t is a long way from
this rude meeting-house to the hall of the House of Representatives, but
in this storm and stress period the distance was traversed in a few
brief hours. The society applied in its exigency for the use of the hall
for an evening meeting, and the application was granted by the members.
It was a _jeu d'esprit_ of Henry B. Stanton, "That when Boston votes we
go into a stable, but when the State votes we go into the State House."
It was even so, for the incident served to reveal what was true
everywhere through the free States that the anti-slavery reform was
making fastest progress among people away from the great centres of
population. It found ready access to the simple American folk in
villages, in the smaller towns, and in the rural districts of New
England and the North. And already from these independent and
uncorrupted sons and daughters of freedom had started the deep ground
swell which was to lift the level of Northern public opinion on the
question of slavery.

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