client; in the crusade against slavery he found his cause, and soon his
clarion voice was heard sounding the onset.

To Garrison's organized agitation, begun in 1832, that soon spread all
over the country, must be added a second cause for anti-slavery
sentiment,--the murder of Lovejoy. This was on the night of November 7,
1837. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was a young Presbyterian minister, a
graduate of Princeton Seminary. He began his career as pastor of a
little church in St. Louis and editor of the _Presbyterian Observer_. At
that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had
married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position
either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man
in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the mêlée the officer was
killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that there
was a plot to kidnap him and sell him into the Southern cotton fields,
and that he had a right to resist. The real facts will, doubtless, never
be known. To slave owners, however, it was intolerable that a black man
should resist an officer under any circumstances. A mob collected, the
negro was bound to a stake, wood piled round about, and the prisoner was
burned to death.

Efforts were made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the
name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury
substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious
metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are
absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this
case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is
beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free.
When Mr. Lovejoy commented editorially upon this outrageous charge,
encouraging lynch law, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical