Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

[186] 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 by¹ 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 harden² 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;³ 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.⁴

Of this mob every citizen of Boston and its vicinity must have been reminded when the news came—not as now by telegraph⁵—of Lovejoy's fate. Only a few days before, and in partial reference to the previous destruction of the Observer's presses, Alexander H. Everett,⁶ warning his fellow-electors that the right of free discussion ‘is not only endangered, but, for the present at least, is actually lost,’ had written:⁷