1. Benjamin Lundy was an American Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey of the United States who established several anti-slavery newspapers and traveled widely.
29 Facts About Benjamin Lundy
1. 2.
Benjamin Lundy 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.
3.
Benjamin Lundy was born to Joseph and Elizabeth Shotwell Benjamin Lundy, both Quakers, at Greensville, Hardwick Township, Sussex County, New Jersey.
4.
Benjamin Lundy's mother died when he was four, but he became close to his stepmother, Mary Titus Lundy.
5.
However, by that time, young Benjamin Lundy had moved to Wheeling, Virginia.
6.
In Wheeling, Benjamin 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.
7.
Benjamin Lundy determined to devote his life to the cause of abolition.
8.
Benjamin Lundy became acquainted with a local Quaker family, the Stantons, who lived a dozen miles west from Wheeling, in Mt.
9.
The young family settled in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, where Benjamin Lundy soon built up a profitable saddlery business along the highway west.
10.
On his birthday, January 4,1816, Benjamin Lundy published a circular indicating his intent to found a national anti-slavery society to focus antislavery sentiment and activity.
11.
Benjamin Lundy named his first son to honor James Tallmadge, whose antislavery speech in the US House on February 16,1819, Lundy printed in full.
12.
Benjamin Lundy decided to liquidate his saddlery business in favor of a publishing business.
13.
Benjamin Lundy then established his own anti-slavery paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, with the first issue published in January 1821.
14.
Benjamin 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.
15.
Benjamin 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.
16.
Benjamin Lundy 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.
17.
Benjamin Lundy traveled to New York to meet with Quaker activist Elias Hicks and to lecture against slavery in North Carolina.
18.
Benjamin Lundy published a biography of Harford County, Maryland, philanthropist and abolitionist Elisha Tyson, as well as a proposal for the gradual emancipation of slaves.
19.
Benjamin Lundy did so, but found on his return that his wife Esther had died giving birth to twins, and his children were scattered among friends.
20.
On January 9,1827 Baltimore's most notorious slave-trader, Austin Woolfolk, whom Benjamin Lundy had been investigating in public records since his move to Baltimore and severely criticizing, assaulted Benjamin Lundy as he walked along a downtown street.
21.
Woolfolk pleaded guilty to assault, but Judge Nicholas Brice agreed with Woolfolk's lawyers that Benjamin Lundy had provoked it by criticizing Woolfolk's lawful occupation, and therefore sentenced the slave trader to a one-dollar fine and court costs.
22.
Benjamin Lundy urged Woolfolk to bring criminal libel charges against Lundy, but a grand jury refused to indict him.
23.
Benjamin Lundy followed the trade, shortly afterwards moving his newspaper paper to Washington, DC, where, after some years under different ownership, it failed.
24.
Benjamin Lundy sought to find a suitable place outside the United States where emancipated slaves might be sent.
25.
Benjamin 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.
26.
When former president John Quincy Adams came to Philadelphia on his birthday, July 11,1836, Benjamin Lundy escorted him to meet other Quakers, including James Mott and his wife Lucretia Mott.
27.
Benjamin Lundy purchased a farm near the Clear Creek Meeting House, as well as the new village of Lowell, Illinois.
28.
Benjamin Lundy printed several issues of the re-established Genius of Universal Emancipation on a borrowed press in nearly Hennepin, Illinois.
29.
Benjamin Lundy's house in Mount Pleasant is a National Historic Landmark.