Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/253

Rh in slave state legislatures, showing that freedom of speech and of the press was gradually being destroyed. Every time that a southern governor or southern legislature passed a bill demanding that the northern states muzzle the press or deliver some abolitionist editor to a southern governor for trial, Birney printed the demand in full.

It was due to the influence of Charles Hammond, editor of the Gazette, that Birney was permitted to remain in Cincinnati at all. The Post, the Whig and the Republican, the three papers which represented the Whig and Democratic parties, abused him unmercifully, and one of them even suggested lynching.

Amid the onslaught on Birney, Hammond administered to his fellow-editors and fellow-citizens a stern rebuke and emphatically re-asserted the right of freedom of speech and of the press, declaring forcibly that, if Mr. Birney wished to establish a paper in Cincinnati and to discuss slavery, it was his right to do so, and that men who should attempt to molest him would be striking at the fundamental principles of American institutions. For a while this had its effect, but the paper had not been established more than three weeks when a mob broke into the press-room and destroyed most of his material.

The murder of Elijah Lovejoy next stirred the country. Lovejoy was a graduate of an Eastern college, who had gone to St. Louis and had become the editor of a Henry Clay paper. In 1833 he established in St Louis a religious weekly called the Observer, in which he made frequent comments on slavery. It was not until 1835 that his paper became the subject of attack, at which time he, believing that it would be better to publish the paper on free soil, moved his press over to Alton, a small town across the river in Illinois.

When his press was delivered there, a mob smashed it