Abolition

by Tim Black

  The men seemed stunned when Mr. Greene and his group passed through the gathering mob and quietly walked into the warehouse.

  “What are women doing here?” one of the men asked aloud.

  “Got me,” another replied.

  “I don’t want to fight no women,” a third replied. “I didn’t sign up to fight women, just abolitionists.”

  “That ain’t gonna stop us from getting that printing press,” the first one declared. “Is it, men?”

  “No!” came a chorus.

  Mr. Greene was the last member of the group to enter the warehouse. He had hardly made it inside the door when the first rock crashed through a warehouse window. It was followed by several others, which shattered other windows. The men inside the warehouse grabbed earthenware pots from a supply at the warehouse and began throwing the pots through the windows at the proslavery mob.

  Gunfire erupted.

  “Get down, kids!” Tesla called to the students. Minerva hit the floor and Victor fell on top of her, covering her body from harm.

  Outside the mayor of Alton was addressing the mob. “Men, stop this!”

  Receiving no response to his plea for law and order, the mayor then turned his attention to the warehouse. “Those of you in the warehouse, come out and no one will harm you. All they want is the infernal press.”

  “We believe in freedom of the press,” Elijah Lovejoy responded. Samuel thought Lovejoy to be a man in his thirties, a rather handsome, fine-featured fellow, with long sideburns. “We have a right to print the truth as we see it,” Lovejoy proclaimed.

  Suddenly, they heard footsteps on the warehouse roof. Lovejoy and a supporter snuck out through a side door. Nikola Tesla floated alongside them, curious as to what the men had sensed. One of the mob was atop the roof and another, carrying a lit torch, was climbing a ladder that was propped up against the side of the building. Lovejoy grabbed the ladder and pushed it over, marooning the man atop the roof, but also causing the man on the ladder to fall and his torch to go out. Another mob member placed another ladder against the wall and ascended the steps toward the roof, another lit torch in his hand. Lovejoy went to work against the latest arsonist, tipping the second ladder over. He shouted to the proslavery mob, “You may burn me at the stake as they did McIntosh at St. Louis, or you may tar and feather me, or throw me into the Mississippi as you have often threatened to do, but you cannot disgrace me. Jesus Christ died for me. And I were most unworthy to bear his name, should I refuse to die for him.” Lovejoy stared defiantly at the proslavery mob.

  “Lynch him!” one of the proslavery men shouted. “Hang him high!”

  Lovejoy smiled in response, which only seemed to anger the mob even more.

  A blast from a double-barrel shotgun halted the newspaper editor and Presbyterian minister in his tracks. Lovejoy crumbled to the ground, mortally wounded.

  Thaddeus Huribut, a friend of Lovejoy’s and fellow abolitionist, carried the wounded editor into the warehouse, where Amos Roff was nursing a bullet wound in his ankle he’d gotten when trying to get the mob outside the warehouse to disperse.

  Shouts of “kill them all!” were heard as the mob stormed the warehouse. Then, seeing the girls from Cassadaga Area High School, the men suddenly stopped shouting. Some of them looked embarrassed at the goings-on, Minerva thought. As if their wives and daughters were watching them act like savages.

  “There it is!” one of the mob shouted as they spotted the printing press. The men dragged the new printing press out into the street and set upon it with sledgehammers, smashing the machine and making a mockery of the freedom of the press, which was guaranteed by the 1st Amendment to the same Constitution that allowed for slavery in the United States.

  Minerva turned her head to the wounded Elijah P. Lovejoy. The newspaper editor was named after a prophet in the Bible, Minerva thought, remembering that Elijah did not die, but survived because God sent chariots to bring him to heaven. But this Elijah was dying. She heard the death rattle as the poor man lay gasping for breath on the floor of the warehouse, the last moments of his life bleeding out of him. The man cradling Lovejoy’s head was sobbing profusely. Lovejoy looked at his friend and smiled. He whispered, “I am going to a better place,” as if trying to comfort his distraught friend. “Do not mourn for me. ‘Yeah, thou I walk through the valley of death,’” Lovejoy said, starting the 23rd Psalm.

  But he never finished it. Mr. Greene and his students watched Lovejoy depart in stone silence. Outside, the cacophony of the sledgehammers and the cries of the drunken men ricocheted into the night, echoing off the warehouses all along the wharf, an auditory harbinger of what was coming for the nation: a reckoning. On slavery.

  Nikola Tesla floated ahead of the teacher and the students, a ghostly guard, if he was needed. Victor had seen how resourceful the scientist had been in Jerusalem, although the idea of the great inventor masquerading as Colonel Sanders brought a smile to his face. Who in the world would ever believe it? Victor asked himself. Still, he felt safe with Nikola Tesla as the point man for the group.

  Surprisingly, the group passed through the mob unmolested. The men seemed satisfied, their rage abated with the destruction of the printing press. And perhaps by the death of one of the most prominent abolitionists in the nation.

  When they returned to the portable Mr. Greene said, “The death of Elijah P. Lovejoy was an incendiary moment. A white man. had given his life for abolition. One man, especially, was moved by Lovejoy’s martyrdom. His name was John Brown.”

  “Didn’t author Herman Melville call John Brown ‘the meteor of the war’”? Victor asked.

  “Yes, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 was one of the seminal events that split the country apart. To the north, Brown became a hero and the subject of a Union marching song, John Brown’s Body.”

  Suddenly, Professor Bridenbaugh began to sing:

  He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true.

  He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through.

  They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew.

  But his soul goes marching on.

  Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. Glory. Glory, Hallelujah. His soul goes marching on.

  Professor Bridenbaugh had a nice voice, Minerva thought. Where had she heard that melody before?

  As if reading Minerva’s mind, Mr. Greene interjected. “You may notice the melody that Professor Bridenbaugh was singing. It is the same melody that Julia Ward Howe used for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. At the beginning of the Civil War the tune John Brown’s Body was one of the Union Army’s favorite marching songs. But enough of that. Lovejoy’s death shocked the nation and at a Congregational Church in Ohio, a young John Brown stood up and proclaimed that he would devote his life to fighting slavery. He was as good as his vow,” the teacher added.

  “We are headed a few months into the future to hear the words of a young neophyte Illinois state representative in Springfield, Illinois. You might even say that the death of Elijah P. Lovejoy helped launched the career of a certain young lawyer from Springfield, Illinois,” Mr. Greene said. “Any guesses?”

  “Abraham Lincoln?” Victor asked.

  “Give the boy a Kewpie doll,” the teacher said.

  Chapter 7

  As the portable set down at dusk on the evening of January 27, 1838, in Springfield, Illinois, Mr. Greene addressed his students.

  “In 1838, Springfield, Illinois, was a year away from becoming the capital of the state. The year before the man who would be its most famous citizen moved to Springfield to practice law. Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield in 1837, and became a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. Springfield would be his home until he moved to Washington in 1861, after winning the presidential election of 1860. He would return to Springfield in a casket, as you well know. This is not the Lincoln we witnessed at Gettysburg,” the teacher continued. “This is a young, lanky, beardl
ess fellow beginning his political career with his first major speech. Lovejoy’s death had impacted Lincoln, but not in the violent way it would affect John Brown. Now, as we listen to young Abraham Lincoln address the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, you will not hear him refer to Lovejoy by name. Lincoln was too smart for that. In the two months since Lovejoy’s murder, a crime for which no one was ever charged, no state official has had the courage to mention the events we just witnessed in Alton. Lincoln manages to allude to the event without mentioning Lovejoy by name. Lincoln was a cautious politician. The speech, however, will be his first published speech, printed in a local newspaper, two weeks after its delivery. It is rather cold outside on this January evening and I suggest you go into the closet and fetch your coats for the walk to the hall where the Lyceum is meeting.”

  As they progressed through the streets of Springfield, with both Professor Bridenbaugh and Nikola Tesla, the students were curious to hear the most famous President of the United States as a young orator.

  Mr. Greene spoke about lyceums. “The lyceum movement was very popular in the 19th century in the midwest,” he explained. “They sponsored educational programs and entertainments and often featured traveling speakers who went from town to town addressing different communities in what was known as ‘the lyceum circuit.’ They were designed to help improve the social, moral and intellectual portions of society. So even western towns, as Springfield was in 1838, were exposed to a bit of culture now and then. In Springfield, Lincoln was one of the founders of the Young Men’s Lyceum. However, both men and women were welcome to attend events.”

  “That was big of them,” Bette said, sarcastically.

  The wooden meetinghall was alit with light, emanating from what Victor believed to be whale-oil lanterns for it was too early in history for kerosene lighting. This was four decades away from Edison’s development of the incandescent light, although Victor was not about to mention the name of Thomas Edison when his archrival, Nikola Tesla, was floating along with the group. Still, Victor conceded, Edison’s invention changed the world. As did Tesla’s idea of alternating current. Too bad the two geniuses were so pig-headed that they couldn’t get along, he thought. Even in the afterlife.

  People were still filing in to the meetinghall. The tallest man in the room was working the crowd, shaking hands and thanking people for coming out on such a cold evening,

  “I just hope that my little speech is worthy of your interest,” Lincoln said, modestly. He nodded to Minerva, Bette and Heather as they filed into a row to take seats on folding chairs. Lincoln smiled at Victor and appeared surprised by the height of Samuel, for Lincoln was accustomed to being the tallest man in any room he entered. He stopped Mr. Greene for a word and offered his hand to shake.

  “How are you this evening, sir?”

  “I am fine, Mr. Lincoln. I am looking forward to your speech.”

  “Why thank you sir, are you a Whig, sir?”

  “Why, yes, Mr. Lincoln, I am,” Mr. Greene said. It was not technically a lie. For instead of registering to vote as a nonpartisan in Cassadaga, Greene had declared that he was a “Whig,” which the elections clerk promptly misspelled as “Wig” before he corrected her. He had even passed his voter’s registration card around class one day to show students that they could register for whatever party they wished. Unfortunately, one of his more rebellious students had taken him at his word and when he turned eighteen, the boy went down to register to vote as a Communist, which resulted in a call from the elections office to the principal at Cassadaga Area High School, who subsequently made a visit to Mr. Greene’s portable to complain. Mr. Greene, secure in his job by tenure, informed the principal that the boy had a right to register as he wished, but said that he doubted the lad would ever have a career in politics or become a school principal.

  After his brief conversation with Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Greene joined his students, sitting in the middle of the group, so that he could speak to them all at the same time.

  “Why didn’t he talk to us?” Samuel asked Mr. Greene.

  “In 1838, only males over the age of twenty-one voted. You boys are both too young and the girls…well this is a decade before even Seneca Falls and eighty-two years before the passage of the 19th Amendment.”

  A young man, sporting muttonchop sideburns, sauntered up to a podium and, in a strong voice that penetrated to the back of the hall, announced that that they were about to begin. “Tonight’s speaker is state representative Abraham Lincoln,” he added.

  Sitting in the first row, Abraham Lincoln arose from his chair and took three strides and then acrobatically bounded onto the stage to speak. He took a manuscript from his pocket and placed it on the podium.

  “As a subject for the remarks of the evening, ‘the perpetuation of our political institutions’ is selected,” Lincoln proclaimed. Then he paused and cleared his throat before beginning his oration.

  Young Abraham Lincoln was nervous, Victor realized. He commiserated with the future President, remembering the time in a school-wide assembly when he had had to address the student body. Victor had been petrified. He felt empathy for Mr. Lincoln. But unlike Victor Bridges who had mumbled his way through a brief recitation to his fellow classmates, Lincoln quickly recovered and declared in a rather high-pitched voice:

  In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the 19th century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these—the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

  Victor wondered where the brevity of the Gettysburg Address had gone. Lincoln was not succinct; if anything, Lincoln as a young orator was long-winded.

  How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” Lincoln asked, rhetorically. “By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a (Napoleon) Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio (River) or make a track on the Blue Ridge (Mountains) in a trial of a thousand years…

  “Ken Burns used that quote about the Ohio in his Civil War series, Mr. Greene,” Victor whispered to his teacher.

  “Yes, and a few more of the Lincoln quotes that Burns used came from the Lyceum speech, Victor,” the teacher replied in a soft voice. “This address to the Lyceum was his first published speech. But we heard Lincoln at his best at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Address is his finest speech, even better than his Second Inaugural Speech in 1865. Succinct and profound in little more than two hundred words and three minutes, the Gettysburg Address changed the meaning of the war from a battle over the Union to one of freedom for the slaves. In 1838, Abraham Lincoln hadn’t learned the art of brevity yet. He was wordy, as you have just heard, but there are passages in the sp
eech that are poetic and profound. I will have to add this speech to my documents for next year’s A.P. examination, I believe, especially for preparation for the document-based question on the exam,” the teacher whispered until an old woman from the row behind poked Mr. Greene to be quiet.

  Victor held back a chuckle at his teacher being reprimanded by the old biddy. He began to daydream as Lincoln went on, but he came back to the speech when Lincoln said,

  Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world.

  “McIntosh is the allusion to Lovejoy isn’t it, Mr. Greene?” Victor whispered.

  “It is one allusion. A rather subtle reference. The mob murder of Francis McIntosh forced Lovejoy to move his newspaper across the Mississippi River to Alton and radicalized him even more. Lovejoy witnessed the murder. The violence left him shaken. It made him an even more shrill abolitionist and his calls for immediate emancipation of slaves was the match that lit the powder keg that cost him his life.”

  “I didn’t realize Abraham Lincoln had such big ears,” Heather whispered to Minerva and Bette as the future President continued his address.