Elijah Parish Lovejoy

• Elijah Parish Lovejoy
• Born: November 9, 1802
• Died: November 7, 1837

Antislavery editor killed while defending his press against an armed mob, known as the “martyr abolitionist,” was born at Albion, Maine, the son of the Rev. Daniel Lovejoy, a Congregational clergyman, and Elizabeth (Pattee) Lovejoy, both of old New England stock. Many of today’s journalists and heirs of the battle to end slavery view him doubly as a martyr: He sacrificed his life for a cause and he gave it in defense of freedom of the press to advocate unpopular views. Others have questioned the term martyr because Lovejoy was willing to resort to violence, albeit defensive. But his death fanned antislavery sentiment across the North.

Lovejoy was educated at Waterville College (now Colby College), in Maine. After teaching school and editing a Whig political publication, he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and in April 1833 was licensed to preach by the Philadelphia Presbytery. In the same year he moved to St. Louis as a preacher and editor of a Presbyterian weekly journal, The St. Louis Observer. On March 4, 1835, he married Celia Ann French, daughter of a local planter; they had one son.

In St. Louis Lovejoy’s targets included “popery” and intemperance. But most grating on his St. Louis readers was his disapproval of slavery, at first mild, then increasingly bitter, in the columns of what was a nonpolitical religious organ. Early in his career Lovejoy attacked abolitionism as extremist, but a lynching in 1835 hardened his views, as did what he viewed as church equivocation on slavery. Leading citizens in St. Louis, a river port for the lower South, found even his views on gradual emancipation repugnant, but Lovejoy refused to moderate them. As mob violence threatened, Lovejoy moved his paper in 1836 from the slave state of Missouri twenty five miles up the Mississippi River to Alton in free Illinois, thinking to be safer in that prosperous city largely populated by settlers from the East.

Meanwhile, the nationwide abolitionist movement was sharply divided as to whether force was morally wrong and tactically unwise or whether force used defensively against proslavery violence was justified, especially if sanctioned by civil officials. At first, Lovejoy, influenced by William Lloyd Garrison, was completely nonresistant when harassed by howling mobs. But later, when his home was repeatedly raided and his wife driven to hysteria, Lovejoy felt that nonviolence had failed and placed guns in his house—with “inexpressible reluctance,” he wrote Garrison’s The Liberator.

The mood of Alton was likewise changing. Upon his arrival, Lovejoy’s first press had been dumped into the river, but sympathetic citizens—in a community in which his views on gradual emancipation were then popular—had expressed outrage at a public meeting and pledged funds for a new press. Gratified, Lovejoy vowed to confine himself to church news in his columns.

But his own views had shifted to a belief in outright abolition, reflected in The Alton Observer, with coverage of the movement and correspondence from agitators. The spark that kindled community anger was Lovejoy’s printing, on July 4, 1837, of a call for the formation in Alton of a state auxiliary to the American Anti-Slavery Society. Mobs of infuriated citizens twice again dumped Lovejoy’s presses into the river. Each time the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society replaced them. The increasingly militant Lovejoy wrote: “These mobs will cease as soon as some of the mobites are hung up by the neck and not before.” Tension had mounted dangerously when word came that a fourth press was on the way by riverboat. Prominent Alton citizens entreated Lovejoy to leave, but he replied that by now he was ready for martyrdom.

The new press arrived on November 7 and was stored in a stone warehouse near the river, guarded by Lovejoy and sixty youths from the surrounding area, all armed, with the mayor’s permission. After darkness had fallen that very night an armed mob stormed the warehouse. In an exchange of shots one of the mob was killed. Incensed, the mob defied the mayor’s order to disperse. The mayor then reassured Lovejoy and his party of their right to shoot in their own defense. Soon Lovejoy saw an attacker with a torch climbing a ladder to set fire to the roof shingles. As Lovejoy was taking aim at the arsonist, and before he could shoot, several attackers fired simultaneously. Mortally wounded, Lovejoy staggered into the warehouse. (Both members of the attacking mob and defenders of the new press were later put on trial, but there were no convictions.)

The abolitionist public mourned Lovejoy as a martyr, but even among the abolitionists sentiment was divided. The Executive of the American Anti-Slavery Society neither censured nor endorsed the editor’s actions, but pledged “strictly to adhere to the pacific principles of the society.”

Whatever other effect it had, Lovejoy’s death bolstered the esteem in which blacks held the white antislavery crusaders. A mass meeting at the First Colored Presbyterian Church in New York mourned Lovejoy “as the first martyr in the holy cause of abolition” and collected sixty dollars for his widow. The contribution was sent with a letter of condolence.

Twentieth-century biographies of Elijah Lovejoy include M. L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (1961); P. Simon, Lovejoy, Martyr to Freedom (1964); and J. Gill, Tide Without Turning: Elijah P. Lovejoy and Freedom of the Press (1959). A valuable reference is C. Mabee, Black Freedom (1970), which extensively discusses the controversy among abolitionists over the use of defensive violence and over Lovejoy’s claim to martyrdom. B. Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969) reports black reaction to Lovejoy’s death. The years after his killing saw the publication of numerous works, some by eyewitnesses such as Henry Tanner, who wrote several accounts, including History of the Rise and Progress of the Alton Riots (1878). Two of Lovejoy’s brothers wrote a Memoir (1838). Also available in some libraries is W. Phillips, Freedom Speech [on the Assassination of Elijah P. Lovejoy] (1891), sold to benefit a Lovejoy memorial fund. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1933).