Calabasas CA
5-03-2022 8:15pm

Journalist & Abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy Killed in Alton, IL 1837

World Press Freedom Day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in December 1993, inspired by the 1991 declaration at Windhoek by African journalists. This year attendees of the conference in Uruguay will discuss “Threats that Silence: Trends in the Safety of Journalists,” highlighting how surveillance and hacking are compromising journalism.

How far back, in America, have journalists been subject to violence and even death for their work? The most notable reference was the shooting of Elijah Parish Lovejoy two days before his 35th birthday during a riot in Alton, Illinois November 7, 1837.

The order of events pertinent to his death are as follows

August 1837

November 7, 1837

  • A printing press was unloaded from the riverboat “Missouri Fulton” to Alton, IL approximately 3am
  • The press was delivered to the warehouse owned by Winthrop Sargent Gilman, who was later cited as a rioter and not a defender of property**
  • Elijah was in hiding within the warehouse basement, determined to begin printing "Alton Observer"
  • 200 pro-slavery rioters began throwing stones at the building and soon set fire to it
  • Elijah came outside, at which point he was fatally shot with an assault of five bullets.
  • The printing press was seized, and parts thrown into the Mississippi River - the part which was retrieved decades later is now displayed in downtown Alton, Il at Hayner Public Library

Historians cite Lovejoy's death as “the first casualty of the Civil War”.  Ironically Elijah had said before he died:

"I have appealed to the constitution and laws of my country; if they fail to protect me, I appeal to God, and with Him I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at my post, but I cannot desert it."

Abraham Lincoln referenced the dumping of Elijah's press into the river and his death in his 1838 speech at Lyceum "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" which is quoted both in "The Civil Way" (1990) and Walt Disney's Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland.

Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.

Both his brother Owen and cousin were abolitionists and unlike Elijah, who was an ordained Christian minister, they entered politics, enlarging the Republican stance against slavery. Elijah's brothers Owen and Rev Joseph C. Lovejoy wrote "Memoir of the REV. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press", with an introduction by John Quincy Adams, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 . Of slavery they wrote:

It has subjected millions of our country- men to a state of abject bondage, has deprived them of dl their inalienable rights, even of the privilege of calling their bodies or souls their own, and debarred them from all means tending to raise them to a more elevated condition

Secondly, The Alton tragedy has proved that by the power of truth the encroachments of the slaveholding spirit upon our liberties, may be effectually resisted and its reign everywhere in due season terminated.

Thirdly, This terrible outbreaking of human wrath is ' furnishing slaveholders and those who favour their cause with evidence which must convince them, if not infatuated, that the freedom of speech and of the press cannot he suppressed by violence.

**Both rioters and, abolitionists who were protecting the printing press, were cited for their actions during the Alton Trials.

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