This Walpurgis period of the movement culminated on November 7, 1837, in a terrible tragedy.  The place was a little Illinois town, Alton, just over the Mississippi River from St. Louis, and the victim was Elijah P. Lovejoy.  He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and the editor of a weekly religious newspaper, first published in St. Louis and removed by him later to Alton.  His sin was that he did not hold his peace on the subject of slavery in the columns of his paper.  He was warned “to pass over in silence everything connected” with that question.  But he had no choice, he had to cry aloud against iniquities, which, as a Christian minister and a Christian editor, he dared not ignore.  His troubles with the people of St. Louis took in the spring of 1836 a sanguinary turn, when he denounced the lynching of a negro by a St. Louis mob, perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar atrocity.  In consequence of his outspoken condemnation of the horror, his office was broken into and destroyed by a mob.  Lovejoy thereupon removed his paper to Alton, but the wild-cat-like spirit pursued him across the river and destroyed his press.  He replaced his broken press with a new one, only to have his property a second time destroyed.  He replaced the second with a third press, but a third time the mob destroyed his property.  Then he bought a fourth press, and resolved to defend it with his life.  Pierced by bullets he fell, resisting the attack of a mob bent on the destruction of his rights.  Lovejoy died a martyr to free speech and the freedom of the press.

The tidings of this tragedy stirred the free States to unwonted depths.  The murder of an able and singularly noble man by a mob was indeed horrible enough, but the blow which took his life was aimed at the right of free speech and the freedom of the press.  He was struck down in the exercise of his liberties as a citizen of the town where he met death, and of the State and country to which he belonged.  What brave man and good in the North who might not meet a similar fate for daring to denounce evils approved by the community in which his lot was cast?  Who was safe?  Whose turn would it be next to pay with his life for attempts to vindicate the birthright of his citizenship?  What had Lovejoy done, what had he written, that thousands of people who did not agree with Garrison would not have done and have written under like circumstances?  He was not a disciple of Garrison, he did not accept the doctrine of immediate emancipation, and yet a pro-slavery mob had murdered him.  Yes, who was safe?  Who was to be the next?  A great horror transfixed the North, and bitter uncertainty, and tremendous dread of approaching perils to its liberties.