in the North. Douglass also became very involved with the local black community, and he served as a preacher at the black Zion Methodist Church. One of the many issues he became involved in was the battle against attempts by white southerners to force blacks to move to Africa. Some free blacks had moved to Liberia, a settlement area established for them in West Africa in 1822. Douglass, along with others in the abolitionist movement were opposed to African colonization schemes, believing that the United States was the true home of black Americans. In March 1839 some of Douglass's anticolonization statements were published in the Liberator. In August 1841, at an abolitionist meeting in New Bedford, the 23 year old Douglass saw his hero, William Lloyd Garrison, for the first time. A few days later, Douglass spoke before the crowd attending the annual meeting of the Massachusetts branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison immediately recognized Douglass's potential as a speaker, and hired him to be an agent for the society. As a traveling lecturer accompanying other abolitionist agents on tours of the northern states, his job was to talk about his life and to sell subscriptions to the Liberator and another newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Standard. For most of the next 10 years, Douglass was associated with the Garrisonian school of the antislavery movement. Garrison was a pacifist who believed that only through moral persuasion could slavery end, he attempted through his writings to educate slaveholders about the evils of the system they supported. He was opposed to slave uprisings and other violent resistance, but he was firm in his belief that slavery must be totally abolished. In the first issue of the Liberator in 1831, he had written: "On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation .....Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands o...
