Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/248

222 defiant nation and they poured into the wilderness back of their shore line, new conquerors.

And now, though the paths through the forests had hardly been cleared, they were beginning a crusade which would have dumfounded and disheartened the Fathers of the Republic. It was in this wild west that obscure individuals were to begin the war on slavery. Under Quaker influence the Manumission Society of Tennessee was formed in Tennessee, as early as 1814, for the purpose of compulsory emancipation. This society published at Greenville a quarterly paper entitled the Manumission Journal.

The direct product of that organization was Benjamin Lundy. He was not a practical printer, not of those with whose history for a century we have been dealing; he was not of the type of the statesman using the press for his political ends, nor yet of the scholar drifting into a journalism that he despised. Lundy was a journalist by virtue of belief in the democracy that, even in the second decade of the nineteenth century, had become a more potent influence in the wilderness of Ohio than the Sage of Monticello ever dreamed possible. Forgotten though Lundy may be, it is well to remember that it was of this obscure saddler and editor that William Lloyd Garrison said, "I owe everything to Benjamin Lundy."

A native of New York, he had, while learning the saddler's trade at Wheeling, Virginia, seen the misery of slavery, and had become so deeply affected that in 1815 he formed an anti-slavery association, called the Union Humane Society, at St. Clairsville, Ohio. He was an unassuming Quaker, without eloquence or particular ability, but with great courage and great faith in his cause. He wrote appeals to the anti-slavery people throughout the country to form similar associations, and