing months, she also fell in love with Frederick, the great-grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, andthey married and lived happily until his death in 2001 at age 86.

A few days ago, Nancy Garrison, now 75, a writer and graphics designer, sat in the living room of her Cohasset home overlooking Lily Pond and recalled her girlhood crush on what some textbooks have portrayed as the grumpy old fulminator, William Lloyd Garrison.

''What I loved was his passion," she said, ''and in the 1940s even a schoolgirl could grasp the blot of slavery as a sin."

This weekend Nancy Garrison plans to be at the Boston Marriott Newton, along with about 150 other members of the family of William Lloyd Garrison, who are gathering from all over North America and Western Europe to mark the bicentennial of the birth of the 19th-century abolitionist whom the family refers to as ''the old man." The oldest is Mrs. Samuel Sloan Auchincloss of Florida, 97. The youngest is Harumi Shaw Garrison of New Jersey, 80 days old today.

As with many reunions, there'll be cookouts, cocktail parties, grand dinners, toasts to the family, and the popping of flash bulbs and champagne corks, too.

But when the Garrisons gather, there's also a focus on lessons to be learned from the old man.

'As harsh as truth'

Born in Newburyport in 1805, Garrison was zealous in fighting all oppression but especially slavery. From 1831 until 1865, he published a weekly abolitionist newspaper in Boston called The Liberator, which attacked not only slaveholders but also what he called the timidity and absurdity of the pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. Then as now, Massachusetts rankled the rest of the nation, and Garrison's message aroused so much hatred that Georgia offered $5,000 for his arrest. In 1835, a mob threatened to lynch him and dragged him along Devonshire Street with a rope around his neck.

Garrison never wavered.

''I am aware that many object to the severity of my language," he wrote, ''but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the Mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire in which it has fallen; -- but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present."

Etched on Garrison's statue on Commonwealth Avenue are his words: ''I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."

If Garrison has faded in America's memory, as Henry Mayer explains in ''All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of American Slavery," the reason may be that America now takes for granted the opposition to slavery that aroused so much hatred in 19th-century America.

Encouraged by Mayer's laudatory biography in 1998, the Garrison family sees the reunion as an opportunity to burnish the old man's image.

''We want a reunion the family can enjoy," says Nancy Garrison, ''but one through which the family can be educated, too, because -- let's face it -- not all Garrisons are Garrison scholars. But beyond family, we also want a public component that will make the connections that are obvious between Garrison's message and present-day slavery -- that is, the sexual slavery in the Middle East and the whole wider picture of slavery as it exists in developing countries and how it plays out in the sweatshops of Asia."

During the reunion, the family will hear discussions of Garrison's philosophy by such scholars as Professor David W. Blight of Yale, who has studied the changing perceptions of the Civil War, and by Dr. Lois A. Brown of Mount Holyoke College, an authority on African-American women abolitionists. There'll be tours of the Museum of Afro-American History on Beacon Hill and the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, where exhibitions on Garrison's work have been set up for public viewing in the coming weeks.

Tonight at Tremont Temple, where abolitionists exhorted the nation against slavery, there'll be what amounts to a public 200th birthday bash for the old man. In addition to music, reenactments and readings from his work, there will be addresses by gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick and WGBH-FM talk-show host Christopher Lydon.

It runs in the family

>No one knows the Garrison family better than James Gould, 81, of Cotuit, whose hobby is genealogy. He began work on the Garrison tree when he married into the family in 1950, and the multitude of names, dates, births, marriages, and deaths that he's chronicled for 55 years have been recorded on a register 8 feet wide, on display at the reunion.

As a professor of history and international relations, Gould is a student of diplomacy, a discipline that he said has served him well in the delicate role of historian to six generations of Garrisons.

''I've always been curious about family origins," he said. ''I keep hoping I'll find a pirate, and it's surprising how often I do. The Garrison clan has them as well as the others, but they don't talk about them very much."

What Gould has found among Garrison's descendants is an extension of the old man's commitment to social reform and resistance to organized religion and political parties.

''I do find a family characteristic of independence, particularly in religion," Gould says. ''Garrison was very religious, but disgusted with churches, and a lot of the Garrisons have turned out to be free religious types. They won't go to church, but they have a sense of religious propriety, love of neighbor, and love of peace. And they don't stick with political parties. They get disgusted with Democrats, and the current Republicans are not important to them. They tend to be social progressives with a strong sense of social reform. You see it in the younger generation, still out there fighting the battle. One works for Oxfam. Others are doctors or teachers or involved with research or at national levels in organizations like Planned Parenthood."

And the pirate in the family?

He laughs.

''Our blackest sheep is a railroad baron named Henry Villard," he said, referring to the German-born journalist who married William Lloyd Garrison's daughter, Helen Frances, known as Fanny.

''Fanny was brought up to be abstemious and a teetotaler," says Nancy Garrison, ''but Henry Villard liked the good life. He was a self-made railroad man, a Gilded Age titan, and there are wonderful letters from William Lloyd Garrison to his daughter, reminding her to regard the manner of her upbringing."

Garrison is so well known as an abolitionist, she says, that his work on behalf of women is sometimes overlooked.

''He was a humanitarian, and it's not talked about as much, but he empowered women, too. When he went to London to speak to the abolitionist movement there, he was accompanied by a number of women who were abolitionists here, and when they were not allowed to sit with the group because they were women, he refused to speak until they were seated."

After the Confederate Army surrendered at Appomattox, Garrison accepted an invitation by President Lincoln and went to Fort Sumter to help raise the American flag again. At Charleston, S.C., he was embraced affectionately by crowds of liberated slaves who cheered his crusade in their behalf. As Mayer notes, it was April 14, 1865, the greatest day of Garrison's career -- and the same day Lincoln was murdered by an assassin's bullet.