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By Root 1699 0

the uncle by marriage of Mary Todd’s sister Elizabeth. Edwards dwelled on the “dangerous and baleful influence” of free blacks and insisted that freeing the South’s slaves and allowing them to remain in the country was impossible. In 1833, a local colonization society was organized in Springfield, with numerous leading citizens as officers, including John Todd Stuart, who would soon become Lincoln’s first law partner. Several other close associates of Lincoln, including the lawyers and Whig political leaders David Davis and Orville H. Browning, as well as Charles Dresser, the Episcopal minister who officiated at Lincoln’s wedding, were also longtime advocates of colonization. Whigs “antagonistical to abolitionism,” as one newspaper put it, dominated colonization ranks in Illinois.49

During the first two decades of Lincoln’s political career, abolitionism proved far weaker in Illinois than in other northern states. In 1837, the Liberator reported that of the 607 local antislavery societies in the United States, only 3 were located in Illinois. Nonetheless, during the mid-1830s abolitionist ideas did begin to circulate in the northern and central parts of the state, thanks to the Observer, a newspaper published by the Maine-born Presbyterian minister Elijah P. Lovejoy first in St. Louis and then, after a mob destroyed his press, just across the Mississippi River in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy’s expulsion from St. Louis followed the killing of a constable by Francis McIntosh, a free black riverboat worker from Pittsburgh. Irate residents of the city subsequently lynched McIntosh. They blamed Lovejoy for spreading the ideas that allegedly caused McIntosh to commit the murder and for protesting the crime against him.50

In October 1837, Lovejoy and his brother Owen, a Congregationalist minister, called a meeting in Alton to organize the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. On the appointed day, eighty-six delegates assembled. Only four hailed from Sangamon County, where Lincoln lived. The state attorney general, Usher F. Linder, organized a mob that packed the meeting and adopted resolutions condemning the idea of emancipation. The next day the town’s mayor brought constables to break up another mob led by Linder and allowed the gathering to proceed.51

The Declaration of Sentiments of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society began with a discussion of “the foundation of human rights.” Since God had created every person with an “immortal soul,” it proclaimed, all were entitled to “equality of fundamental rights.” The document condemned slavery as a “subversion of the laws of God” and a violation of every human right, including education, family life, personal chastity, protection against injury, and individual self-determination. It called for immediate abolition by the southern states and the elevation of free blacks to “an equality with the whites.” Opposition to the Illinois Black Laws quickly emerged as a central tenet of abolitionism in the state. In 1840, one group of abolitionists published a pamphlet claiming that these laws violated the comity clause of the U.S. Constitution, which required each state to accord citizens of other states the same rights as their own.52

With abolitionists widely stigmatized as advocates of racial equality who threatened to disrupt the Union, identifying with the cause required considerable courage. This became starkly evident on November 7, 1837, less than two weeks after the organization of the Anti-Slavery Society, when Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a mob while defending his printing press in Alton. Owen Lovejoy vowed to dedicate himself to the cause now “sprinkled with my brother’s blood” he would go on to a long career as an abolitionist, member of Congress, and bridge between the Radical Republicans and Lincoln during the Civil War. Otherwise, so deep was the hostility to abolitionism in Illinois that Elijah P. Lovejoy’s death evoked little reaction. In Springfield, a public meeting denounced the abolitionists as “dangerous members of society.” In other northern states, however, dozens of newspapers,