|
Dromo's Den
|
|
[Up] [Dromo's Den] Benjamin Lundy Biography LUNDY,
Benjamin (1789-1839). An American antislavery agitator, born of Quaker
parentage at Hardwick, Warren Co., N. J. At the age of 19 he went to Wheeling,
on the Ohio, where he worked as a saddler's apprentice. The town was a
thoroughfare for the slave trade, and Lundy's indignation was quickly aroused
against the whole slave system. His apprenticeship completed, he married, and,
settling in St. Clairsville, Ohio, soon built up a profitable business. It was
not long before he organized The Union Humane Society, which soon numbered
nearly 500 members. In 1819 he went to Missouri in the
hope of strengthening the opposition to the admission of the Territory as
a slave State, and while there he wrote a number of articles exposing the evils
of slavery and the wickedness of its extension. After losing nearly all his
property he returned to Ohio in 1821 and began the publication at Mount Pleasant
of the Genius of Universal Emancipation,
which he shortly afterward removed to Jonesborough, Tenn., and then again, in
1824, to Baltimore, Md. In 1825 he visited Haiti in search of a refuge for
emancipated blacks, and four years later made another voyage to that country for
the same purpose. Two years later he was brutally assaulted by a Baltimore slave
dealer enraged over an article in the Genius. In 1828 he journeyed on
foot through the Eastern States and made 43 public addresses. In the fall of
1829 William Lloyd Garrison (q.v.) joined Lundy in
Baltimore as assistant editor of the Genius.
The two were alike in their hostility to slavery, but Garrison was an advocate
of immediate emancipation on the soil, while Lundy was committed to schemes of
colonization abroad. Within a few months, while Lundy was absent in Mexico,
Garrison published extremely radical articles demanding immediate emancipation
and asserting that the domestic slave trade was as piratical as the foreign.
Garrison was brought to trial for criminal libel and fined and imprisoned. This
occurrence so reduced the circulation of the Genius
that a friendly dissolution of partnership between Lundy and Garrison took
place. It also raised up such a hostile spirit in Baltimore that Lundy shortly
afterward removed the paper to Washington, where, after some years, it failed.
In the winter of 1830-31 Lundy visited the Wilberforce colony of fugitive slaves
in Canada. In the following two years he made two trips to Texas in an attempt
to secure an asylum for negroes under the Mexican flag. In 1836 he started the National
Inquirer in Philadelphia, but retired from it in 1838. In the latter year
almost all his possessions, which were stored in Pennsylvania Hall,
Philadelphia, were destroyed by a mob, which burned the building. In the
following winter he removed to Lowell, Ill., where he reëstablished the Genius
of Universal Emancipation; but after issuing a few numbers he was seized
with a fever, and died Aug. 22, 1839. Consult Earle, Life,
Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia, 1847), and W. C.
Armstrong, Lundy Family and their
Descendants of Whatsoever Name (Nutley, N.J., 1902). The New International
Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920)
476-477.
|