First to Fall

Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery

Ken Ellingwood

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781643137032
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies
• Index: History

A vividly told tale of a forgotten American hero—an impassioned newsman who fought for the right to speak out against slavery. The history of the fight for free press has never been more vital in our own time, when journalists are targeted as "enemies of the people." In this bnrilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author KenEllingwood animates the life and times of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. First to Fall illuminates this flawed yet heroic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for free press rights in a timewhen theFirstAmendment offered little protection for those who daredtocritique America's "peculiar institution."Culminating in Lovejoy's dramatic clashes with the pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois—who were torching printingpress after printing press— First to Fall will bring Lovejoy, his supportersand his enemiestolife during the raucous 1830s at the edge of slave country. It wasa bloody period of innovation, conflict, violent politics, and painful soul-searching over pivotal issues of morality and justice.In the tradition of books like The Arc of Justice, First to Fall elevates a compelling, socially urgent narrative that has never received the attention it deserves.The book willaimtodo no less thanrescue Lovejoy from the footnotes of history and restore him as a martyr whose death was not only a catalyst for widespread abolitionist action, but also inaugurated the movementtoward the free press protections we cherish so dearlytoday.

CHAPTER ONE WHERE THE EVIL EXISTED

THE NEWS WAS BIG, but Elijah Lovejoy wasn’t letting on. As Lovejoy laid out his St. Louis newspaper on a July day in the summer of 1836, he tucked a piece of life-changing news into a small space on page 3. Lovejoy was announcing that he was moving his newspaper, the Observer, across the river to Alton, Illinois, and thus leaving town for good. He topped the brief with a spare headline—“THE OBSERVER—REMOVAL”—that gave little hint of the turmoil and threats of violence that had hovered around Lovejoy for months. Nor did the five-paragraph article convey that Lovejoy’s shift to Illinois could have been more accurately described as an inglorious shove out the door.

“After much deliberation, and a consultation with a number of our friends, we have decided here after to issue the ‘Observer’ from Alton, Ill.,” Lovejoy wrote. His explanation made only oblique reference to his troubles with local mobs: anonymous threats, break-ins, and acts of vandalism against his newspaper office. “So long as duty seemed to require our remaining here we were determined to remain, at whatever sacrifice of personal comfort, reputation or safety,” he continued. But rather than dwell on those safety concerns, which were already known to many in town, Lovejoy presented his shift across the river as a cool-headed decision to go where the business prospects for the Observer seemed brighter. “[T]here is no doubt the paper will be better supported there than it now is, or is likely to be, remaining in St. Louis,” Lovejoy wrote. “We hope this reason will be perfectly satisfactory to all our good friends in Missouri, who might otherwise think its removal uncalled for.” That very issue would be the Observer’s last in St. Louis.

The bare-bones report was one of the less-problematic things Lovejoy had written in recent memory. Tensions over his antislavery writings had been creating sparks since the previous year. More recently, Lovejoy had been locked in an on-again, off-again war of words with a St. Louis judge over the horrid public burning of a biracial man. Lovejoy’s reaction to the killing had led powerful men in St. Louis to label him an abolitionist, which in those days, in that place, was akin to classifying him as a public enemy. It is quite likely that his detractors would cheer his announcement as a form of surrender. Yet there was another meaning that came through in the notice about his move to Illinois—a tone that sounded more like determination. Lovejoy was going where he hoped Missouri’s vigilantes would no longer torment him, that much was true. But he was still going to publish.

Alton was merely twenty-four miles up the river, but its location on the Illinois side of the Mississippi placed it in a free state, where slavery was ostensibly absent and where a newspaper editor troubled by the moral implications of human bondage might be free to comment on it. But Lovejoy would discover soon enough that in border zones such as the one he inhabited, the rules could be blurry. He would learn that a line drawn on a map to distinguish slave state from free state provided limited practical clarity when it came to whether a newspaper could criticize the nation’s so-called “peculiar institution.”

St. Louis wasn’t yet finished with Lovejoy, however. The ink was barely dry on his July 21 farewell when the mob there struck—just hours after the notice appeared. Vandals trashed his St. Louis newspaper office and destroyed his family’s belongings, which had been packed in preparation for the cross-river trip to Alton. Lovejoy managed to salvage his hand-operated press from the mess and put it on a ferry to Alton, where it would wait on the dock until his arrival. But his trial was hardly done. By the time Lovejoy arrived in Alton to start his new life, a group of “miscreants,” as he called them—possibly the same people who trashed his office in St. Louis—discovered the press on the riverbank spot where it had been delivered on the Illinois side. The group then proceeded to smash the press to pieces there on the bank. In the span of a few days, in other words, Elijah Lovejoy—a thirty-three-year-old minister, editor, now refugee—had been victimized by tormenters on both sides of the Mississippi River, in a slave state and a free one.

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FOLLOWING THE BACK-TO-BACK ATTACKS, Lovejoy was justifiably concerned about the welfare of his young wife, Celia, and their infant son, Edward. The couple was married the previous year in Missouri, where Celia, who was ten years Lovejoy’s junior, had grown up as member of a slave-owning family. Now, Lovejoy sent Celia and Edward to her mother’s home in St. Charles, Missouri, about thirty miles from St. Louis, while he sought to establish their new home and life.

Lovejoy was arriving in Alton under circumstances that could hardly have been less auspicious. Behind him lay an abandoned life under threat, rather neatly embodied by the ruins of his vandalized St. Louis office. Before him was the already-dented promise of a fresh start, his printing press destroyed before he’d had a chance even to contemplate his first issue of the relocated Observer. Anyone in such a position would have a right to be discouraged, but Lovejoy sounded a more matter-of-fact note when he reported the events to his family back in Maine, with the help of an Alton newspaper article. “By the Alton Telegraph, which I send you today, you will learn that I have had the honour of being mobbed at last. I have been expecting the catastrophe for some time, and now it has come,” he wrote in a July 30 letter to his brother Joseph a week after the twin incidents. The St. Louis attack “was the more mean and dastardly, inasmuch as I had previously determined to remove the office of the Observer to this place, and had made all my arrangements accordingly, and had so stated,” he continued. “You will also see that on my arrival here, a few miscreants undertook to follow the example of St. Louis, and so demolished what was left of the printing office.”

In a sense, Lovejoy had been victimized in Alton by his own strict moral code. The press rescued from his St. Louis office had been shipped by steamboat to the other side of the Mississippi. But contrary to Lovejoy’s order, the cargo was landed on the Alton dock on Sunday morning—the one day of the week when the Presbyterian minister refused to conduct business. The awaiting press proved too tempting a target for the five or six men who moved in during the wee hours of darkness the following morning to destroy it. Strict observation of the Sabbath had been a frequent subject of Lovejoy’s Observer, both in his own columns and the articles he reprinted from other religiously themed newspapers. He was quick to criticize people—mail-wagon drivers and steamboat hands, for example—who labored on what he saw as an inviolable day of rest.

Sabbatarianism at that time was a favored concern of Protestant reformers from the East Coast who took aim at what they viewed as the moral shortcomings of individuals in order to purify overall American society. Observing the Sabbath was such a cause. The end of slavery was another. Lovejoy was active in both. (In his final edition of the St. Louis Observer, Lovejoy published the proceedings of a church debate in which he protested against the lucrative practice—overlooked, but common at the time—by which slaveholders hired out slaves on Sundays and collected the wages. Lovejoy labeled the practice “an immorality of the highest degree,” noting in pointed fashion that some of his fellow Presbyterians were hiring out their slaves for Sunday work.)

In his letter to Joseph, Lovejoy was quick to try to reassure that he was unbowed by the back-to-back attacks. “Though cast down, I am not destroyed, nor in the least discouraged; and am now busily engaged in endeavouring to make arrangements for starting the Observer again. I think I shall succeed,” Lovejoy wrote in his sure-handed script. “I do believe the Lord has yet a work for me to do in contending with his enemies, and the enemies of humanity. I have got the harness on and I do not intend to lay it off.” The source of Lovejoy’s optimism wasn’t faith alone. By the time he penned the letter to Joseph, the editor had found possible vindication for his decision to move to Alton—this in the form of potential allies. The day after Lovejoy’s press was smashed by the “miscreants” and tossed into the Mississippi, embarrassed Alton leaders stepped forward to offer help to their newest neighbor, as well as to recover the reputation of their booming river town. The rich and well-meaning men of Alton would finance a new press for Lovejoy. But there would be a catch.

Alton’s leaders, with high hopes for their up-and-coming community, had no appetite for controversy of the sort that had trailed Lovejoy across the river like a threatening cloud. In St. Louis, he’d been labeled an abolitionist—a term that, even in the North, carried the same worrisome baggage as “fanatic” and “troublemaker.” Lovejoy rejected the label, but the town fathers of Alton had no desire for the kind of mob violence that had been bursting forth across many American cities during the previous two years.

Only a few months earlier, in May, a group of men in Alton had burst into the room of a traveling magician named Schweighoffer and, in the midst of his show, destroyed an apparatus with which he had been entertaining the audience. A local newspaper offered hearty praise when the ringleader of the vandals was hauled before a jury and fined $100—a sum that at the time was thought to represent the largest verdict ever imposed in Madison County. “We congratulate our community that such a verdict was found against the first symptoms of riot and disorder which have appeared among us,” the Alton Telegraph rejoiced in an article that appeared under the headline “Justice Served in Alton.” The newspaper saw in the community’s response to the violence against the magician a sign that it knew how to nip such trouble in the bud. With a note of satisfaction, the paper declared that the hefty fine “augurs well for a healthy state of public sentiment.”

On the evening after the riverbank mauling of his printing press, Lovejoy was invited to attend a meeting with some of Alton’s most prominent citizens. It was an unofficial gathering but, as with many such community meetings across America during the antebellum era, one that could end with decisions. The Altonians wanted to have a conversation with this fellow who had been all but chased from a neighboring state and now was the focus of mayhem in their own. They would come to a few understandings. Understandings such as there wouldn’t be much tolerance for anyone seeking to stir up passions over the issue of slavery. Among the wary attendees at a newly built Presbyterian church was the future mayor John M. Krum, an attorney in his mid-twenties who, like many of Alton’s leading lights, had migrated from New York a few years earlier. Several others who would later prove to be among Lovejoy’s staunchest allies also showed up. There was Amos Roff, the owner of a store that sold wood stoves, grates, and hardware, and the Reverend Frederick W. Graves, an Amherst College graduate who was minister at the First Presbyterian Church in Alton. Both would remain at Lovejoy’s side through the months of trials that lay ahead.

Lovejoy was asked to describe his plans for setting up the Observer in Alton and to make clear to the assembly just how deeply he planned to delve into the slavery issue. Lovejoy was in a delicate position here: he was in a new town, standing before a church full of residents—many of them strangers to him—who would determine whether his decision to come to Alton had been wise or foolish. They represented a kind of jury, and his answer mattered deeply. Poised before the group, Lovejoy cut a hardy figure: a man of medium height, muscled, with a dark complexion and piercing black eyes.

The editor spoke. His main objective was to edit and publish a religious newspaper, Lovejoy began. He then turned to the issue that was on everyone’s mind: slavery. “When I was in St. Louis I felt myself called upon to treat at large upon the subject of slavery, as I was in a state where the evil existed,” he explained. Lovejoy said that as a Missouri resident, he had felt a “duty” to inject the topic of slavery into his weekly columns there. But he denied being an abolitionist, and made the point that he had even previously clashed with them from time to time. “I am not, and never was in full fellowship with the abolitionists… and am not now considered by them as one of them.” Now that he had moved to a “a free state where the evil does not exist,” Lovejoy continued, “I feel myself less called upon to discuss the subject than when I was in St. Louis.”

The editor’s remarks would surely have had a comforting effect on the men inside the church: There was now little reason to expect that Lovejoy’s newspaper would become a source of controversy. He had said so himself—slavery might be a hot topic on the far side of the Mississippi, but what need was there to discuss it in Illinois, a free state? Some of those present at the meeting would go even further. They chose to hear—and, later, to portray—Lovejoy’s words as a guarantee, a pledge. To their ear, Lovejoy had promised that he would keep his little newspaper free of all talk about slavery.

But others who were listening to Lovejoy’s presentation, including Roff and Graves, heard no such thing. In fact, as they and others would later recall in a signed declaration, Lovejoy closed his remarks with what ultimately would be preserved as a full-throated defense of his right to publish. “But gentlemen, as long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject,” Lovejoy concluded. Lovejoy would have occasion to repeat similar sentiments many times in print and speeches, but the clashing recollection over the substance of his comments this evening later came to take on outsize significance.

Was Lovejoy telling the truth? Or was he an abolitionist? Did he intend to remain quiet on the sensitive matter of slavery? Or was he fooling himself—and others—by suggesting that he would somehow feel less need to decry an institution he abhorred simply because he had crossed a state line, even one separating North from South? Lovejoy biographers who have parsed his words from the church gathering generally agree that the editor probably made no explicit pledge to remain silent, but may have conveyed a message the crowd was too eager to hear. The historian Merton Dillon, the most rigorous of Lovejoy’s earlier biographers, says that Lovejoy’s comments were “filled with half-truths and ambiguities,” and reflected a considerable lack of self-awareness in failing to realize just how far down the road toward abolitionism he had already traveled. When the Altonians who listened to Lovejoy then voted to approve statements vowing to preserve law and order and to help him replace his ruined press, they clearly were not acting as if they had an abolitionist in their midst—certainly not one who would use a newspaper in Alton as a vehicle to mobilize antislavery opinion. “When the people of Alton later discovered that he continued to oppose slavery,” Dillon writes, “their wrath toward him became so much the greater because they believed they had been deceived. Lovejoy, it seemed to them, had abused their hospitality and broken a solemn pledge.”

For his part, Lovejoy read the group’s declared stand against abolitionism as “all for effect.” In his July 30 letter to Joseph in Maine, Lovejoy stood by his assurances. “I told them, and told the truth, that I did not come here to establish an Abolition paper, and that in the sense they understood it, I was no Abolitionist, but that I was an uncompromising enemy of slavery, and so expected to live, and so to die,” Lovejoy wrote.

In that single sentence, the editor had put his finger on one of the fundamental quandaries dividing antislavery Americans at the time, as organized efforts to bring about the emancipation of the country’s more than two million slaves began to sprout in the Northern states. As Lovejoy knew well, it could be problematic in certain places to openly express moral dismay over the enslavement of fellow humans. But it was quite another thing to be identified with abolitionists, whose incipient agitation on the slavery question was often attacked—even in the North—as the work of madmen and insurrectionists.

The abolitionists of whom Lovejoy claimed to want no part were, in fact, men and women very much like himself. In general, they were people of deep faith: Quakers and mainstream Protestants of the Northeast who were drawn to the cause of antislavery out of a sense of moral revulsion. The more far-reaching among them, epitomized by the editor William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, viewed the antislavery cause as part of a larger social-justice struggle that demanded equality for Black people, and that promoted women’s rights as well. It was Garrison who had kick-started the newest wave of antislavery activism at the start of the 1830s with his launch of a pugnacious newspaper, the Liberator, which served as the clarion for a bold and unapologetic campaign for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people without compensation for their owners.

Garrison’s strident energy had won over activist-minded free Black people in the North and rallied to the abolitionist cause thousands of pious, reform-aimed white people in big cities and one-church villages, like the one in Maine where Lovejoy had grown up. Wealthy men such as the well-known Tappan brothers in New York had even lent financial backing. But at the time Lovejoy landed in Alton in 1836, abolitionism remained a fringe crusade—one that to many leery Americans carried the frightening potential to undermine the nation’s stability and imperil a slave-dependent cotton economy in the South that also happened to provide handsome profits for the North. Lovejoy wasn’t ready to embrace that kind of abolitionism, a phenomenon that to him had seemed so confrontational, so extreme. He was keeping his distance—publicly, anyway.

The distinction Lovejoy was making—that is, calling for the eventual emancipation of slaves without embracing “abolitionism”—came down to more than semantics. It reflected an important difference in tone, method, and the urgency with which the project should be undertaken. Lovejoy’s own views on these questions had already evolved and would slide to a more militant posture in reaction to mounting pressure against him. Perhaps his disavowal of the “abolitionist” label during the meeting reflected, as Dillon suggests, a certain lack of self-understanding. But in fairness, Lovejoy was himself a moving target, a man undergoing transformation on the question of slavery, with radicalization still ahead. Like his restless new hometown, Lovejoy was a work in progress.

The editor’s letter to Joseph pivoted quickly from his travails over the lost press to the more standard fare of family letters known the world over. Lovejoy reported that his health was good. And though Celia had been sick with a fever, she seemed to be on the mend. Their baby, Edward, now four months old, was well. It had been nearly a decade since Lovejoy, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Where the Evil Existed
• Chapter Two: A Land of Strangers
• Chapter Three: Brethren
• Chapter Four: The Only Weapon
• Chapter Five: Nothing but a Newspaper
• Chapter Six: To the West
• Chapter Seven: The Ashes of McIntosh
• Chapter Eight: A Judge Named Lawless
• Chapter Nine: Mr. Birney Frees his Slaves
• Chapter Ten: Incendiary Missiles
• Chapter Eleven: The South Builds a Barricade
• Chapter Twelve: A Right to Interfere
• Chapter Thirteen: The Odious Doctrines of Elijah Lovejoy
• Chapter Fourteen: A Band of Lawless Men
• Chapter Fifteen: The Wise and Good
• Chapter Sixteen: Effects Most Happy
• Chapter Seventeen: No Right to be Neutral
• Chapter Eighteen: A Train of Mournful Consequences
• Chapter Nineteen: Tin Horns and Torches
• Chapter Twenty: A Martyr in the Cause
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright