n Observer_. At
that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had
married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position
either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man
in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the melee the officer was
killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that there
was a plot to kidnap him and sell him into the Southern cotton fields,
and that he had a right to resist. The real facts will, doubtless, never
be known. To slave owners, however, it was intolerable that a black man
should resist an officer under any circumstances. A mob collected, the
negro was bound to a stake, wood piled round about, and the prisoner was
burned to death.

Efforts were made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the
name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury
substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious
metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are
absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this
case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is
beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free.
When Mr. Lovejoy commented editorially upon this outrageous charge,
encouraging lynch law, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical
electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing
office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed
to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but
liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and
destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then
brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of
his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but
the next night a second mob collected, and when Lovejoy stepped from the
building he was riddled with bullets, the warehouse burned, and the
press, for the third time, flung into the Mississippi. The news of this
murder aroused the continent, filling the South with exultation, and the
North with alarm. Slavery, a subject which had long been tabooed,
suddenly became the one topic of conversation in the home, the store,
the street-car. All editors wrote about it; all Northern pulpits began
to preach on the subject. More faggots had been flung upon the fire, and
oil added to the fierce flames.

Every explosion