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Elijah P. Lovejoy
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Elijah P. Lovejoy monument
Elijah P. Lovejoy monument
Elijah P. Lovejoy monument Monument in memorial of Elijah P. Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois.

Elijah P. Lovejoy

American abolitionist
Also known as: Elijah Parish Lovejoy
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Elijah Parish Lovejoy
Born:
November 9, 1802, Albion, Maine, U.S.
Died:
November 7, 1837, Alton, Illinois (aged 34)
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Elijah P. Lovejoy (born November 9, 1802, Albion, Maine, U.S.—died November 7, 1837, Alton, Illinois) was an American newspaper editor and martyred abolitionist who died in defense of his right to print antislavery material in the period leading up to the American Civil War (1861–65).

In 1827 Lovejoy moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he established a school and entered journalism. Six years later he became editor of the St. Louis Observer, a Presbyterian weekly in which he strongly condemned slavery and supported gradual emancipation. Missouri was a slave state, and in 1835 a letter signed by a number of important men in St. Louis requested him to moderate the tone of his editorials. He replied in an editorial reiterating his views and his right to publish them. Threats of mob violence, however, forced him to move his press across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois. Despite its new location, his press was destroyed by mobs several times in one year. Finally, on the night of November 7, 1837, a mob attacked the building, and Lovejoy was killed in its defense. The news of his death stirred the people of the North profoundly and led to a great strengthening of abolitionist sentiment.

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abolitionism
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Wendell Phillips Abolitionist Wendell Phillips speaking against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 at an antislavery meeting in Boston. In the rigorous moral climate of New England, slavery was anathema, and much of the fire and righteousness of the abolition movement originated there.

abolitionism

European and American social movement
Also known as: abolition movement, antislavery movement
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Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
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Also called:
abolition movement

abolitionism, (c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. The intensification of slavery as a system, which followed Portuguese trafficking of enslaved Africans beginning in the 15th century, was driven by the European colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the plantation economy generated an immense demand for low-cost labour. Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated total of 12 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. The brutality of slavery, made increasingly visible by the scale of its practice, sparked a reaction that insisted on its abolition altogether.

Origin of the abolition movement

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The abolition movement began with criticism by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment of slavery’s violation of the “rights of man.” Quaker and other, evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities. By the late 18th century moral disapproval of slavery was widespread, and antislavery reformers won a number of deceptively easy victories during this period. In Britain, Granville Sharp secured a legal decision in 1772 that West Indian planters could not hold slaves in Britain, because slavery was contrary to English law. In the United States, all the states north of Maryland abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804. But antislavery sentiments had little effect on the centres of slavery themselves: the massive plantations of the Deep South, the West Indies, and South America. Turning their attention to these areas, British and American abolitionists began working in the late 18th century to prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans into the British colonies and the United States. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, these forces succeeded in getting the slave trade to the British colonies abolished in 1807. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves that same year, though widespread smuggling continued until about 1862.

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Antislavery forces then concentrated on winning the emancipation of those populations already in slavery. They were triumphant when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838 and in French possessions 10 years later.

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