We dare not trust ourselves to speak of this shocking affair in the language which our indignation would dictate. It forms one of the foulest blots on the page of American history. . . . We loathe and abhor the miserable cant of those who talk of Mr. Lovejoy as
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May, 1838, referring to anti-abolition riots in Philadelphia which resulted in the burning of Penn Hall, it said, “The Abolitionists, we doubt not, would like the fun of having their hall burned every year, and their chance to make ten or twenty thousand converts out of the outrage and excitement.
Let no one suppose us inclined to treat such criminal outrages with levity.
Such humors of the body politic should be corrected by an application of grape and canister.”
Greeley says in his autobiography that the two events which “materially modified” his preconceptions of the slavery question were the attempts of the South to annex Texas, and the killing of Elijah P. Lovejoy at Alton, Ill., in 1837, because he insisted on publishing there a religious newspaper which condemned slavery as one of the evils opposed to godliness.
The New Yorker of November 25 in that year contained an editorial two columns long giving an account of the murder, and saying:
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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