Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
The Martyrdom of Lovejoy
By Wendell Phillips Garrison (18401907)L
The greatest feeling produced by this atrocity was in the city the most remote from the scene—in Boston, where, by a rich compensation, it overcame the timidity of Channing, revealed the oratory and fixed the destiny of Wendell Phillips, and with him drew Edmund Quincy into the forefront of the ranks of the despised abolitionists. The aldermen, who at first refused the use of Faneuil Hall for an indignation meeting, and Attorney-General Austin, who desecrated the hall afresh by declaring that Lovejoy had died as the fool dieth, were surprised by the demonstration of a new Boston upon which they had not counted. The Boston which had come near having its Lovejoy in the person of Mr. Garrison, in October, 1835, had undergone a revolution in two years—a revolution perhaps to be defined as the weakening of Southern ascendency. The response of Faneuil Hall to the Alton riot was Northern resentment against a pro-slavery invasion, as it seemed.
With more exactness, however, it may be said that Lovejoy was sacrificed on Southern soil. All the towns along the Mississippi were frequented by Southerners, often largely settled by them. Little more than a dozen years had elapsed since the strenuous exertions of Governor Edward Coles had barely defeated the attempt of the Southern element in Illinois to legalize slavery by amending the constitution. Alton, situated in the southern half of the State, opposite the slave-cursed shore of Missouri and not far from St. Louis, in intimate commercial relations with the cotton-growing districts, was, though owing its prosperity, and even a certain reputation for philanthropy, to Eastern settlers, predominantly Southern in tone. Southern divines helped to harden public sentiment against the further countenance or toleration of Lovejoy; Southern doctors took an active part in the mob, and one of them perhaps fired the murderous shot. So, the year before, Cincinnati, tumbling Birney’s press into the Ohio, was truly a Southern city; so, the year after, Philadelphia, burning Pennsylvania Hall to the ground. In fact, the least Southern and most surprising of all the mobs of that epoch was precisely the Boston mob against the editor of the “Liberator.”
Of this mob every citizen of Boston and its vicinity must have been reminded when the news came—not as now by telegraph—of Lovejoy’s fate.