Page:The Slave Struggle in America.djvu/27

 Elijah P. Lovejoy was a native of Maine, who, in 1832, established a religious paper in St. Louis, in which he published such strictures on slavery as to raise a perfect outcry against him. In answer alike to entreaties and menaces he asserted his right to discuss the slave problem. "We have slaves, it is true," he said, "but I am not one." He affirmed the liberty of the press and refused to submit to dictation. The proprietors were frightened, and requested him to resign his editorship. The Observer, as the paper was called, fell into other hands as payment for a debt, and the new owner gave it to Mr. Lovejoy. Four years later a mulatto was in jail for fatally stabbing one man and wounding another who had arrested him. An infuriated mob broke into the prison, and, seizing the mulatto, carried him beyond the city, where they chained him to a tree and burned him. Judge Lawless, in charging the grand jury, said that if a mob were carried away by "mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric frenzy" to deeds of violence and blood, the participators are absolved from guilt and not proper subjects for punishment. Lovejoy was not slow to comment on the judge's jesuitical justification of this atrocious deed. An angry crowd entered and destroyed Lovejoy's office. He removed his press to Alton, but it was seized on the banks of the river and broken into fragments. A number of citizens met and agreed to reimburse Lovejoy for his loss. He told them that it was a religious, and not an abolition, press that he wished to establish. Although an enemy to slavery, he was no Abolitionist; he was opposed to immediate emancipation. He would, however, hold himself at liberty to write and speak what he pleased on any subject.

St. Louis threatened Illinois with loss of the trade of the Slave States unless she could find some means of staying Lovejoy's pen. His office and press were again destroyed. Another press was purchased, this too was seized by a furious mob, and thrown in fragments into the Mississippi. Lovejoy was mobbed and insulted. To quote his own words, he was "hunted up and down like a partridge on a mountain." He was "threatened with the tar-barrel," "waylaid every day." His life was "in jeopardy every hour." It was demanded that he should leave Alton. To this, after a moving allusion to his sick wife kept in "continued alarm and excitement," and, "driven night after night from her sick-bed into the garret to save her life from brickbats and the violence of the mob," he replied: "I know you can tar and feather me, hang me up, or put me in the Mississippi. But what then? Where shall I go? I have been made to feel that if I am not safe in Alton I am not safe anywhere." No, he would not leave. "If I die I am determined to make my grave in Alton." The city was intensely excited—vile epithets, fierce invective, and abuse of all kinds were freely indulged in, and the arrival of another press was a signal for turning violent words into