4 / “The Palladium of Our Liberties”:

Freedom of the Press in the Old Northwest, 1837–1848

I have long regarded the conductors of the public press, as a class of persons who have assumed upon themselves a fearful responsibility . . . their influence is powerfully seen and felt, for weal or for woe to the human family.

—Arnold Buffum in The Protectionist, January 1, 1841

In the antebellum era, the newspaper was a central tool for transforming the nation, and freedom of the press was thus essential to activists. The members of the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society who gathered at Cadiz in October 1842 proclaimed abolitionist periodicals a vital means to awaken others to the ills of slavery. Newspapers could publicize both slavery’s true “nature and influence” and the human and material costs of its continuance.1 These activists believed that such publications comprised an integral part of the public expression and expansion of the antislavery agenda in the Old Northwest, and their editors indeed took on a “fearful responsibility.” Local reformers consequently prioritized protecting and funding antislavery newspapers in the region to help them carry on their work.2 Abolitionists of both sexes took advantage of this burgeoning forum, and relied upon newspapers both to make converts and to justify their public action. Newspapers from both East and West were key to activists’ ability to exchange information, tactics, and energy with one another. They—and the concurrent press revolution of the era—were vital tools reformers needed to cross the miles that separated them.

Antislavery publications became the locus of struggles for freedom of expression and human rights in the Old Northwest. As the battleground of ideas, the region was rife with conflict over the right to publish abolitionist arguments and advertisements in newspapers. These disputes grew out of the fact that Old Northwest antislavery activists and their foes interpreted the American Revolution’s legacy in wildly diverging ways. Bitter factions disputed the founders’ intentions regarding free expression, and each used them for their own purposes.

Men and women in the Old Northwest fought to protect the press, a crucial component of the antislavery publicity machine, against challenges that were unique to their tense local climate. Anti-abolitionists, often trying to defend their political parties from turmoil, suppressed freedom of the press through violence and economic pressure, while reformers expanded contemporary understandings of this as a guaranteed right. In three bustling commercial hubs in Illinois and Ohio, from 1837 through 1848, press freedom for antislavery advocates remained a hotly contested issue. Local residents fought over which ideas could enter the public sphere, one affected not only by partisanship, racism, and social stratification, but also by the growing trade systems that enmeshed the region in southern commerce. The debate over freedom of the press in these states was no abstract discussion of citizenship privileges, for it was deeply bound up with the politics of the era. Anti-abolitionists—who ranged from community leaders, to party stalwarts, to prominent tradesmen—saw that inflammatory journalism could undermine the slave system and the stability of the political parties. Both slavery and those parties needed to sweep criticism of the “peculiar institution” under the rug.

For abolitionists in this isolated region, newspapers played a principal role in transmitting a shared sense of identity, a sense of membership in a community. They facilitated commonalities and bonds among people who were often not in direct contact with one another, but who shared values.3 As such, newspapers were important cohesive links people used to connect their networks across great distances, determine strategy, and debate underlying principles. While they faced vociferous opposition, they also received funds and support from outside sympathizers. Thus joined with one another and able to buoy one another’s spirits, Old Northwest antislavery people remained committed to their mission of organization and conversion.

* * *

The press was of vital importance to antislavery advocates as it sustained their movement over large distances and gave them another public voice. They and their opponents fought hard to control publications at a time when both the press and literacy were rapidly expanding in the United States. From 1801 to 1833, the number of newspapers in the nation and its territories increased by 600 percent. In 1830, the total daily news circulation was approximately 78,000, and by 1840, it had ballooned to 300,000.4 The numbers give only a partial picture, however, for contentious debates over press freedom dated back to the nation’s youth; the founders had addressed it in the debate over the Bill of Rights in 1787.5 Nationally, abolitionists had fought for this freedom since the early 1830s, but their struggles in the Old Northwest were unlike those of older eastern cities.6 These growing communities had tenuous but important commercial ties with the South, and fiery local political contests shaped the character of their arguments over freedom of the press.

Technological and organizational innovations ushered along the press revolution in the Old Northwest and across the country, and these enabled abolitionists to expand their public presence. The successive developments of the iron press and the increased use of the steam-driven press made printing an easier task, as did improvements in papermaking technology. Infrastructure developments—the railroad and, after 1844, the telegraph—also accelerated the distribution of news across the nation.7 Abolitionist editors asked itinerant lecturers and subscription agents to disperse their papers, and agents collected money and issued subscriptions for both local and national papers in the Old Northwest.8

By these means, the antislavery press connected local activists with their counterparts across the nation. Old Northwesterners read eastern papers and vice versa, and expanding numbers of newspapers emerged to push particular agendas. After 1830, these papers played a crucial role in the circulation and promulgation of antislavery ideology in the region. In 1842, the Chicago Western Citizen revealed its view of the newspaper’s substantial efficacy as a propaganda device: “the thoughts that are in its columns may influence ten thousand for good, and produce effects which volumes of essays, sermons, or narratives, could not effect, and especially where they could never reach.”9 Both local newspapers like the Citizen and national ones soon served as tools for determining strategy and debating underlying principles. Antislavery papers gathered new support for their cause, and formed a vital component of the communication between local, state, and national reformers.10 They were central to spreading activism across the antebellum North, and joined in fiery disputes that encompassed a range of participants.11

Antebellum African Americans were no mere passive objects of reform, for they also wrote and published antislavery newspapers. In addition to male editors active across the nation—including Samuel E. Cornish, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany—Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the peripatetic educator, lawyer, and editor of the Provincial Freeman, moved in and out of Canada and the Old Northwest in the 1850s.12 She focused her publication efforts north of the border, however. Most Old Northwest entrants into the battle for press freedom were white, as the case studies here reflect, and as was also true nationally.

The newspapers’ increasing prevalence and efficiency of distribution in this era allowed people to rapidly exchange essential information that was often of a partisan or otherwise slanted nature. While antislavery newspapers attracted disproportionate wrath and violence, the overtly ideological content in their pages was common for the press of the time. Antebellum American newspapers and news editors usually adopted partisan affiliations, and papers provided the most convenient and accessible source of political information for widely dispersed populations.13 In one such case, the Chicago Western Citizen, which the members of the Liberty Party in the Old Northwest read widely, made no secret of its partisan affiliation. For the election of August 1843, the paper printed a list of congressional candidates with the Liberty ticket in large type, while the Whig and Democrat candidates appeared in smaller type under the heading “Pro-Slavery Ticket.”14 Some Old Northwest editors held press freedom convictions that meant they printed antislavery perspectives even when they did not share them, but all labored in a tense, often dangerous, environment.

Partisan newspapers that spoke for the major political parties and reform publications like the antislavery newspapers differed in important ways. The former had both funding and influence over their message from advertisers and centralized party structures that resisted risking voter support by advocating unpopular perspectives. They also had much broader circulation. The latter had less consistent financial support and more specific targeted audiences, both of which left them freer to put forth controversial messages—and more endangered by community hostility.

* * *

Like their fellow activists the local organizers, antislavery publishers and journalists tenaciously fought to protect their freedom of the press, for the newspaper was indispensable to the expansion of the antislavery ranks. In this weighty battle, the very vitality of their movement and its principles were at stake. When mobs and fellow newspapers attacked antislavery papers to suppress them, they endangered not only the exchange of activist information but also the movement’s nourishment and expansion. On both the local and national levels, spreading abolitionist ideas would have been impossible without the press and its capacity to organize, coordinate, and extend antislavery networks.

While antebellum people expected partisan commentary in their newspapers, many nonetheless drew the line at antislavery perspectives, as the attempts to stifle controversial voices in the Old Northwest press reveal. The human rights agenda of reformers proved unpalatable to the sensibilities of many in the region. Seen in this way, local efforts to stifle discourse about abolition in public print emerge as part of the larger national trend to silence the struggle over slavery and criticism of the major national parties. For abolitionists, freedom of the press was more than a means to convey their message. Instead it transformed into a parallel cause for which they willingly battled. While some of activists’ notoriety was not of their choosing, they often consciously aroused explosive responses from their communities with their rhetoric and actions. Indeed, they took part in a highly contested effort to expand African American rights and freedom of expression for all.15 Old Northwest abolitionists crafted innovative arguments for their right to voice unpopular sentiments, and risked their personal safety by advocating divisive positions in hostile situations. Like other advocates who stirred up rights debates beginning in the 1830s, they melded liberalism, republicanism, and evangelical religion into a larger rationale for universal rights.16 Across organizational lines, they harnessed these ideas to overtly political arguments that claimed the common humanity of all people. Newspapers played an integral role in promulgating these rights arguments.

Old Northwest antislavery proponents intimately tied their efforts to protect the press to their increasingly expansive use of the First Amendment in self-defense. As early as 1835, the American Society asserted that freedom of the press was an inheritable right, but did not cite any legal authority; this right was a new creation. English common law had given the American colonists few protections for press freedom, and indeed, people could censor or ban works after they had been published. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, printers in the colonies used the courts to fight for the right to print controversial material. In the revolutionary era, many Americans came to value freedom of the press, and included it in nine of the eleven state constitutions they passed then, but the federal constitution lacked any specific mention of freedom of the press until the Bill of Rights.17 In its 1835 address, the American Society claimed as “American citizens” that freedom of the press was one of the “blessings we have inherited from our fathers,” which they intended to pass on.18 That interpretation appealed to an ever-growing constituency after the national controversy over the gag rule in the House of Representatives began in 1836. The gag rule increased antislavery people’s political isolation and reinforced the opposition of the major political parties to their rights, for northern Democrats joined southern Democrats and Whigs in their support for these silencing measures.19 Desire for press freedom expanded even more following the mobbing and killing of antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy at Alton, Illinois in 1837.20

Both the gag rule and the Lovejoy incident clarified that antislavery people faced threats to their freedom of expression from proslavery southern state governments, but also from legislatures and ordinary citizens across the nation. Extralegal violence, in particular, put shadowy concerns over liberty under a glaring spotlight. As was the case with freedom of assembly, abolitionists and their allies conceived of these new rights as both federal/constitutional rights and as “basic human right[s] that state constitutions protected.”21 Activists grappled their way toward a sweeping definition of guaranteed constitutional rights.22 When abolitionists’ freedom of expression came under fire, they gained many new recruits to the cause as well as supporters for this new, broader understanding of their rights.

Antislavery people came to understand that they could use mob attacks strategically to strengthen their claims that both the institution of slavery and its constitutional protections threatened democracy. Some resorted to physical means for self-protection, while others retained nonresistant (nonviolent) methods.23 The conflicts in Alton and Peoria (in Illinois) and Cambridge, Ohio, are provocative examples of Old Northwest antislavery persistence and self-defense. They also show that anti-abolitionists, too, saw the press as central to the expansion of antislavery sentiment, as became clear from their efforts to suppress it across the region.

* * *

The murder of editor and Presbyterian minister Elijah Parish Lovejoy constituted the final event in a chain of conflict that extended back to his early attempts to print the religious newspaper, the Observer, in Alton. As the escalating tension in this Mississippi River town revealed, advocacy of unpopular positions in a hostile environment could radicalize individuals. Maine-born Elijah Lovejoy was not initially an abolitionist when he moved to St. Louis and first began publishing that religious newspaper there.24 Missouri slaveholders always saw him as an abolitionist, and over the course of 1834 and 1835 that description became increasingly accurate. Growing exposure to the realities of slavery and its effects—especially on his press freedom—changed him, and he gradually incorporated more immediate antislavery arguments into his paper.25 Lovejoy was not alone in this trajectory of conversion, for across the North repression of abolitionists’ rights, including freedom of the press, won over people who were opposed or indifferent before the crisis. In some cases, this was out of self-interest, as they believed that such silencing and gag rules threatened white people’s rights.

By the summer of 1835, St. Louis’s slaveholders grew intolerant of any discussion of slavery. The rising tide of anti-abolition sentiment threatened to engulf Lovejoy, and his allies counseled him to desist or depart, but even then he steadfastly defended his right to press freedom. Eventually, his opponents forced him to leave St. Louis, after he condemned a lynch mob that had burned Francis McIntosh to death. McIntosh was a free man of mixed race ancestry who had killed an officer in the process of resisting arrest. When Lovejoy denounced McIntosh’s murder, local residents expelled him to Alton “under the threat of personal injury.” Lovejoy moved there, across the river from St. Louis, in July 1836. His reputation preceded him, and upon his arrival, anti-abolition citizens immediately dumped his press into the river, quickly displaying their opinions on press freedom.26 He ordered a new press, certain he should persist in printing the paper in his new town. The young minister was determined to pursue his chosen path, regardless of the consequences, and his allies supported this position.

Even in Alton, locals strongly opposed abolition, but Lovejoy refused to temper his press freedom or activist agenda. He extolled the correctness of his approach in his Alton Observer that September. If his foes took away the right of “FREE DISCUSSION,” he explained in the language of universal rights, then “we have nothing left to struggle for.”27 His growing notoriety aided in the recruitment of other Illinois abolitionists. Having decided that Illinois needed a state organization, he issued a call in the Observer on July 6, 1837, for an Illinois State Anti-Slavery Society. Despite a positive reception among other abolitionists, many of his fellow residents of Alton abhorred this move. On July 11, his opponents convened a town meeting to oppose his organizing efforts, and demanded that he cease local antislavery activity.28 Then, as later, Lovejoy refused to back down.

In August and September, Lovejoy encountered further problems in his new home. First, a mob of eight to ten “respectable” Alton men attempted to tar and feather him, and while they ultimately released him unharmed, that night they nonetheless destroyed his press for the second time. Lovejoy continued to print about abolition, and the next month, the mayor himself watched while a “quiet and gentlemanly mob” destroyed a third press. By this time Lovejoy had captured the attention of allies outside of Alton; following the destruction of the first three presses, newspapers discussed him and he received supportive letters and money from across the state.29

At the time, Alton had a new charter that only provided for ill-realized government and law enforcement. In areas like this that lacked formal legal institutions, citizens on occasion relied on vigilante justice.30 Law enforcement in the era was rudimentary, but abolitionists repeatedly demanded protection for their rights. The regulatory system that did exist was often biased, for governments did not typically pay locally elected constables to stop crimes in progress or to keep the peace. Municipal authorities thus had little motivation to take such actions, especially when, as was the case with abolitionists, “the victims of crime or disorder were unpopular minorities.”31 Control over community norms thus often fell into the hands of the people themselves. In Alton, this lack of enforcement for press freedom had disastrous consequences.

* * *

Lovejoy’s antislavery commitment deepened further as he and his loved ones repeatedly came into direct confrontation with anti-abolitionists. October 1837 proved an eventful month both in his life and in Alton. Early that month, while Lovejoy was visiting his wife’s family in St. Charles, Missouri, 23 miles northwest of St. Louis, another mob attacked him. After he had preached twice against slavery in a local church, angry residents entered his mother-in-law’s house and beat him severely, despite the efforts of his wife, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law to defend him. His wife Celia Ann “was smiting them in the face with her hands . . . and telling them that they must first take her before they should have her husband.”32 Her actions prove that protecting her spouse’s safety and press freedom were inextricable. Like other women in the Old Northwest, she physically defended a man from an anti-abolitionist attack.33 This assault also demonstrated that Lovejoy’s notoriety so inflamed his foes that they would beat him even if it meant possibly injuring women in the process. Back in Alton, on October 24 a group of prominent citizens met in the Presbyterian Church to form a colonization society. This was a deliberate effort to oppose local abolition. They denounced Lovejoy as divisive, in contrast to colonization’s “beneficial” uniting effects.34 This alternative effort failed to quash the state antislavery society, because Lovejoy and his allies were determined to exercise their freedom of expression and to take action.

On October 26, the State Anti-Slavery Convention held its inaugural meeting in Alton as planned, a public display of Illinois abolitionists’ solidarity with Lovejoy’s ongoing efforts. The members deemed themselves the “friends of free discussion,” and thus explicitly grounded their right to organize in the struggle for liberty of expression. Nonetheless, local anti-abolitionists repeatedly infiltrated their meetings and advanced pro-slavery resolutions. The antislavery group realized that their antagonists outnumbered them, and so decided to clandestinely reconvene their meeting at the home of the Reverend Theodore B. Hurlbut. There the new society finally managed to hold its organizing meeting in peace. They voted to support Lovejoy in the continued publication of the Observer in Alton. Concerned with both civil liberties and the national stain of slavery, the newly organized society combated attempts to silence abolitionism, and overtly justified forming an immediatist society by arguing that the entire country had a stake in these issues. No matter the costs of such an outspoken position, they argued against what they called “fetters” of the mind. The new Illinois Society also struggled against bias and for absolute equality of rights for all men, aiming to “remov[e] public prejudice.”35 They claimed for themselves, for the moment, the same adherence to nonviolence that they advocated for slaves. Events in Alton soon brought their commitment to those principles into question.

At the Alton meeting, it became clear that Lovejoy was not the only person whose adoption of press freedom grew out of efforts to organize against slavery. Much as Lovejoy’s trials had radicalized him, his co-members claimed that they had doubted the necessity of a society until they had viewed the virulence of their opposition, and had seen “that some organized systematic effort, was absolutely necessary to save our own liberties from the ruthless hands of unprincipled men.” This threat was real, for they knew that a fourth press for Lovejoy’s Observer would soon arrive, funded by sympathetic allies in the community and abroad. They planned to store it in the warehouse of merchants Benjamin Godfrey and Winthrop S. Gilman.36 Anticipating their future difficulties, they declared the legality of their public abolitionist actions. To them, violence seemed so likely that they wrote bluntly: “No one has any right to hinder us by law or by force.”37 This assertion would not go unchallenged.

Several days later on October 30, armed abolitionists raised local tempers as they guarded a speech Lovejoy’s fellow Illinois Society organizer the Reverend Edward Beecher gave at the Alton Presbyterian Church. Born in 1803 to Lyman and Roxana Beecher, Edward was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher. President of Illinois College in Jacksonville since 1832, Beecher had become an outspoken advocate of “free speech and free press,” as he proved by helping to guard Lovejoy’s press the night before his death.38 Anti-abolitionists threw a stone into the meeting, but the reformers there were prepared. William Tanner called to attention the assembled members of an informal but armed abolitionist protection company who soon “flanked” the door.39 Beecher finished his speech without further violence, one small victory for the abolitionists. This triumph granted a modicum of legitimacy to their brinksmanship by demonstrating that their threat to defend themselves was sufficient to stop an attack.

* * *

The anti-abolitionists publicly and vocally debated Lovejoy and his allies. On November 2, a large meeting at the counting room of John Hogan and Company continued to dispute local press freedom. Hogan, the vice president of the colonization society, argued against Lovejoy and his antislavery compatriots. Edward Beecher, Winthrop S. Gilman, and Lovejoy himself defended abolition and press freedom. Gilman declared that every citizen had the right to “speak, write, or print his opinions on any subject.” John Hogan subsequently presented a disingenuous argument that Lovejoy had agreed to cease advocating abolition upon moving to Alton.40 Hogan himself later admitted that Lovejoy had made no such promise, but Lovejoy’s opponents repeated this assertion nonetheless. Many local residents would have preferred that this had been the case, for it allowed them to denounce him as a meddling outsider and as an unreliable man who failed to keep his word.41 This was a specious claim, but they repeated it all the same.

At that same debate, Lovejoy eloquently defended his actions, citing universal rights and asking for protection from the community. He revealed his and his family’s fears for their safety, but noted that he would not stand down even if it entailed dying for the causes of abolition and press freedom. The civil authorities present there argued that they could not stop mobs from silencing Lovejoy, and the mayor himself stated that he disapproved of the editor for bringing slavery, abolition, and press freedom into public discussion in Alton.42 With their continual persecution of Lovejoy, Alton’s anti-abolitionists denied he was entitled to print his views. In response, Lovejoy invoked “universal, abstract rights” and adhered to the religiously based higher law doctrine.43 Anti-abolitionists vowed that they would control Alton public discourse, and they found license to attack Lovejoy in the mayor’s acquiescence and willingness to blame him for local tensions.

* * *

Elijah Lovejoy’s fourth printing press arrived at Alton late in the evening of November 6, 1837, on the steamer Missouri Fulton. The supporters of the embattled minister and printer placed the press in Godfrey and Gilman’s warehouse under their own armed watch. By 10 p.m., they could no longer ignore the swelling crowd outside of the warehouse. The mass soon grew to between 150 and 200 rioters, of whom 50 to 80 were armed. From inside, merchant and warehouse owner Winthrop Gilman proclaimed that the defenders of the warehouse would stand their ground, they would “protect their property, and that serious consequences might ensue” should the mob attempt to enter the warehouse. In his post-riot letter to the Democratic Party paper, the Alton Spectator, Mayor John M. Krum recalled the members of the mob stating that they wanted the press, and that although they “did not wish to injure any person,” they would destroy it.44

The mayor and other unnamed “civil authorities” made ineffective efforts to stop the mob. Mayor Krum, himself a Democrat, claimed that they could not separate the crowd due to the assailants’ superior numbers: “No means were at my control . . . by which the mob could be dispersed and the loss of life and the shedding of blood prevented.”45 Krum and his colleagues made no other attempt to help the men under siege in the warehouse.46

The mob fired upon the building and attempted to force entry into it. A young carpenter in the crowd outside, Lyman Bishop, was the first to die, taking a bullet from an abolitionist in a defensive counterattack. Following Bishop’s death, there was a short lull followed by the mob’s renewed onslaught.47 The anti-abolitionists then set the roof of the warehouse afire, and Lovejoy met his death from four bullets. Even after the voice of abolition had been silenced, the crowd was not satisfied, and refused to disband.

After Lovejoy died, the defenders of the warehouse fled, and the mob destroyed the press. A large crowd of men entered the building, and “threw the press upon the wharf, where it was broken in pieces and thrown into the river.” Finally contented with the deed’s completion, the mob left the other property in the warehouse unharmed. They then departed, not acknowledging in their actions that two men and the freedom of the press had met their demise that night.48 Local courts never tried or convicted anyone for the deaths of Lovejoy or Bishop, although they did indict men on both sides of the conflict for the crime of rioting.49

* * *

After the incident at Alton, abolitionists both locally and nationally had a horrific example of where conflicts over their right to freedom of expression could lead. Many told a narrative of martyrdom and of Alton’s brutality and degeneracy. Others saw a more universal story of the slave system’s influence in the river town as symbolizing the institution’s hold on the nation; to them, Alton meant that slavery’s survival relied on the silencing of dissent.

Lovejoy’s death forced many abolitionists to question their attitudes to violence. He was not the first immediate abolitionist in the region to reject the common precept of passive nonresistance. Among his predecessors were participants in an 1836 meeting of the Ohio Society at Granville, who used clubs to drive away a mob that attacked them. In effect, Old Northwest antislavery people rarely adhered in practice to absolute nonresistance, especially since their foes so frequently assaulted them. Most abolitionists were ambivalent, but respected Lovejoy’s choice to arm in his own defense, even as some condemned and others lauded his actions.50

This incident constitutes a justifiably maligned chapter in Illinois history. Its significance is not under dispute here, but its usual interpretation is, for even recent accounts of the events at Alton privilege glorifying the individual man as martyr over exploring the reasons why a press freedom debate led to Lovejoy’s death. Myths of the Lovejoy murder do little to illuminate the local political culture in which this episode of anti-abolitionist violence occurred.51

Omitted from virtually all readings of Lovejoy’s “martyrdom,” as both contemporaries and later historians called it, is any sense of Alton’s particular social or political climate.52 When contrasted with related events a mere six years later, upstate in Peoria, Alton reveals that in the Old Northwest, geography determined neither actions nor ideology. While Illinois was a northern free state, the relationship between place and political climate was complex. Support for human bondage and opposition to fighting it thrived well outside of the South. The ideological border between an antislavery North and a pro-slavery South lacked definition in the young states of the Old Northwest, and the idea of clear sectional division emerges, upon closer analysis, as both arbitrary and unsatisfactory.

Any attempt to explain conflict over abolition in antebellum Illinois requires consideration of local political operations. Alton and Peoria’s prominent citizens’ efforts to suppress antislavery views in the press were but two instances in a history of conflict over the right to promulgate such views in the Old Northwest. These altercations represent a pattern of local contestation over abolitionists’ rights that continued through the 1840s and beyond.

Upon revisiting the 1843 anti-abolition assault in Peoria, it is evident that while in the intervening years since Lovejoy’s death, antislavery people had broadened their strategies to include political abolition, this made them no more popular. Political antislavery formally organized with the Liberty Party in 1840, but had little quantitative impact in Illinois. The Democrats maintained overwhelming control of the state from the 1830s until the rise of the Republicans after 1854. Still, the Liberty Party’s foray into politics, if anything, made it more dangerous to oppose slavery publicly, especially in 1843, when the next year’s presidential election weighed heavily on many partisan minds. While the Liberty Party never actually posed a numerical threat, in pockets of Illinois it succeeded in disseminating its message quite effectively, to the point where, in 1844, the state hosted 8 out of the 28 counties in the country where the Liberty Party attained over 10 percent of the vote.53 This shift was hardly welcomed by all. In the era’s closely contested elections, the party’s ability to siphon off even this small percentage of voters made the major parties want to shut down the Liberty Party—and silence abolitionists in general. These developments strongly informed the situation in Peoria.

In February 1843, a faction of Peoria’s prominent citizens sought to stifle the local antislavery presence. This conflict subsequently exploded into another fiery press freedom battle that local partisan politics exacerbated. Peoria lacked anything approaching consensus on the contentious issues of abolition and the racial basis of civil rights, and the mainstream parties wished to suppress dissent. When the abolitionists gathered in a Peoria church, their opponents shut down their meeting in an attempt to repress local antislavery organization. A mob curtailed freedom of expression in that town without opposition from the larger community, apart from their ally in the press, Samuel H. Davis.

The debate in this Illinois River town arose out of the antagonistic cultures in the state—and in the region—in the 1830s and 1840s. As an embattled region that bordered the South and often shared in its commercial fate, the Old Northwest was at the front lines of debates over abolition and racial equality. This local battle over antislavery rights was but one flare-up in an extended Illinois controversy that dated back to Lovejoy’s pioneering efforts in the state. In contrast, in Peoria, the muzzling of the press in the 1840s, while violent, never extended to mortal injury. The conflicts there prove that activists who lived in the antislavery battleground continued to fiercely resist being silenced with assertive rights arguments, and the lower degree of violence there facilitated their ongoing efforts.

In Illinois, as in other parts of the Old Northwest, people played out national fights about slavery, abolition, and party politics on the local level by arguing about freedom of expression. In Peoria, the contest over slavery molded local political agendas, and party lines mandated suppressing antislavery discussion; in fact, the national political parties’ demands to stifle this divisive subject increased friction in the region. Notwithstanding prominent citizens’ efforts to filter local-level discourse, evidence of contestation and dissent on the issues of race and abolition leaked through. This conflict of interests contributed to confrontation and violence. Throughout the region, concern for party messages, localism, social order, racist ideology, and the call of commercial profits created a permissive attitude toward extralegal violence, which hampered activists’ abilities to avert attacks on press freedom.

* * *

When considered in the light of the better-known 1837 incident of anti-abolitionist violence at Alton, the forcible stifling of abolitionism in Peoria appears restrained because it did not involve fatalities. While the Alton incident culminated in an armed standoff and the deaths of Elijah Lovejoy and Lyman Bishop—one extreme outcome of abolitionist organizing in an adverse environment—Peoria’s anti-abolitionists secured their victories largely without bloodshed. This contrast speaks to the disparate levels of antislavery assertiveness in the two towns, and to significant differences in the resulting levels of violence.

The incidents at Peoria in the 1840s belie the findings of historians who claim that gradual withdrawal of the “sanction” of public opinion for mob violence led to a drastic decrease in the violent oppression of abolitionists after 1840. Further proof of the persistence of violence is the 1847 whipping of Bloomington, Illinois, abolitionist and minister Levi Spencer.54 In fact, such mob attacks continued in the Old Northwest for decades, as people maintained stark disagreements about the validity of antislavery perspectives throughout the antebellum era, and supported these positions with their fists. Perhaps fearing such hostility, the Peoria abolitionists waited nearly seven years after the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society’s creation before attempting to organize locally, despite the fact that nineteen Peorians were founding members of the state society.55

A focused look at Peoria can deepen understanding of the trajectories and resolutions of violent mob action in the Old Northwest. In Peoria in 1843, as earlier in Alton, abolitionism opened up a chasm in the community, unleashing conflict over the right to print antislavery statements. Abolitionists acted as willing provocateurs in these inhospitable situations, seeking to promulgate their message despite the risks. In post-Lovejoy Illinois, abolitionists could counter such violent acts with strong arguments in favor of their own civil liberties. Press freedom for antislavery people in Peoria was a hard-fought right, one that partisan politics made even more difficult to secure.

The conflict in antebellum Peoria was a local manifestation of a contentious national political environment. The two major political parties sought to silence discussion of abolitionist opinions and squelch efforts for African American rights, and aimed to prevent either of these divisive positions from expanding or claiming their voters. Both the Democrats and the Whigs were invested in maintaining a neutral or accommodating stance on slavery. They feared sectional discord and the fracturing of their political structures, and in the early 1840s in the Old Northwest, they faced the additional electoral threat of the Liberty Party.56 The major parties could only suppress discussion over slavery in the arenas that they controlled, however, such as the US Congress and national party platforms. Dissent and contestation in other venues—like the newspapers and local politics—proved more difficult to contain, although party men did try to do so through their participation in some anti-abolition mobs.

The Peoria fight for press freedom played out in a context of national and local partisan conflict. The local disputes not only represented battles of Whigs versus Democrats, but also the agendas of the established parties versus those of the immediate abolitionists and the Liberty Party. Returning to the publishing history and public lives of Mary Brown Davis and Samuel H. Davis provides one window into the effects of partisanship on the press and on the conflicts in Peoria in the 1830s and 1840s. Their Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer had a neutral political agenda from its inception in 1837 to 1840. As Samuel stated in the paper’s prospectus, it was impartial; the paper aimed to give locals and easterners facts on Peoria and the surrounding area, with a focus on agriculture and business.57 Editors wrote prospectuses to justify their papers’ necessity, explain their goals, and set out their fundamental ideologies. Davis’s neutral agenda contrasted sharply with that of Arnold Buffum when the latter established The Protectionist in New Garden, Indiana, in January 1841. Buffum aimed to reveal to his fellow northerners the influence of what he called the “slave power” on their independence and prosperity. Buffum, a Quaker of Rhode Island birth, was a founding member of the American Society who helped the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society affiliate with the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in the 1840s. An interesting figure, Buffum called himself an immediatist who voted antislavery.58 As slavery continued to encroach upon their freedoms, he declared that The Protectionist would be one means for them to push back.59 Samuel Davis had no such expansive plans for his paper.

Nevertheless, Davis soon changed his mind, and began to run the Register as a Whig Party newspaper in 1840. The partisan switch stemmed from the founding that year of a local Democratic paper, the Peoria Democratic Press, with its southern-born editor, John S. Zieber.60 Davis subsequently published advertisements for Whig party events, as well as increased partisan content.61

As did other editors of the time, Davis took direct political stands in his pages, but he believed in the free circulation of ideas and did not restrict his newspaper to those that he himself held. At least through 1843, Davis advocated a strong Whig agenda in his editorial commentary, claiming that he had no taste for abolition and actually found it troubling. He nonetheless granted abolitionists their say and their right to organize. Notwithstanding his dim view of abolitionists and of the Liberty Party, Samuel printed announcements of their activities.62 His explanation was simple and universal, for despite his personal dislike of abolitionism and his belief in 1840 that the Liberty party was a diversionary device the Democrats had created to siphon off potential Whig voters, Davis steadfastly supported a free press: “Our views of the freedom of the press and the right of free discussion often compel us to publish things . . . we individually disapprove of.”63 He felt obligated as an editor to ensure the unhindered circulation of ideas. Controversy over the publication of antislavery information haunted the Register from its early issues, but Samuel H. Davis made press freedom a priority.

To demonstrate Davis’s commitment to open public discussion, and despite his allegedly neutral stance on the issue of abolition, the Register occasionally published pieces that opposed slavery.64 He printed advertisements for antislavery societies and for the Liberty Party, which caused much consternation for some anti-abolitionist readers. Interestingly, these advertisements and editorials would sometimes appear in the same issue as advertisements for runaway slaves. Davis may have done this out of the need to keep the paper afloat financially.65

On several occasions, he pointed out to his readers that he still owned two slaves in Virginia, as if to show his own interest in the subject, but this did not shape his stance on press freedom. In December 1837, Davis wrote of Lovejoy’s death: “We may possibly be the only slave owner connected with the press in this state . . . and yet we hesitated not to lift our feeble voice against the outrages the moment we heard of them.” As soon as news of the 1837 Alton riot reached Peoria, Davis supported Elijah Lovejoy, arguing that he merely acted to protect his property—his press—and to enact his right to speak his opinions. Davis was one of only three Illinois editors to rebuke the Alton attackers, and he did so despite being a slave owner. He grounded his position in the correctness of law and the protections that press freedom afforded American citizens, and refused to censor discussion of the institution, regardless of his self-interest.66 In defiance of his stated impartiality on slavery and his claims to be a slaveholder, Samuel Davis also editorialized on June 4, 1841, that he regarded it as a “moral, social and political” evil, but that the South could control it where it already existed.67 Later, in April 1841, Davis advocated the unqualified right of all citizens to petition Congress, a position that many opponents of abolition wanted to deny to antislavery people through the continuation of the gag rule.68

However, Davis also highlighted another of the lessons of Alton, for even as he affirmed abolitionists’ right to free speech—as he did again in May 1842 regarding the controversial antislavery meeting in nearby Washington, Illinois—he tempered his willingness to allow them a public forum with a desire to refrain from giving them too much attention.69 His new understanding that Lovejoy’s martyrdom and “any action, even the mildest mobbing with rotten tomatoes or eggs, hatched abolitionists,” proved as true in Peoria as in Alton, as he and his wife soon saw.70

* * *

While her views on slavery were clearer, Mary Brown Davis also pushed the boundaries of the embattled abolitionist press, and sought to shine a spotlight on antislavery activism. Female abolitionist journalists actively participated in western antislavery publications, and Mary Brown Davis represents the pinnacle of their achievements. She used newspapers, including the Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Western Citizen, to broadcast her views. Davis was the leading female abolitionist writer in the Old Northwest in the 1830s and 1840s, and her publications continued into the following decade.

Davis had important allies, including Zebina Eastman, the Vermont-born editor of the Western Citizen who had moved west as a young man and taken up abolition by 1837. When he came to Illinois, he worked on a series of papers, including one with pioneering antislavery editor Benjamin Lundy. After Lundy’s death in 1839, Eastman took over his press, and in 1842 he brought it to Chicago as a Liberty Party paper. At the young age of twenty-seven, he began to run the new Western Citizen, which did not win immediate acceptance from the surrounding community. Eastman faced threats to his person and his press, but no one ever actually mobbed him.71 In this growing city—which was developing a fervent antislavery community—anti-abolitionist ire stopped short of the heights it reached in Boston or even in Alton. The paper had many supporters, and its significant subscriber base extended beyond Illinois into northern Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa. It also lasted until October 1853, surviving the transition to the Free Soil Party.72

Eastman used his editorials to not only promote political abolition—and argue against slavery in general—but also to proclaim the doctrine that all men are created equal and should have equivalent rights, regardless of race. In his pages Eastman argued for full citizenship for African Americans, and the repeal of the Illinois “Black Laws.”73 Moving beyond rhetoric, Eastman also employed free African American H. O. Wagoner as a compositor in 1846. Wagoner was a well-traveled abolitionist, schoolteacher, and experienced newspaperman who shared Eastman’s interest in the Underground Railroad.74 Eastman’s own arguments and actions for racial equality help explain his willingness to publish other authors—including women—who agreed with his stance.

In contrast to other newspaper editors of the period who attacked women for transgressing their supposed assigned sphere (and like his mentor Lundy), Eastman welcomed female journalists and granted them a free voice in the press. He expected that they would appeal to women and attract them to the abolitionist cause. Eastman wrote, “The article on our first page, headed Mary Brown Davis, ‘The Cruelty of Slavery,’ will be particularly interesting to our female readers.”75 Thus Eastman explicitly acknowledged that both women and men read his political abolition newspaper.

Women like Davis played a leading role in the antislavery newspaper culture of the Old Northwest, and newspapers were vital to disseminating their contributions and ideas.76 They drew upon concepts of female gender identity to speak to and on behalf of other women and their families, and claimed the newspaper as an appropriate public forum for their antislavery propaganda. They boasted of their successes in expanding the movement, and made cutting-edge arguments for racial equality and against the sexual oppression of slave women.77

Davis’s articles typically appeared on the first and second pages of the Western Citizen, and the prominence of her columns from 1842 to 1849 indicates that Eastman took her seriously as a journalist. In the four-page weekly Citizen, Davis’s columns shared the first two pages with local, national, and international news, and her writing was equally prominent with that of male journalists.78 In the eyes of many Old Northwesterners, the antislavery and anti-prejudice message was bad enough coming from a man, but a woman’s pen was even more poisoned. Davis’s articles, those of her male counterparts, and the antislavery press generally all brought activists into conflict with their many anti-abolitionist neighbors. The Old Northwest environment meant that they had to struggle to express their views.

Mary Brown Davis’s physical location limited her press freedom, and her comfort level with controversial subject matter varied. While she composed outspoken antislavery and anti-racist pieces for the Western Citizen, published 175 miles from Peoria, she wrote most of her articles for the Register on more conventional antebellum women’s issues. Closer to home, she focused on sentimental poetry and stories, temperance, love, the importance of being a good wife, Christianity, the nature of “woman,” and motherhood.79 When contrasted with her bold writing elsewhere, this may indicate that she found her local context threatening, for all of her organizational bravado. She may have had greater press freedom—and found it easier to make radical arguments—at a larger distance from her person, or the person of her husband. Even as Samuel was an outspoken proponent of freedom of the press, he may have limited his wife’s ability to speak out.

In her early columns away from Peoria, Mary Brown Davis typically addressed her audience in a tone of supplication. As she explained her antislavery goals, she rhetorically requested a public forum from the newspaper editors and their readership. In Davis’s first column in the Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1839, she thanked the editor in language typical of the era, expressing her appreciation that he had granted her the “privilege” of “lending my feeble aid, through the columns of your paper, to the cause of the oppressed.”80 Several years later, she wrote to Western Citizen editor Eastman that he could use her articles if he found “them worthy a place in your paper.” This tone of deference toward the reading public corresponded with the hesitation some antislavery women evinced as they formed their societies.81

Davis’s initial caution soon yielded to assertive claims, for she declared the newspaper an appropriate venue for women’s contribution to the movement, and proclaimed her expertise on slavery. In an early column, Davis wrote that she chose journalism as one forum for her activism, since publishing her firsthand accounts of the depravity of the South could “expose some of the horrors of slavery.”82 Davis also repeatedly claimed that her tales of southern decadence and horror were strictly accurate: “I will send some facts in my next article . . . they are presented just as they occurred.”83 Here she addressed the greater mandate for authenticity that critics applied to abolitionist speakers and writers.84 She presented herself as a birthright expert with special insights on the evils of slavery, and like the famed immediate abolitionist Sarah Grimké, Davis explained that her upbringing led her to abhor the institution.85 Davis offered cutting assessments of the need for Old Northwest women to take antislavery action. In publications outside of Peoria, she even included a call for them to exert political leverage.86

While they adhered to some traditional arguments concerning women’s role and special virtues, Mary Brown Davis and her fellow female journalists experienced sufficient press freedom to advance a radical racial agenda in papers like the Western Citizen. Davis overtly declared her support for racial equality, fugitive slave rights, and abolition. She drew attention to her own direct aid to fugitive slaves and stated her support for their flight: “my gate . . . has never been closed against the poor and needy, the stranger, or the outcast.”87 Davis appealed to her readers’ sense of common humanity, and conveyed the urgency of the cause of freedom. Not content to merely agitate for abolition in the abstract, she concretely argued for African American rights, and claimed former slaves would become productive members of society, “independent and good citizens,” upon attaining their freedom.88 Davis argued for African American women’s and men’s advancement.89 This is but one telling example of the progressive racial vision of female abolitionist journalists, as Mary published it outside of Peoria; it also is distinct from the mildness of Samuel’s arguments.

Despite her more conventional tone in the Register and her husband’s reluctance to discuss the topic, Davis nonetheless wrote a few antislavery pieces for the Peoria paper, using freedom of the press to introduce her radicalism into the local print milieu. Shortly after moving to Peoria in 1837, she wrote an editorial describing her joy at leaving the South. She was happy to escape the “blighting, withering, desolating influence” of slavery, and offered publicly a “fervent prayer” for its destruction.90 She told the Register’s readers—as she called for them to sympathize with slaves—that she gloried in escaping daily contact with the institution, and sought to alleviate the suffering of people caught in its grip.91 Davis’s public efforts to do so, in combination with other like-minded souls who sought to organize locally, brought Peoria into a state of turmoil.

* * *

It was evident to both antislavery and press freedom advocates that Peoria’s anti-abolitionists had tried to coerce the reformers in their community into silence. Unable to find a local Whig or Democratic paper willing to publish their account of the attack on their February 13 meeting, five Peoria abolitionists used a letter to the Chicago Western Citizen to articulate their frustration with the law’s representatives—the sheriff, peace officers, and established citizens present at the meeting—who had refused to intervene when the anti-abolitionists had assaulted them. Three of them—Moses Pettingill, John Reynolds, and A. T. Castler—had been present at the Alton founding meeting.92 The inaction of the officials had granted an air of legitimacy to the silencing of the Peoria antislavery group. Despite abolitionist claims that this repression conflicted with the right to free expression that they were in the process of expanding, extralegal violence found both a significant following and political sanction in this western Illinois river town.93

Following the riotous disturbance at the February 1843 Peoria antislavery meeting, Samuel H. Davis condemned “these outrages” against press freedom. His self-published pamphlet, “Free Discussion Suppressed in Peoria,” argued against extralegal violence, served as an important piece of abolitionist propaganda in Illinois, and even reached a national audience.94 Davis sent the pamphlet east with H. H. Kellogg, who planned to distribute it as a publicity device as he traveled to raise awareness of Illinois abolitionists’ plight. It reached New York that April, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society, published excerpts from it. In May, the Standard revisited the Peoria conflict as a battle for “free discussion,” and drew attention to “S. H. Davis” as the “one noble exception” to local acquiescence to the will of the mob. He gained adulation from the national antislavery leadership for choosing to place “himself openly in the ranks of the friends of free discussion.”95 Many locals had quite a different view of Davis than did the Standard.

Despite being accustomed to partisan commentary in their newspapers, most residents of Peoria placed controversial abolitionist content beyond the pale, and attempted to stifle it in their midst. Davis had sold his press to fellow Whig printers William H. Butler and Samuel G. Butler in September 1842, but continued to edit the newspaper for a time because the new owners were ill.96 After the Register’s new publishers refused to condemn the anti-abolition attack of February 1843—or even allow neutral discussion of the issues—Davis severed all contact with the newspaper. The Butler brothers feared publishing Samuel H. Davis’s rebuke of the mob, for their advertisers had threatened a boycott if they circulated abolitionist information. The anti-abolitionists who met at the courthouse that winter imposed direct economic pressure on the newspaper owners, forcing them to refuse publicity to abolition societies.97 They baldly stated this intention in their resolutions: “If any of them refuse to comply with such request . . . we [will] withdraw our support and patronage from such newspaper press.” John S. Zieber, editor of the town’s other paper, the Democratic Press, presented himself as a shining example of a press uncorrupted by antislavery doctrine, noting he had “never . . . published either the proceedings of or a notice for an abolition meeting, though repeatedly requested to do so.”98 The new editor of the Register, the Whig lawyer Lincoln B. Knowlton, had also actively condemned the Peoria abolitionists at the “citizen” meetings, and proclaimed after taking over the paper that he could censor any subject he wished in its pages.99

The local gag rule that the anti-abolitionists imposed proved too much for Samuel H. Davis’s moral code, and his pamphlet made a clear rebuke. He argued that a publisher ought to print notice of “all public meetings of whatever sort,” and linked the struggle with the national gag-rule debate. He presented John Quincy Adams, key actor in that controversy, as a heroic “champion of the dearest right granted in the charter of our liberties.” Since the “right of free discussion” was so precious, he claimed that attacks on it would have serious consequences. Davis wrote that the smothering of press freedom in other communities had inevitably led them down the path to civil and economic ruin, and directly linked “free discussion” with “prosperity.”100 He noted the stifling of Lovejoy’s freedom and its impact on once-thriving Alton, which since the editor’s death had shifted into a state of real estate depreciation and stagnant trade.101 Antislavery newspapers commonly discussed Alton’s economic decline.102 As a counterexample, Davis offered Chicago, “the very hot-bed of abolitionism,” as the home of flourishing expansion and business opportunity.103

In the pamphlet, Davis based his argument on the right of all people to think for themselves and discuss whatever issues and subjects interested them. He wrote, “I never doubted the right of the anti-slavery society to meet whenever they chose, and do their business in their own way, in the same manner any other society in this free country might do.” Citing the First Amendment and Illinois legal codes, he argued both that the abolitionists had every right to meet and that their antagonists had acted contrary to law. Davis quoted the Peoria abolitionists’ letter that laid out the local suppression of their rights. Since the Peoria newspapers had refused to publish this letter, only the Western Citizen and Davis’s self-published pamphlet finally granted it public circulation. In this letter, the abolitionists cited God and the “law of love” to justify their meeting. They claimed the mob’s actions were inexplicable, for they had not broken any laws by assembling, and had refused to resist with violence.104

At the courthouse on February 14, the evening following the antislavery gathering, the anti-abolitionists had led another meeting to condemn the local reformers and to assert their need for town unity. Samuel Davis noted that there were two hundred to three hundred people present, but stated that only forty-four actively voted in the resolutions. Davis thus emphasized that the majority did not actually support mob action, but rather were “friends of law and order.”105 Refuting Davis, the anti-abolitionist voice in the press, John S. Zieber of the Peoria Democratic Press, argued that actually “probably over four hundred persons” were present, and that they shared great unanimity on the issue of slavery.106

At that meeting, a committee of prominent lawyers, merchants, and industrial entrepreneurs prepared deliberately non-partisan resolutions setting forth their positions.107 They stated that abolition was unconstitutional and fostered sectional tensions, and then alluded to the presence of interlopers in the community with reference to “a very small minority of our citizens and others” who were attempting to organize an antislavery society in Peoria.108 By this reference to “others,” they could have intended to imply that either the female abolitionists (by some definitions, not citizens) or people they identified as outside activists in their community were acting out of place. They might have categorized as outsiders the easterners and New Englanders in their midst. They claimed in a later resolution that the Reverend William T. Allan was a foreign agitator and a “disturber of the public peace.” While of southern birth and already well known as an abolitionist when he arrived in 1842, Allan actually held a legitimate position in the community of Peoria. He lived in town, was the minister of Peoria’s Main Street Presbyterian Church from 1842 to 1844, and lectured for the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society from 1840 to 1846.109

While claiming high regard for principles of freedom, the anti-abolitionists restricted this to their own faction and to ideas that they found palatable. They directly advocated censorship of publications and meetings that opposed their ideas, and boldly silenced those who sought to introduce to their town what they regarded as destructive antislavery activity. They claimed most town citizens “opposed” abolition and found it not only unlawful but also “revolting to all those sentiments of pride and self-respect which white men ought to possess.” Their resolutions from the February 14 meeting read like a laundry list of classic anti-abolition fears, including runaway slaves, “free negro loafers, practical amalgamation, treason, disunion, civil war, the destruction of all those civil rights of ‘life, liberty, and property’ (to which we have at least an equal claim with negroes) and other evils, necessarily resulting from the establishment of abolition principles.” In this view, abolitionism would turn their ordered society upside down. They further demonstrated their scorn for African Americans and their focus on interracial sex with the statement that they did not want “the negro race . . . in our bed chambers and around our tables.” State lawmakers had borne out this concern over interracial sex in an 1829 law that forbade interracial marriage, and laws against both remained on the books through the 1960s.110 This was a blatant effort to shut down antislavery discussion by citing exaggerated potential consequences for their community.

In point of fact, there were few African Americans in Peoria at the time, and they did not participate in these debates over abolition. In the early period of Illinois abolitionist organizing under study here, free African Americans—who numbered seven in Peoria in the 1840 census—did not take an active role in the struggle.111 Their small numbers and significant legal disabilities blocked the creation of a strong public voice. The community—like many in Illinois—saw African Americans as possessing only suspect freedom, which gave them a very small and insecure platform for activism. The demographics there later changed, for Peoria newspapers reveal significant local free African American activism beginning in the 1850s, but they did not appear to have played a direct role in the anti-abolitionist conflicts of the previous decade.112 Formal African American political activism accelerated in Illinois after 1847, and then focused more on repealing the restrictive “Black Laws,” not on abolition of southern slavery.113 While African Americans certainly did not provoke the anti-abolitionists, nevertheless these reactionary citizens regarded the importance of maintaining social and racial stratification as self-evident. These rationalizations failed to persuade Samuel Davis, among others.

* * *

In this crisis, Samuel H. Davis balanced on the line between his political and personal principles. In his writings, he staunchly maintained his ignorance of the ongoing local abolitionist efforts, a stance surely duplicitous given his wife’s prominent role in this organizing. In his pamphlet he claimed, “[o]f the proposed anti-slavery meeting also I had thought nothing and cared nothing. Of the principles, views, and objects of the anti-slavery men (and I may add women), I had never sought to inform myself, the study thereof not being in accordance with my inclination.”114 Here, Samuel slyly alluded to the presence of women organizers, while reserving comment on their identity. He thus skirted mention of Mary’s abolitionist activism, despite the public evidence of her newspaper columns and prominent role in the local and state antislavery movement. Indeed, he claimed that he did not learn of the riot until the day after it occurred, which was highly unlikely for a man living in the same house as someone who attended the meeting.115

One reason for this deceit may have been that Samuel wanted to retain his Whig affiliation, which in that partisan environment entailed eschewing abolitionism. He defended the Whigs and contributed to Peoria’s political divisions with his claim that the Democrats instigated the riot. He also argued that the Democrats had convinced some Whigs to join to take the blame for the disorderly conduct. Seeking to preserve their good name, he denied that these Whigs represented the “true” spirit of that party—the protectors of liberty of expression and action.116 In case any question about his views remained, he also baldly stated that his objections to mob rule did not mean that he had embraced antislavery: “There are some ignoramuses in this community who think, because I condemn these disgraceful proceedings, that I am therefore an abolitionist!” His March 1843 participation in a Farmington, Illinois, convention—called to combat anti-abolition actions and the suppression of freedom of the press in Peoria—may have contributed to this impression. The Farmington attendees denounced anti-abolitionists, and argued that the Peoria abolitionists’ lack of violent resistance meant that they had behaved nobly despite extensive abuse. At Farmington, Davis affirmed the importance of freedom of the press, and largely excerpted his speech from his pamphlet.117 That convention also revealed that Peoria’s struggles took on symbolic importance for Illinois abolitionists.

Soon enough, by the late 1840s Samuel had changed his tune, and he openly opposed slavery and racism. He served as the President of the State Liberty Convention in July 1846, and in 1847 he signed a petition for the repeal of the Illinois “Black Laws.” Along with 38 other Peorians, including Mary Brown Davis (and four other women) and their son James Scott, he petitioned the Illinois General Assembly that February.118 While Samuel Davis changed, fellow residents of his town failed to welcome these shifts.

* * *

In Peoria and other areas of antebellum America where new communities were taking shape, local “respectable” elements could not sanction efforts to push press freedom in radical directions, such as racial equality or abolitionism. When abolitionists and their allies made claims about universal humanity, their opponents equated activism with sectional conflict and the dissolution of the nation, including their valuable commercial ties with the South.

In both Peoria and Alton, the participants in the extralegal violent attacks on press freedom intended to silence abolitionism’s problematic voice within their society and so promote social stability. Vocal activism against slavery violated the “tacit consensus” that town leaders in early Illinois believed was necessary for the populace to remain orderly.119 The abolitionists themselves declared no wish to be a part of this consensus, aiming to question the social structures they found unjust.

Many of the active anti-abolitionists in these towns had significant local economic and political clout. Some used their influence to publicize their plan to shut down the abolitionists. The Alton anti-abolitionists represented a wide range of occupations and social strata, from prominent merchants, doctors, lawyers, and ministers, to ordinary mechanics, workmen, and laborers.120 In Peoria, the mob drew on both major parties, and its main leaders were distinguished attorneys, including several who held political office as Whigs and Democrats.121 A number of them were active in the local colonization movement in at least 1839 and 1840.122 Samuel H. Davis noted the presence among their members of prominent legal men such as Norman H. Purple, then candidate for a judgeship.123 In their number were less eminent lawyers, as well as wealthy merchants, capitalists, and more than one banker.124

As these notable participants demonstrate, anti-abolition mobs often feared losing their social stability, which was both precarious and predicated on racial, gender, and economic domination. Even as they were leading white men, their position nonetheless seemed to rest on shaky foundations—as their preoccupation with maintaining hierarchy reveals. In Peoria and Alton, newspaper discussions of abolition and racial equality panicked these men about the civil disruption these issues could bring to the social order of their river towns, and that of the nation as a whole.125 A fear of sectionalism animated their arguments, and the men vehemently stated their desire to retain national unity. Local economic connections to the South added to the mandate for silence on slavery prevalent in many parts of the North, for among the Old Northwest states Illinois had the strongest southern connections.126 Some of the anti-abolitionists had direct ties to the South. These included Andrew Gray, a merchant in partnership with a Virginian, and Henry Stillman, a steamboat owner.127

As their southern links indicate, attitudes toward abolition—and a willingness to silence it—were intimately connected with the changing economy. Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, Peoria experienced rapid expansion and commercial volatility. The town settlers were a mixture of transplanted easterners and southerners, but as William T. Allan and Mary Brown Davis prove, southern nativity did not necessarily mean sympathy to slavery. Illinois joined the Union as a state in 1818, but the population remained scattered into the 1830s and 1840s, with most people living in towns along its waterways. Much of the economy relied on water transport, and Illinois had numerous options, including Lake Michigan and its tributaries on the north, the Mississippi on the west, the Ohio River on the south, and the Illinois and Kaskaskia rivers winding through the middle of the state.128 Local economic and political struggles informed those that took place on the state, regional, and national levels. With the diffusion of transportation improvements throughout the Old Northwest, much of the economic fortune of the nation as a whole had become directly or indirectly linked to slavery.

Peoria’s debate about press freedom exemplifies the effects of conditions in developing Illinois towns that increasingly depended on southbound river commerce. The town’s origins were in the 1690s under French rule, and the settlers chose the site on the Illinois River for its connections with the Mississippi.129 The chief local industries in the 1840s centered on farming, with an emphasis on wheat, corn, and hogs. Entrepreneurs processed those commodities into flour, beer, whiskey, and meat. All these benefited from and fed into the burgeoning southern trade. Peoria’s steamboat traffic began in December 1829, with the ship the Liberty.

By 1833, as was true across the entire Ohio River valley, Peoria was already seeing significant exchange with the South, especially with St. Louis and New Orleans. Across the region’s river towns, including those in southern Indiana, people divided sharply over slavery thanks to this southern trade.130 Peoria merchants and entrepreneurs could thus argue that disruption of this traffic would have had significant economic consequences. Illinois anti-abolitionists used what they saw as the permeable boundary between North and South as but one justification for silencing press freedom. Their partisan identities, fears of social disorder, the influence of outsiders, and racial leveling all created an environment where anti-abolitionists felt comfortable using extralegal violence to stifle local activism. They sought to preserve their social order in the face of these threats. For their part, abolitionists did not lack weapons, and they deftly maneuvered anti-abolitionists’ efforts to censor them into advantageous claims for freedom of the press. By defending themselves with the right to free expression, they drew on the principles underlying the American polity. The anti-abolitionists in Peoria and elsewhere thus did not vanquish the local antislavery spirit, although they tried to use force to do so throughout the decade.

* * *

Peoria’s determined abolitionists faced violent opposition through the late 1840s, despite moments of relative calm, and they expressed their dismay about this in antislavery newspapers. In May 1844, the Illinois Society held a surprisingly tranquil annual meeting at Peoria, although they perhaps choose this location due to the symbolic value of its tumultuous recent history.131 However, that lull aside, persecution of abolitionists continued there into 1846. In May, after a throng of Peorians broke up the local society’s meeting at the courthouse and “unmercifully egged” several abolitionists, they had to move their gathering to Moses Pettingill’s storeroom. Pettingill, a wealthy merchant, was an avowed abolitionist despite the risks this entailed to his business and his person. He opened Peoria’s first hardware store in 1834, and as a temperance man, refused to sell liquor there. He ran, unsuccessfully, as the Liberty Party candidate for the state senate in 1848.132

A mob also broke up the second 1846 meeting and viciously attacked some of the attendees. Local antislavery people saw this as an infringement on their right to meet, and Samuel Davis and Jonathan Blanchard, the president of Knox College in Galesburg, again resorted to the Western Citizen to strongly protest this incident.133 After sustaining repeated anti-abolitionist attacks, including threats to tar and feather traveling abolitionist Ichabod Codding, they arranged for armed reinforcements and to keep Codding safe in Pettingill’s house. Codding was a New York-born Congregationalist minister active as an itinerant in Illinois and across the Old Northwest from the 1840s through the Civil War.134 The town authorities displayed a concern that had been missing from the 1843 incidents, for the mayor of Peoria came to Pettingill’s house and stayed with them. This collaborative effort dissuaded their intended attackers, but they met further local challenges.135

Later in 1846, Samuel H. Davis himself suffered from a brutal anti-abolitionist attack intended to silence his printed words. He had remained a polarizing figure locally, and a scapegoat for anti-abolition wrath. His assailants claimed that an antislavery article in the Western Citizen (which they erroneously attributed to Davis) had angered them. The men attacked and beat the former editor in broad daylight on a busy Peoria street, and he sustained serious injuries, as did his son who attempted to help him. Even a magistrate could not stop the assault, but finally two private citizens intervened and took Davis home. That same day local authorities fined one of the assailants, while the other fled the vicinity. Despite the severity of his wounds, Davis had the presence of mind to use this situation to his advantage. He agreed to not press charges in exchange for a future promise of noninterference with the Liberty Party in Peoria, as well as the use of the courthouse for antislavery meetings.136 Davis succeeded in this trade, and his commitment to freedom of the press had ultimately led him along the path to full-fledged abolition even as it placed him in the direct path of harm.

* * *

The dim regard for the antislavery press and view of its perils extended to Ohio, too, where a fellow newspaper editor faced notable community opposition. The antislavery message had become no more palatable in the Old Northwest in the late 1840s, for other editors in the region also had to fight for press freedom as the partisan climate heated up. Even then, when they published arguments against slavery, editors faced brutal personal and property attacks for speaking out. This opposition contrasts with other historians’ accounts that after 1845, violence against the antislavery press largely ceased. According to these arguments, the major parties then introduced antislavery planks into their platforms, and the slave controversy became more about sectional disagreements than about splits within the North.137 In fact, the slow introduction of a moderate antislavery agenda to mainstream politics (actually somewhat later with the Republicans in 1854) made opposition to slavery neither more appealing nor much safer to report about in the Old Northwest.

In 1848, those developments were still a few years away, and antislavery editing remained a hazardous job. Cambridge, the county seat of Guernsey County in southeastern Ohio, had an intense engagement with politics in the 1840s, including a strong Whig presence.138 Into this environment came the brash local newspaperman Mathew R. Hull, who began publishing the Clarion of Freedom in 1844. Quoting from the biblical Matthew, Hull wrote, “[t]hank God we came not to Cambridge ‘to send peace, but a sword.’”139 Hull clearly did not dispute that he and his coeditor Joseph Wolff disturbed the town’s tranquility with their paper, for he saw that as an essential part of the reform mission. Hull, an outspoken antislavery man, a Wesleyan Methodist, and a Liberty Party supporter, served on the executive committee of the 1843 meeting of the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society.140 Hull and Wolff presented bold and outspoken arguments against slavery, racism, and both major political parties (but especially the Whigs).

In the summer of 1847, Hull faced a prolonged period of attacks on his newspaper office and on his press freedom. His problems appear to have had partisan and moral origins, as he had a knack for blunt criticism. He spoke out against the “Black Laws” and racial prejudice in the local schools, and denigrated the ongoing Mexican War as “this slaveholding Whig war.”141 He had disparaged local and national Whig politicians for their stance on slavery, and claimed that the former incited attacks on him to stifle “our liberty of thought, and the liberty of the press.”142 Hull’s neighbors certainly had little interest in seeing his perspectives aired in print.

Over the course of several weeks that summer, an infuriated crowd repeatedly attacked the office that also served as Hull’s family home. Hull was ill and recovering in the building, but his weakened state did not stop his foes from egging and stoning the house and breaking the windows on July 23 and 25. The attacks continued, he claimed variously, for 17 or 18 nights, and the crowd “threatened to tear down our press—to blow up our building with powder, and to burn the house over our heads.” Observers in Cambridge noted that local officials made no effort to secure Hull’s property, his family’s safety, or freedom of the press.143 The editor vehemently argued that no one could silence him. His foes, he wrote, “will bite the dust before we will.” He was confident that the Clarion had widespread support, and claimed “[t]he whole country is roused in our behalf.”144 The facts do not bear out Hull’s bluster that most of his neighbors were on his side, since a number of men in his “country” freely attacked him for his views.

Despite this fact and even with their pain and trials, Hull and Wolff boasted that the throwing of rocks and eggs only increased their subscription base, and printed testimonials to demonstrate that they had numerous allies in the surrounding community. Hull did have his supporters, who held meetings in Cambridge and points north, east, and south, as far away as 177 miles, all aimed at reinforcing his right to express his views. They spoke out against the numerous violent assaults, as did a Michigan paper that reprinted an account of the attacks, claiming “we think the supply of rotten eggs will fall short before he knuckles under.”145 Hull received positive attention from other Ohio newspapers, including the Anti-Slavery Bugle, and published numerous letters of solidarity from the surrounding area in Ohio, and even from Pennsylvania and Washington, DC.146 The press coverage was not universally positive, however, for the Pittsburgh Gazette claimed that Hull had brought the mob on himself through his slander and use of profane language, as well as physical violence, but they supplied no details of such violence. The National Era quickly refuted this account with an elaborate refusal to allow any justification for mob activity.147

The violence against Hull continued, and on its final night his opponents gathered in a crowd in the street. These evidently angry men added blackened oil to the collection of missiles they threw in the windows, which stained the interior of the house. They proclaimed they would “whip every Abolitionist in town” and “knocked down two or three with clubs, while others escaped to places more secure than the public streets.” Jonathan Davis, a local butcher, beat Wolff and Hull, and they “offered no resistance.” Like the Peoria abolitionists, they refused to retaliate physically when attacked. While the authorities arrested Davis, he did not serve time, and Hull claimed that local Whig politicians paid his court costs.148 The authorities again declined to protect Hull’s freedom of speech, and highlighted with their actions the legitimacy of the assaults on him.

Ultimately, the anti-abolition attacks drove Hull and his family from town in September 1847. To Hull, Davis’s beating proved the true extent of the danger that local partisan politics posed for him. He thus chose to take drastic action: “we concluded to shake the dust from our feet and flee to another city.” The Whigs responded to this announcement of his departure by convening a meeting both to continue to “denounce us, and in mercy to call off their dogs.” There, they tried to get the Democrats to join their anti-Hull efforts, claiming their common interest in silencing the Clarion, but were unsuccessful.149 Having driven the editor out of town, they wanted to get in the last word on the situation.

Hull became an itinerant for a time, and spoke strategically through his own newspaper, which Wolff continued in his absence. He remained in contact with his hometown by correspondence from a safe distance, and along with his family finally left Cambridge to find a more tranquil home in New Concord, a mere nine miles away. In a letter to Wolff published in the newspaper, Hull wrote of how he and his “almost heart-broken wife” needed to escape, as did their children, who had endured “young mobocrats” who emulated their elders and pelted them with assorted objects.150 The challenge to press freedom was only one of several that Hull’s family faced when they moved, for his reputation followed him.

* * *

Hull subsequently traveled across Ohio to New York to meet with other abolitionists and attend a Liberty Party convention, and he began publishing the Clarion in its new home.151 The National Era of Washington, DC, wrote that the mobbing and moving had not altered Hull’s energy for the cause: “Its editor has abated nothing of his spirit.” Further, his paper had actually become somewhat profitable.152 Wolff and Hull themselves claimed a substantial circulation increase as a result of the attacks.153 Hull’s persistence in speaking out thus paid dividends in both money and publicity, and in this way helped finance his extensive travels.

The paper’s new home in New Concord proved more hospitable, but hardly idyllic. When they moved, Hull and Wolff reiterated their rights to press freedom, and seized the mantle of law-abiding citizenry: “we are determined . . . to be peaceable citizens, while we claim the constitutional liberty of the press, we are perfectly willing to abide the penalty, if we violate any law.”154 They persisted in shoring up these rights, and on December 24, 1847, the Clarion printed the minutes of a “respectable meeting” held at New Concord. This meeting’s stated aim was to support press freedom and tie its protection to the laws of the nation. The attendees vowed to shut down mob violence upon its first appearance, arguing that mobs were both illegal and immoral, and in them “ . . . all are left equally unprotected in person and property.” Hull and Wolff claimed that few residents of New Concord supported anti-abolition violence.155 The free expression agenda of that meeting was nonetheless unpopular with many local residents, for that August antislavery lecturers Henry C. Wright and Charles Burleigh had trouble getting a speaking venue there. They ultimately found one, after extensive work.156 Local sentiment on abolition changed sufficiently in the ensuing months that Hull himself lectured there by May of 1848.157 Hull thus won a partial victory for freedom of the press, for although anti-abolitionists forced him out of Cambridge, he retained his voice by moving his family and paper to a safer place, and using the national press to publicize his efforts. These challenges show the determination of Old Northwest anti-abolitionists to stifle press freedom, the influence of partisan politics on their actions, and editors’ persistence in the face of this ongoing pressure.

* * *

Under close examination, early Cambridge, Peoria, and Alton appear to have teetered on the precipice of explosive violence, but only Alton went over the edge. Extralegal conflict emerged under distinct circumstances in these three towns, and brought them to significantly different end points. The towns shared a pattern of contestation over abolition, due to a confluence of racism, economics, and politics. The armed opposition that the Alton abolitionists and their allies presented to their adversaries raised the level of violence to murder. One reason historians have given for the Alton riot’s escalation was the resistance with which the Lovejoy faction met their enemies.158 In communities that generally supported abolition, such as Oberlin, Ohio, events even as provocative as the mass liberation of a fugitive slave—as occurred in the notorious Oberlin-Wellington rescue of 1858—could proceed peacefully. Violence escalated in Alton when activists armed themselves in self-defense rather than merely speaking out.159 The anti-abolitionists also became increasingly frustrated as Lovejoy and his allies persisted in their advocacy despite the clear message that most Alton people disdained it. Lovejoy’s death reminded people on all sides of the consequences of mob activity. Advocates of press freedom learned from it, and many chose to adhere ever more closely to principles of nonresistance in the face of danger. Others saw it as a sign that anti-abolitionists would stop at nothing to silence them, and increased their outspokenness accordingly.

The press freedom advocates in Peoria and Cambridge presented less provocative resistance when contrasted to those of Alton. While the abolitionists faced strong community opposition there and maintained their right to free expression, they did not take up arms in self-defense. In addition, Elijah Lovejoy insisted upon his right to publish his radical message right where he lived, as did Hull and Wolff in less inflammatory circumstances. Samuel H. Davis offered moderate and universal messages of press freedom in Peoria. Mary Brown Davis, for her part, largely confined her most radical messages to the Chicago Western Citizen, writing mainly conventional articles for her local newspaper. In general, the Peoria abolitionists and free press advocates more subtly dissented from the status quo, and the local presses themselves never faced physical attack, although the abolition meetings did, as did Samuel Davis as the representative of antislavery journalism in his community’s eyes. This contrast should not, however, be taken too far. While Peoria’s press freedom advocates did not violently resist, they did persist, and conflict continued at least until 1846. In Cambridge, Hull and Wolff’s actions were closer to Lovejoy’s, in that they vehemently defended their right to print antislavery perspectives, and for a time waited out persistent mob attacks on their press. The Cambridge editors’ departure from community norms was more obvious than the Peorians, but they nonetheless differed from Lovejoy and his allies in that, when attacked, they refrained from physically defending themselves.

Despite their differences, violence emerged in all three communities as anti-abolitionists denied antislavery people their press freedom. Conflict arose from this denial, as debate became pushed to the margins, and advocacy of abolition became an offense punishable by forced silence, violence, or death. The boundaries of permitted publications about slavery and race hinged upon ideas about social structure, economic stability, and partisan politics. These antislavery agitators linked their defense with larger issues, including the citizens’ right to freedom of expression. The adversity Old Northwest antislavery people faced brought them support from their local and national compatriots, and confirmed the importance of the region to the broader reform struggle. The anti-abolition faction, for its part, stifled these reformers with threats of extreme violence. They linked activists’ aberrant behavior with social disorder, antihierarchical acts, and the destruction of the major political parties. Old Northwest activists continued their stalwart efforts against slavery and for their liberties despite these perilous clashes.

* * *

The larger significance of these debates over abolitionists’ press freedom lies in their extremism, which reveals how important these controversies were for antebellum people. The Old Northwest was particularly explosive on the slavery question, an issue that studies of anti-abolitionist violence do not explain. Historians have analyzed such attacks without delving into their larger context, and thus the events at Alton appear as an incident of fanaticism, like other riots in Boston and Philadelphia. Alton, in this view, was not a locus of larger national political debates, but one city among many that represents a larger pattern.160 While such earlier accounts have illuminated the 1837 events at Alton and the factions involved, they omit attention to the ways liberty, politics, economics, and social norms all combined to make that town’s debates over press freedom and activism (and those of other Old Northwest places like Peoria and Cambridge) distinctive. Perhaps the most important lesson these towns have to teach is that abolitionists could become the targets of overt violence if they chose to persist in converting people in such problematic environs as Alton, Peoria, and Cambridge.

In addition to demonstrating the silencing effect that partisan agendas could have upon local communities, these violent clashes over press freedom in the Old Northwest also illustrate the impact of local-level events on national debates. Such abolition struggles in this region became crucial in setting the parameters for national political discussion in later decades. The Old Northwest was the home of some of the Republican Party’s earliest successes as it overturned former Democratic strongholds in Illinois, Indiana (apart from in 1840), and Michigan.161 The region came to substantially affect national antislavery debates and sectional politics by contributing a national leadership that was well aware of and influenced by Old Northwest circumstances. The cautious political culture regarding race and abolition came to shape national politics. Establishing political consensus remained elusive for Old Northwesterners over time, and this problem spread.

By the end of the 1850s, the contingent positions produced in the Old Northwest found national expression through Abraham Lincoln, whose position on slavery became increasingly critical over the course of his life.162 Nonetheless, over time, Lincoln still remained significantly less interested in equality than were the pathbreaking antislavery journalists and editors of his region. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Indiana- and Illinois-bred Lincoln argued that the “divergent attitudes” of the North and the South on slavery’s morality provided their “essential point of conflict.”163 Certainly for some prominent antislavery journalists, the Republican Party represented a step backward, rather than progress for the abolition cause. Zebina Eastman—himself never mobbed—wrote against the Republicans to Ichabod Codding in April 1857, to proclaim his nostalgia for the days of the Liberty Party and its stronger stance against slavery.164 While many radical abolitionists (and even former Liberty Party men like Eastman) saw Lincoln as insufficiently stalwart, by 1860 slavery’s foes had won more space to promulgate their ideas. They had found a more moderate vision of their agenda in a major national party and in Lincoln, both rooted in the Old Northwest’s contentious political culture. Nonetheless, the strong political power that the anti-war and anti-Black Democrats exerted in the region, throughout the war, substantially limited the ability of more radical activists to bring about change.

* * *

These controversies over press freedom and Old Northwest political culture in the 1830s and 1840s demonstrate that slavery and institutionalized racism were woven into the fabric of the entire nation, and not merely the South. Ideas of national unity, racism, party discipline, and support for slavery all contributed to opposition to abolition and its public expression. Racism was influential across the North, but in this region it was particularly important in shaping the reform climate. When activists witnessed slavery’s national reach in shutting down their press freedom, this affirmed for them the importance of converting locals to the antislavery position, and of eliminating widespread prejudice. To them, the Old Northwest held the key to improving the nation’s moral landscape, and without the ability to print and express their views, this would not have been possible.

Antebellum activists proclaimed that threats to their freedom loomed all around, and they saw ample evidence of this not only in mob attacks on presses, but also on reform lectures. The traveling lecturer and the antislavery press both played vital and intersecting roles in the struggle to convert the Old Northwest. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society wrote in 1846 that newspapers, with their frequent arrival at the home of the reader, could be powerful “levers . . . to detach the system of slavery from its stronghold in the indifference or selfishness of the northern hearts.” Their regular appearances could “prepare the way for the lecturer[s],” and later, discuss and share ideas from their meetings.165

Many strong links connected newspapers and traveling lecturers. Itinerants printed lists of their scheduled meetings in local and national papers to awaken activists to their impending arrival, and to alert friends at home where they could write to them.166 On their journeys, lecturers also increased the circulation of antislavery newspapers, as many sold subscriptions at their meetings.167 In turn, papers spread itinerants’ influence across a larger geographic area.168 They each had an integral part to play in the Old Northwest battle. Much as local antislavery organizers and editors confronted challenges when they claimed a public place in their towns, itinerant men and women in the Old Northwest also grappled for legitimacy and freedom of speech as they spread the abolition message. Indeed, the struggles of traveling antislavery lecturers to speak freely built upon the fight for freedom of assembly and press freedom of Old Northwest antislavery activists.