Benjamin Lundy (January 4, 1789August 22, 1839) was an American Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey of the United States who established several anti-slavery newspapers and traveled widely. He lectured and published seeking to limit slavery's expansion and tried to find a place outside the United States to establish a colony in which freed slaves might relocate.
As William Lloyd Garrison pointed out in a eulogy, Lundy was not the first American abolitionist, but "he was the first of our countrymen who devoted his life and all his power exclusively to the cause of the slaves."
Early and family life
Lundy was born to Joseph and Elizabeth Shotwell Lundy, both Quakers, at Greensville, Hardwick Township, Sussex County, New Jersey. His mother died when he was four, but he became close to his stepmother, Mary Titus Lundy. As a boy, he worked on his father's farm, attending school for only brief periods. In 1804, New Jersey passed a law allowing gradual emancipation of slaves, although the 1810 census in Sussex County showed that more than half of the 758 black people were still enslaved.
However, by that time, young Lundy had moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). In 1808 he was apprenticed to a saddler. On the Ohio River, Wheeling was on important transit point of the interstate slave trade, with coffles of slaves often marched through town. Many would be shipped down the Ohio River toward Kentucky (a slave state) and additional slave states down the Mississippi River. In Wheeling, Lundy saw firsthand many iniquities inherent in the institution of slavery, including the use of horsewhips and bludgeons to force barefoot human beings to walk through mud and snow. He determined to devote his life to the cause of abolition. (Genius of Universal Emancipation, Greeneville, Tennessee, January 1823)]]
Lundy also became acquainted with a local Quaker family, the Stantons, who lived a dozen miles west from Wheeling, in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. Ohio did not permit slavery, and Benjamin Stanton would become a U.S. Congressman from that district, and two decades after Lundy's death, his brother Edwin Stanton would become Secretary of War under President Abraham Lincoln.
In December 1814 Lundy and Esther Lewis declared their intent to marry in the local Quaker meeting, and did so on February 13, 1815. Her brother William married Lydia Stanton, sister of David Stanton (Edwin Stanton's father). On November 18, 1815, they had their first child, Susan Maria Lundy Wierman (d. 1899). In the following decades, Esther bore two more sons, Charles Tallmadge Lundy (1821–1870) and Benjamin Clarkson Lundy (1826–1861), and two additional daughters, Elizabeth (1818–1879) and Esther (1826–1917).
Career
The young family settled in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, where Lundy soon built up a profitable saddlery business along the highway west (that later became Interstate 70). In 1815, he and five others also organized an anti-slavery association, known as the Union Humane Society, which within a few months had a membership of more than 500. Prominent members included lawyer journalist Charles Hammond, James Wilson (grandfather of President Woodrow Wilson) and Joseph Howells (father of William Dean Howells). Fellow Quaker Charles Osborne, who editing the Philanthropist (later moved to Cincinnati), also showed him journalism and printing basics.
thumb|right|Lundy's house in Mount PleasantOn his birthday, January 4, 1816, Lundy published a circular indicating his intent to found a national anti-slavery society to focus antislavery sentiment and activity. That became his life's work. He named his first son to honor James Tallmadge, whose antislavery speech in the U.S. House on February 16, 1819, Lundy printed in full. This periodical, first a monthly and later a weekly, was published successively in Ohio, Greenville, Tennessee, Baltimore, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It appeared irregularly, and at times, when Lundy was away on lecturing tours, was issued from any office that he could access. Newspapers including the Niles Weekly Register, the New York Spectator and papers from Connecticut and Edwardsville, Illinois reprinted Lundy's exposés.
However, anti-slavery activism did not pay well, and slaveholders did not believe Lundy's arguments that slavery stifled progress, despite his comparisons of the relative prosperity of New York and Pennsylvania with Virginia. Lundy had been recruited to Greenville, Tennessee to work against slavery in a slave state after the death of Elihu Embree, but he found the hostility formidable. Lundy used the equipment purchased from Embree's estate to begin publishing the American Economist and Weekly Political Reporter with more standard farm prices, business and political news in 1822. He also continued to lecture against slavery, and in 1824 attended the American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he connected with other activists, including Robert Purvis. He also traveled to New York to meet with Quaker activist Elias Hicks and to lecture against slavery in North Carolina.
Baltimore and the District of Columbia
After selecting Baltimore to re-establish his business after deciding to move from Tennessee, Lundy moved his family to Maryland in October, 1825. This enabled Lundy to print his newspaper weekly instead of monthly or even less frequently. Lundy also published a biography of Harford County, Maryland, philanthropist and abolitionist Elisha Tyson, as well as a proposal for the gradual emancipation of slaves. In 1826, a slaveowner offered to free twelve slaves if Lundy would accompany them to Haiti. He did so, but found on his return that his wife Esther had died giving birth to twins, and his children were scattered among friends. He also urged Woolfolk to bring criminal libel charges against Lundy, but a grand jury refused to indict him. However, Garrison returned to Boston (where he suffered a mob attack in 1835), although Woolfolk's trade also diminished, supplanted by Franklin & Armfield of Alexandria (at the time in the District of Columbia). Lundy followed the trade, shortly afterwards moving his newspaper paper to Washington, D.C., where, after some years under different ownership, it failed. Lundy became a leading voice in denouncing the Texas Revolution as a method to perpetuate slavery in Texas in defiance of Mexico's ban on it. When former president John Quincy Adams came to Philadelphia on his birthday, July 11, 1836, Lundy escorted him to meet other Quakers, including James Mott and his wife Lucretia Mott. Under the editorship of John G. Whittier, Lundy's successor, that paper became The Pennsylvania Freeman.
Lundy purchased a farm near the Clear Creek Meeting House (the westernmost establishment of the Hicksite Friends), as well as the new village of Lowell, Illinois. He printed several issues of the re-established Genius of Universal Emancipation on a borrowed press in nearly Hennepin, Illinois.
His house in Mount Pleasant is a National Historic Landmark.