William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most influential American abolitionists, began publishing "The Liberator" in January 1831, not long after the "Appeal" was published. Garrison, who believed slaveowners would be punished by God, rejected the violence Walker advocated but recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves. "Every sentence that they write — every word that they speak — every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," Garrison wrote.