Joshua Leavitt

• Joshua Leavitt
• Born: September 8, 1794
• Died: January 16, 1873

Abolitionist, editor, clergyman, was born at Heath, Massachusetts, the son of Roger Smith Leavitt and Chloe (Maxwell) Leavitt. Roger Leavitt’s father was the Reverend Jonathan Leavitt of Suffield, Connecticut. His wife’s father was Col. Hugh Maxwell, an Irish soldier in the American Revolution. A good student as a youth, Joshua Leavitt was graduated from Yale in 1814, became a preceptor at Wethersfield Academy and studied law at Northampton, Massachusetts. After being admitted to the bar in 1819 he married Sarah Williams, daughter of the Reverend Solomon Williams of Northampton, in 1820. Practicing briefly at Heath and at Putney, Vermont, he then completed a two-year divinity course at Yale in a year. Ordained as Congregational minister at Stratford, Connecticut, in 1825 he began to write about slavery in the columns of the Christian Spectator. His move to New York in 1828 as secretary of the Seaman’s Friend Society and editor of the Sailor’s Magazine set the stage for broad involvement in reform and particularly abolitionist activity.

Leavitt initiated sailors’ missions in different cities and became an early lecturer for the American Temperance Society. Although he had, in his own words, “no musical skill beyond that of ordinary plain singing,” he put together a two-volume work The Christian Lyre; a collection of hymns and tunes adapted for social worship, prayer meetings and revivals of religion (1831 and 1833); it was followed by the Seaman’s devotional assistant and mariner’s hymns (1838). These works were compiled as he was becoming more and more involved in antislavery work. This connection between religion and abolitionism was frequent among reformers of this period. Leavitt was also an editor of the Journal of Public Morals and chairman of the executive committee of the American Seventh Commandment Society.

Leavitt became the editor in 1831 of The Evangelist, a paper founded by the abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan to popularize in New York City the new theology of Charles Grandison Finney, promoting religious revivals, temperance, and antislavery. Leavitt was also briefly a member of the Colonization Society. But around 1831 he began to cooperate closely with such abolitionists as Lewis Tappan and Theodore Dwight Weld to “pull together for the first time the scattered threads of moral democracy reaching back to pre-Revolutionary days.” In that year Leavitt became secretary of their newly formed Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, which sponsored Weld to speak on temperance and manual laborism, furthering the free labor sentiment that was to become part of the abolitionist appeal. Leavitt was influential, with Lewis Tappan and others, in the American Anti-Slavery Society, which began with the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Men such as Tappan and Leavitt directed their reform appeal to professional men of property, position, and influence. Foreshadowing later differences, they were concerned by the vehemence and diffidence toward politics of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. In 1834 Leavitt personally experienced the violence implicit in the slavery issue when he fled from a mob gathered at the home of Lewis Tappan. In 1836 economic panic forced him to sell The Evangelist. He then became editor of the Emancipator, which had been founded by Arthur Tap-pan in 1833. In his advocacy of political action he was part of the break from Garrison and the formation in 1840 of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which favored political action. He was influential in helping to form the Liberty party, which ran James G. Birney for president in 1844, and he briefly edited the Ballot Box, which supported that party. In the “Financial Power of Slavery,” a version of remarks he made during a lecture tour of Ohio in 1840, Leavitt wrote one of the most widely circulated abolitionist documents, and sounded a theme that formed part of the underlying basis for the formation of the Liberty party. Leavitt described the economic cost to manufacturers of their debts to southern slaveholders; the status of the latter, he said, was a “passport to credit.” Regardless of the economic soundness of the argument, it made an impact and was printed in the Emancipator, twice in the Philanthropist, the western abolitionist newspaper, and was reprinted and circulated as a tract. Conventions in various states denounced the financial power of slavery, as did the Liberty party national convention in 1841. Blaming slavery for national financial troubles, Leavitt called it, in 1841, “a bottomless gulf of extravagance and thriftlessness.” Promoting a recognition of differences between slave and free states gave impetus to political action. He also advanced a different kind of economic argument when he attacked northern antislavery Democrats who would not support the Liberty party for putting the economic interests of their own constituents before abolitionist convictions. For his contributions, some would later call Leavitt the “Father of the Liberty Party.”

Shortly after the Birney campaign he moved the Emancipator to Boston, where he attacked the Mexican War and maintained his multi-issue reforms by arguing for free postage, free trade, and temperance, often heatedly and polemically. When it seemed in 1848 that the paper might not survive, he became an editor of the new Independent, lured partly by the security of a stable position. He tempered his fiery prose and became a journalist respected throughout the nation.

In 1863 Leavitt published The Monroe Doctrine. In 1869, he received a gold medal from the Cobden Club in Great Britain for his support of free trade. Known to friends in New York City as the “sturdy Puritan of New England,” Leavitt exemplified the personal commitment of the early abolitionists, their connection to religion and other issues, and their contribution to the political action that led ultimately to the election of 1860.

Some autobiographical material appears in the journals edited by Leavitt. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds a set of Free-Soil papers that Leavitt assembled. Accounts of Leavitt’s life include D. L. Dumond, Anti-Slavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America; F.B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, vol. 6; The New York Times, January 17, 1873; The Independent, January 23, 1873; E. Wright, “The Father of the Liberty Party,” The Independent, January 30,1873; C. G. Finney, “Dr. Leavitt’s Death,” The Independent, February 6, 1873; L. Bacon, “Reminiscences of Joshua Leavitt,” The Independent, February 13, 1873; J. P. Thompson, “Personal Recollections of Dr. Leavitt,” The Independent, March 6, 1873; J. P. Bretz, “The Economic Background of the Liberty Party,” The American Historical Review, January 1929; and New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, April 1873.