Lovejoy abandoned by most churches, newspapers

Bill Knight column for Nov. 5, 6 or 7, 2018

This week marks anniversaries of the birth and death of anti-slavery martyr Elijah Lovejoy, a newspaperman and minister who in the 1830s was repeatedly attacked by critics, but too-rarely defended by his peers in the press or clergy.

Born, raised and educated in New England, Lovejoy came to St. Louis in 1827, when he started one of the city’s first schools and became prosperous but bored. He bought into the St. Louis Times newspaper and became its abrasive editor, writing against alcohol and tobacco, and displaying intolerance toward Catholics, Baptists and other denominations.

Raised a Christian, Lovejoy for years regretted never experiencing a born-again epiphany, but felt converted at an 1832 revival, emerging convinced that slavery was as sinful as intemperance, adultery or murder. After undergoing seminary training he launched the St. Louis Observer, with moderate anti-slavery contents supporting repatriating freed slaves back to African instead of Abolitionists’ advocating emancipation.

But Missouri was a slave state, St. Louis a rough town, and many attacked his writings and sermons.

“They might just as well attempt to stop the circulation of the air over their prairies as to prohibit the dissemination of newspapers,” he said. “Is this the land of Freedom or Despotism?”

Answers came, unwelcome ones.

First, a gruesome lynching occurred, as Francis McIntosh, a free black man from Pittsburgh working on a steamboat docked in St. Louis, was arrested in 1836 for interfering with an arrest, and he tried to escape, injuring two officers.

McIntosh was caught and jailed, then left alone in a cell, where a mob of about 500 broke down the door, took the man to a tree at the edge of town, and burned him alive.

Next, condemned this horror and left for a church meeting in Pittsburgh, and in his absence, a mob vandalized his office, and St. Louis Judge Luke Edward Lawless (a slaveowner) presided over the probe of the lynching and blamed Lovejoy not the mob. 

Lastly, Lovejoy that summer relocated across the river to Alton, some six months later became a full-throated Abolitionist, and mobs broke into the Observer and smashed its press. The St. Louis Times, the Alton Spectator, the Missouri Republican, the Missouri Argus, and the Louisville Baptist Banner all vilified him, and the Alton Telegraph said it wouldn’t interfere with hostile actions against him.

Altogether, his press was destroyed three times and he was repeatedly threatened, but he remained steadfast.

“I fear God more than I fear man,” he said. “There is no way to escape the mob but to abandon the path of duty, and that -- God helping me -- I will never do. If I fall, my grave shall be made in Alton.”

He didn’t abandon his duty, but he did fall, murdered on the night of Nov. 7, 1837, two days before his 35th birthday. And his grave is in Alton.

Before being shot five times, Lovejoy and a handful of supporters had resisted the large, drunken mob that eventually overwhelmed them.

Later, 12 men were indicted for rioting – but they were friends of Lovejoy who’d defended the Observer. One was found not guilty and the charges dropped against the others.  Four men later claimed to have shot Lovejoy – James Rock, Dr. Horace Beal, Dr. James Jennings and Dr. Thomas Hope – but “despite the crimes committed in plain view, not one person paid a penny fine, and not one person went to prison for a single day,” wrote the late U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) in his wonderful 1994 book about Lovejoy, “Freedom’s Champion.”

Despite sharing the obvious interest in the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of the press and the freedom to worship, Lovejoy had been shunned by many of his pastor colleagues in Christian churches and most newspapers in Missouri and Illinois’ southern region (which had considerable pro-slavery elements despite it’s being a free state). A few Illinois newspapers – in Quincy, Springfield, Peoria and Galena – had supported Lovejoy’s right to oppose slavery beforehand, and after his murder, hundreds of newspapers from around the country, South and North, expressed outrage at the killing.

Reflecting on the hypocrisy, Simon seemed to express disappointment and regret more than rage or condemnation. But he also offered an inspirational observation as useful this week as any:

“There are ... times when to be neutral in a fight between right and wrong is to be on the side of the wrong,” Simon wrote. “There is no scarcity of people who are oppressed. There is only a scarcity of men and women with eyes clear enough to see and hearts big enough to act.”