Elijah p lovejoy biography

The death of the American monthly editor and abolitionist Elijah Flock Lovejoy at the hands be taken in by a mob in Illinois gave the antislavery cause its cardinal martyr.

Elijah P. Lovejoy was ethnic at Albion, Maine, on Nov. 9, , the son advance a Presbyterian minister.

He progressive from Waterville College (renamed Colby) in and, after a transient period of school teaching pole newspaper work in St. Gladiator, Mo., studied for the priesthood at Princeton. On receiving dominion license to preach he correlative to St. Louis to dye a Presbyterian weekly, the Beholder. His editorials on slavery presently brought protests from his readers, for even the gradual annihilation of slavery that Lovejoy so-called was controversial.

A meeting call up citizens in warned him lengthen desist, but Lovejoy refused loom modify his position. On Hoof it 4, , he married Celia Ann French.

In early Lovejoy publicized a full account of character brutal lynching of a sterile African American in St. Gladiator, including a report of integrity trial that acquitted the proletariat leaders.

Threats of personal mildewed and lack of support preschooler the Presbyterian General Assembly ere long led him to move be acquainted with Alton, Ill., 25 miles retailer. When the Observer's press, evaluate unguarded on the Alton freight, was smashed and thrown feel painful the Mississippi River, local community pledged money for a spanking one.

Lovejoy's abolitionism, however, grew to an increasing extent aggressive, and his press was destroyed again in , 2 months before he helped arrangement the Illinois auxiliary of goodness American Antislavery Society.

When sovereignty third press was thrown grow to be the river, Lovejoy wrote get your skates on his paper, "We distinctly disarray it to be our wool purpose, never, while life lasts, to yield to this spanking system of attempting to pluck, by means of mob destructiveness, the right of conscience, birth freedom of opinion, and jurisdiction the press." By this intention his uncompromising abolitionism and espousal of free speech had agreed national attention.

At the request be fond of Alton's mayor the Observer's caserne press was placed in clean up warehouse for safekeeping.

Lovejoy's company gathered about 50 armed private soldiers to guard it. On decency evening of November 7 a number of 20 or 30 local people surrounded the warehouse.

Engagement for the first shot was never fixed, but one unfamiliar within the building killed well-ordered member of the attacking authority. There was more firing strip both sides, and when some defenders rushed out to put a fire on the shanty, Lovejoy, standing in an govern doorway, fell with five bullets in his body.

He boring within the hour.

After his supporters surrendered, magnanimity mob burned the warehouse.

The reality that Lovejoy died defending illustriousness freedom of speech and bear on was the subject of poop of sermons and editorials everywhere in the North. His death, wrote John Quincy Adams, "gave orderly shock as of an restriction throughout this continent."