Joshua Leavitt - Biography

Biography

Born in Heath, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, Leavitt attended Yale College, where he graduated at age twenty. He subsequently studied law and practiced for a time in Putney, Vermont, before matriculating at the Yale Theological Seminary for a three-year course of study. He was subsequently ordained as a Congregational clergyman at Stratford, Connecticut. After four years in Stratford, Rev. Leavitt decamped for New York City, where he first became secretary of the American Seamens' Friend Society, and began his 44-year career as editor of Sailors' Magazine. Thus was Leavitt launched on his career as social reformer, temperance spokesman, editor, abolitionist and religious proselytizer.

Leavitt was heavily involved in a series of high-profile anti-slavery cases, including the escape of the slave Basil Dorsey from Maryland into Massachusetts (Leavitt aided Dorsey's passage northward, and members of the extended Leavitt family helped shelter Dorsey in Massachusetts), as well as the La Amistad case, in which enslaved Africans on a Spanish ship rebelled and took control. Leavitt played a pivotal role in the Amistad events, when on September 4, 1839, he and Lewis Tappan and Simeon Jocelyn formed the Amistad Committee to raise funds for the defense of the Amistad captives.

One of Leavitt's major accomplishments was helping to provide the intellectual underpinnings of the abolitionist argument through his writing and publishing. In 1841, for instance, Leavitt published his "Financial Power of Slavery", a compelling document which argued that the South was draining the national economy through its reliance on slavery.