TBT: Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy

TBT: Super Awesome People™ in History.

I recently found out that the abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy was an ancestor of a friend of mine. I didn’t previously know the elder Lovejoy’s life story, but what better excuse to take a deep dive into American history to write this week’s Super Awesome People™ in History post?

“The incidents which preceded and accompanied and followed the catastrophe of Mr. Lovejoy’s death point it out as an epoch in the annals of human liberty. They have given a shock of an earthquake throughout this continent.”

John Quincy Adams, on the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy

  • The Pro-Slavery Riot on November 7, 1837. Death of Rev. E. P. Lovejoy. (Missouri History Museum)
  • Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was born on November 9, 1802, in Albion, Maine, as the eldest child of Elizabeth and Daniel Lovejoy, who was a Congregational preacher and farmer. Elijah P. Lovejoy graduated cum laude and valedictorian of Maine’s Waterville College in 1826 (now Colby College) and then moved out west, eventually settling in St. Louis, Missouri in 1827. At the time, Missouri was a slave state that was surrounded by free states and territories, and there were tensions in St. Louis between pro-slavery and abolitionist factions.

Lovejoy began working as a school teacher and as an editor for the St. Louis Times newspaper. Five years later, he moved to New Jersey to attend the Princeton Theological Seminary where he became an ordained Presbyterian preacher in 1833. He returned to St. Louis and served as a pastor of Des Peres Presbyterian Church and the founder of the St. Louis Observer, a religious and antislavery weekly paper.

As editor of the newly-established Observer, Lovejoy began writing anti-Catholicism pieces (which were controversial on their own), but it was his anti-slavery editorials that infuriated St. Louis’s pro-slavery faction. The abolitionist movement was still in its early years, and Lovejoy’s stance against slavery was considered radical, although he favored a gradual abolishment rather than immediate emancipation. Even the financial backers of the Observer were wary of his outspokenness, as he condemned not only the institution of slavery, but the moderates who allowed the “evil” of slavery to continue because it was “ancient and lawful.”

“[Slavery] is demonstrably evil. In every community where it exists, it presses like a night-mare on the body politic. Or, like the vampire, it slowly and imperceptibly sucks away the life-blood of society, leaving it faint and disheartened to stagger along the road of improvement. . . . It becomes us as a Christian people, as those who believe in the future retribution of a righteous Providence, to remove from our midst an institution, no less the cause of moral corruption to the master than to the slave.”

Elijah P. Lovejoy, 1835, St. Louis Observer

On multiple occasions, pro-slavery mobs attacked the Observer‘s printing press, enraged by Lovejoy’s antislavery editorials. They were especially incensed when Lovejoy condemned the brutal lynching of Francis L. McIntosh, a free black man who was burned alive for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy. Lovejoy also spoke out against Judge Luke Lawless whose instructions to the jury led to the acquittal of the men who lynched McIntosh, and no charges were ever filed.

After his printing press was attacked for the third time, Lovejoy and his family (wife Celia, m. 1835; two children) fled St. Louis for Alton, a city across the Mississippi River, and located in the free state of Illinois. There, Lovejoy became a pastor at Upper Alton Presbyterian Church, and he founded the Alton Observer to continue his antislavery writings. He believed that “the paper will be better supported [in Alton] than it now is, or is likely to be, remaining in St. Louis.” But pro-slavery sentiments were strong in Alton as well, and Lovejoy’s press was destroyed as soon as it arrived in Alton.

Lovejoy published the first issue of the Alton Observer in September, 1836, and as he continued to write against slavery, pro-slavery mobs continued to attack his press. A little more than a year after Lovejoy established the Alton Observer, a mob attacked the warehouse where his newest printing press was being guarded. On November 7, 1837, the mob tried to burn down the warehouse with Lovejoy and some of his supporters inside, and during the attack, Lovejoy was shot and killed by persons unknown. The mob succeeded that night and destroyed Lovejoy’s printing press for the final time and tossed its pieces into the Mississippi River.

Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed two days before what would have been his 35th birthday, and no one was ever found guilty of his murder. In the years that followed, Lovejoy became a martyr, but for those who weren’t ready to embrace the abolitionist cause, he was seen as a martyr, not against slavery, but for free speech.

“[T]hey spun the story of his death to center ‘free speech’ because that felt like a more ‘universal’ value. They didn’t want his legacy to be a tool of substantive change, but they needed to neatly package it. […] Why bother looking at the content of those editorials and the discourse around them when you can just eject from the controversy altogether and say ‘I think we can all agree free speech is good.’ That’s so much easier than doing the hard work of actually changing things! Making specific grievances and ideas the center of the dialogue is dangerous to people who want to uphold the status quo. Talking about more abstract notions like ‘free speech’ is a way to flatten discourse. Which serves the powerful at the expense of the powerless.”

Richard Lovejoy, writer and descendant of Elijah P. Lovejoy

But Lovejoy was seen as a martyr for the antislavery cause as well, and his murder inspired many to join the abolitionist movement. Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen Lovejoy, became an abolitionist leader in Illinois, friend of Abraham Lincoln, and an Illinois State Representative. In the course of his abolitionist work, the younger Lovejoy helped many runaway slaves escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Owen and another brother, Joseph C. Lovejoy, wrote a memoir about Elijah, which was published in 1838 and widely-read by abolitionists across the nation.

Read More About Elijah Parish Lovejoy

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