The death of the American newspaper editor and abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-1837) at the hands of a mob in Illinois gave the antislavery cause its first martyr.

Elijah P. Lovejoy was born at Albion, Maine, on Nov. 9, 1802, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He graduated from Waterville College (renamed Colby) in 1826 and, after a brief period of schoolteaching and newspaper work in St. Louis, Mo., studied for the ministry at Princeton. On receiving his license to preach he returned to St. Louis to edit a Presbyterian weekly, the Observer. His editorials on slavery soon brought protests from his readers, for even the gradual abolition of slavery that Lovejoy proposed was controversial. A meeting of citizens in 1835 warned him to desist, but Lovejoy refused to modify his position. On March 4, 1835, he married Celia Ann French.

In early 1836 Lovejoy published a full account of the brutal lynching of a...