Owen Lovejoy - Career

Career

Lovejoy migrated to Alton, Illinois, where his older brother Elijah Parish Lovejoy had moved in 1836 from St. Louis, because of hostility to his anti-slavery activities. The older Lovejoy was by then an anti-slavery Presbyterian minister who edited the Alton Observer, an abolitionist newspaper. The younger brother studied theology there.

Owen was present on the night of November 7, 1837 when his brother Elijah was murdered while trying to defend the printing press of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society from an angry mob. He is reported to have sworn on his brother's grave to "never forsake the cause that had been sprinkled with my brother's blood." Owen and his brother Joseph P. Lovejoy wrote Memoir of Elijah P. Lovejoy (1838), which was distributed widely by the American Anti-Slavery Society, increasing Elijah's fame after his death and adding to the abolition cause.

Lovejoy served as pastor of the Congregational Church in Princeton, Illinois from 1838–1856. During these years, he also organized a number of the 115 anti-slavery Congregational churches in Illinois begun by the American Missionary Association, founded in 1846. His activities brought him increasing public prominence.

In 1854 Lovejoy was elected a member of the Illinois State Legislature. He worked with Abraham Lincoln and others to form the Republican Party in the state, and he and Lincoln remained close friends. In 1856, he was elected as a Republican from Illinois as Representative to the 35th United States Congress and succeeding Congresses, serving from March 4, 1857, until his death.

Lovejoy was a platform speaker in support of Abraham Lincoln in the famous debates with Stephen Douglas. While in Congress, he "introduced the final bill to end slavery in the District of Columbia," long a goal of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He also helped gain passage of legislation prohibiting slavery in the territories. He was one of the few steadfast Congressional supporters of Lincoln during the American Civil War. Lincoln wrote, "To the day of his death, it would scarcely wrong any other to say, he was my most generous friend."

Lovejoy died in Brooklyn, New York in 1864. His body was returned to Illinois for burial at Oakland Cemetery in Princeton. He was the cousin of Maine Senator Nathan A. Farwell.