One dozen anti-slavery hymnals and songbooks were published between 1834 and 1856 in Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. “Hymns, descriptive of the wrongs and sufferings of our slave population,” the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) believed, could impress upon listeners “a deep sense of their obligations to assist in undoing every burden, breaking every yoke, and setting every captive free.” Fugitive slave William Wells Brown (1816–1884) compiled this secular collection of verses for similar reasons.