Log-Lun: Loguen through Lundy

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


LOGUEN, Jermain Wesley, 1813-1872, New York, African American, clergyman, speaker, author, former slave, abolitionist leader.  American Abolition Society.  Bishop, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.  Supported the anti-slavery Liberty Party.  Conductor, Underground Railroad, aiding hundreds of fugitive slaves, in Syracuse, New York.  In 1851, he himself escaped to Canada when he was indicted for helping a fugitive slave.  Wrote autobiography, The Reverend J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, A Narrative of Real Life. 1859.

(Dumond, 1961, p. 334; Mabee, 1970, pp. 294, 307; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 677-678; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 368; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 13, p. 848; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 7, p. 358; Radical Abolitionist, Vol. 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 368:

LOGUEN, JERMAIN WESLEY (c. 1813- September 30, 1872), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, was born near Manscoe's Creek in Davidson County, Tennessee, the natural son of a white resident, David Logue, and a slave mother, Cherry, who had been kidnapped in Ohio. The story of the experiences of Cherry and h er family forms one of the blackest pictures of the slavery system. Growing up without schooling, with many hardships and few glimpses of the sunnier aspects of life, Jermain long planned to break away from slavery, but determined never to buy his freedom. Although his first attempt at escape failed, the sale of his sister aroused anew his resolution. The account of  this flight through Kentucky and southern Indiana (c. 1834-35), antecedent to the organization of the Underground Railroad, shows that the preliminary surveys for that system had been made and that a few lines already ran through the homes of Quakers as unerringly as railroads run through the large towns and cities. Jermain crossed from Detroit to Canada, making his way to Hamilton, Ont., in search of work. Writing to Frederick Douglass in May 1856 (see The Reverend J. W. Loguen, p. 339), he refers to this episode as "twenty-one years ago-the very winter I left my chains in Tennessee" and to himself as "a boy twenty-one years of age (as near as I know my age)." This statement furnishes the best available guide to the chronology of his early life.

In Canada, he learned to read, while by hard farm labor and thrift, in the face of great discouragement, he made a start towards competency. After two years as porter in a hotel at Rochester, New York, he was able to study at Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, where he received the only schooling he had. He then opened a school for colored children in Utica, and later one in Syracuse. At Busti, New York, in November 1840 he married Caroline Storum, a woman with some negro blood. Settling in Syracuse shortly afterward, he became one of the local managers of the Underground Railroad. He subsequently became an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, with successive pastorates (1843-50) in Bath, Ithaca, Syracuse, and Troy. He was presiding elder of the last-named district. He had begun to call himself Loguen, and through the persuasion of his Methodist friends he adopted Wesley as his middle name.

As a speaker against slavery he aroused much interest. Citizens of Cortland, New York, raised a fund to purchase his mother, but her master, Manasseth Logue, a brother of David, refused to sell her unless Jermain would buy his freedom also. His liberty imperiled by the Fugitive-slave Act of 1850, he left Troy and returned to the comparative safety of Syracuse, where his home again became an important station of the Underground Railroad. During the decade before the Civil War, he was a central figure in the activities of that organization, especially such as centered around his Peterboro neighbor, Gerrit Smith [q.v.]. In various ways he assisted some fifteen hundred fugitives. Indicted for participation in the "Jerry rescue" case (1851), he sought temporary refuge in Canada. Just before John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Loguen went again into Ontario with John Brown, Jr., in behalf of the League of Liberty and possibly also to further plans of the elder Brown. In 1864, Loguen declined election as a bishop of his denomination, but accepted in 1868, and was assigned to the Fifth District (Alleghany and Kentucky conferences). After two years he was transferred to the Second District (Genesee, ·Philadelphia, and Baltimore conferences). In 1872 he was reelected bishop and appointed to take charge of mission work on the Pacific Coast, but he died at Saratoga Springs, New York, before he could go to his field.

[The main source of information is The Reverend J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, a Narrative of Real Life (t.p. 1859, but the book contains letters dated 1860); although it is written in the third person, its detailed information indicates autobiography. A manuscript note by a Syracuse genealogist in a copy at the Syracuse Pub. Library states that Loguen died in his sixty-third year, which would place his birth c. 1810. See also W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad (1898); J. W. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1895); death notice in New York Tribune, October 1, 1872.]

W.H. A.


LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882, poet. Wrote antislavery poetry.

(Hughes, Meltzer, & Lincoln, 1968, p. 105)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1: 

LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH (February 27, 1807-March 24, 1882), poet, was born in Portland, Maine. His first known ancestor was Edward Longfellow, a man of property in Yorkshire early in the seventeenth century,, whose grandson, William, settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, about 1676, and married Ann Sewall, a sister of Judge Samuel Sewall (q.v.]. Their grandson Stephen took two degrees at Harvard, and became teacher, town clerk, and clerk of the courts in Portland, Maine. His son Stephen was a Massachusetts legislator and judge of the court of common pleas. The judge's son Stephen [q.v.], the poet's father, a Harvard graduate, was a distinguished lawyer in Portland, member of Congress, trustee of Bowdoin College, and president of the Maine Historical Society. The poet's maternal grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth [q.v.], was descended from Christopher Wadsworth, Englishman, who settled in Duxbury, Massachusetts, before 1632. Peleg, a Harvard graduate, a general in the Revolution, and member of Congress, married Elizabeth Bartlett of Plymouth; and through these grandparents the poet had descent from at least four of the Pilgrims, including John Alden, Priscilla Mullens, and Elder Brewster. His mother, Zilpah, a nervous invalid, was an intense lover of music, poetry, and nature.

Henry, the second child, was educated chiefly in private schools. He began to write early, the Gazette of Maine, Portland, publishing a poem by him on November 17, 1820. (He denied that he wrote the doggerel about Mr. Finney and his turnip.) Entering Bowdoin College as a sophomore, he graduated in 1825, fourth in a class of thirty-nine; Hawthorne was a classmate, but they were not intimate. While in college Longfellow had many poems accepted by the magazines; and by his senior year he had set his heart on a literary career, writing to his father, "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature." He planned to study at Harvard and then attach himself to a magazine; but soon after graduation he was offered a projected professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin, on condition that he study abroad, and therefore spent the years 1826-29 in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. From 1829 to 1835 he was professor and librarian at Bowdoin, also preparing textbooks and contributing essays and sketches to the magazines. He married, September 14, 1831, Mary Storer Potter of Portland, a beautiful and cultivated woman.

In 1835 Longfellow accepted the professorship of modern languages and belles-lettres at Harvard, and went abroad for a year to improve his knowledge of German and the Scandinavian tongues. In spite of the sudden death of his wife at Rotterdam in that year, he held to his course and made an extensive study of German literature before returning to America in 1836. At Cambridge, where he lodged in the Craigie House, Washington's former headquarters, his life settled into a pleasant routine. His college duties were heavy, for he had to prepare three lectures a week, besides supervising four native teachers and often taking the classes himself. But he went much into society, a jaunty figure immaculately clad; and he made many friends, the closest being Professor Cornelius C. Felton, Charles Sumner, George S. Hillard [qq.v.], and Henry R. Cleveland, who with the poet formed "The Five of Clubs," dubbed by outsiders "The Mutual Admiration Society." After 1837 his relations with Hawthorne were increasingly friendly; and at this time, as always, he kept up by letter his intimacy with George W. Greene [q.v.] of Rhode Island, whom he had met in Italy in 1828. During 1837-40 he contributed five articles to the North American Review; and in 1839 published Hyperion, a romance, and Voices of the Night, his first book of verse. The spring and summer of 1842 he spent mostly at Marienberg, a water-cure on the Rhine; but he formed a lifelong friendship with the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, visited Dickens and other men of letters in England, and wrote Poems on Slavery (1842) during the voyage home.

On July 13, 1843, he married Frances Elizabeth Appleton, the original of the heroine of Hyperion, whom he had met in Switzerland in 1836. She was a woman of twenty-six, "of stately presence, of cultivated intellect, and deep, though reserved feeling" (Samuel Longfellow, Life, post, II, 1, 2). Her father, a Boston merchant, bought the Craigie House for the pair as a wedding present. The poet's life now flowed on for many years with full and placid tide. Six children were born to him, among them Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow [q.v.]. Lowell and Agassiz became his intimate friends. In the summer he found congenial society at Nahant, where he and his brother-in-law, Thomas Gold Appleton [q.v.], finally bought a cottage. In 1854 he resigned his professorship, which had grown increasingly irksome; and his life thereafter had more unity and peace-until tragedy suddenly engulfed him. On July 9, 1861, Mrs. Longfellow was sealing up packages of her daughters' curls; a match set fire to her dress, and, in spite of her husband's efforts to put out the flames, by which he also was badly burned, she died the next day. How deep was his wound is shown by the few words wrung from him after some weeks: "How can I live any longer !" is the second entry in his journal, on September 12, n after a long gap. In a letter to George W. Curtis on September 28, he says that although "to the eyes of others, outwardly calm" he is "inwardly bleeding to death." The persistence of his grief is revealed by "The Cross of Snow," written eighteen years afterwards. Next to the care of his children he found most solace in daily labor to complete his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. While the work was slowly going through the press, in 1865, Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton aided in the last revision. "Every Wednesday evening," wrote Norton, "Mr. Lowell and I met in Mr. Longfellow's study to list en while he read a canto of his translation from the proof-sheet. We paus ed over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante's expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow's absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty. . . . Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o'clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed Mr. Long fellow had a special charm as a host, the charm of social grace and humor" (First Annual Report of the Dante Society, May 16, 1882, p. 22).

In the poet's remaining years honors were heaped upon him. During a tour of Europe with his family, in 1868-69, he received the degree of LL.D. from Cambridge, and that of D.C.L. from Oxford; breakfasted or lunched with Gladstone, the Duke of Argyll, and other notables; was given a private audience by the Queen; visited Tennyson on the Isle of Wight; and met scholars and artists in Italy, including Liszt, who soon after set to music the introduction to The Golden Legend. To the Craigie House came distinguished visitors year after year-Froude, Trollope, Kingsley, Dean Stanley, Lord and Lady Dufferin, Salvini, Ole Bull, the Emperor of Brazil, and many others. He was more and more lonely, however; Hawthorne and Felton had died before his European tour; Agassiz and Sumner di ed in 1874; Lowell went abroad; Greene became feeble and depressed; yet Longfellow kept at work with calm cheerfulness. The summers he spent at Nahant, except for a week's visit each year with his sister in the old Portland home. On his seventy-second birthday the children of Cambridge gave him an arm-chair made of wood from the chestnut tree of "The Village Blacksmith." His next birthday was celebrated in the public schools of Cincinnati, and the following year many schools throughout the country observed the day. During the last three months of 1881 he was confined to his room by vertigo followed by nervous prostration, and never fully recovered. On March 18, 1882, four schoolboys called, and he showed them the house with his usual courtesy. That afternoon he became ill, peritonitis developed, and six days later he died. He was buried at Mount Auburn. On March 2, 1884, a bust of him was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Longfellow's gentleness, sweetness, and purity have always received due emphasis; Lord Ronald Gower's eulogy in 1878 is typical: "There is a kind of halo of goodness about him, a benignity in his expression which one associates with St. John at Patmos" (My Reminiscence, volume II, 1883, p. 265). Other essential aspects of his personality have often been ignored, however. "Injustice in any shape he could not brook," said his sister of him as a boy; and he proved it as a young man when he hotly refused to accept an instructorship at Bowdoin instead of the promised professorship, and the corporation yielded to the indignant stripling. The sterner side of his nature showed itself at his Boston club one day: "Felt vexed at seeing plover on the table at this season, and proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game-laws thus violated." The comments in his journal and letters are often severe. "The smokers turned my study into a village tavern with cigars and politics, much to my annoyance." "My ways of thinking are so different from those of most of the Bostonians that there is not much satisfaction in talking with them. -- himself is an exception. He has a liberal, catholic mind, and does not speak as if he were the pope.'' "The American character seems often wanting in many of the more generous and lofty traits which ennoble humanity." "The fugitive slave is surrendered to his master ... Dirty work for a country that is so loud about freedom as ours!" This critical edge he may have got from his father; from his mother he inherited nervous sensibility verging on disease. In boyhood he begged to have cotton put in his ears on Fourth of July, to deaden the sound of the cannon; his illness in 1842 was disorder of the nerves; in middle life he was sometimes "half crazed" with neuralgia; a medical examination in 1867 found his "bellswires ... out of order"; nervous prostration preceded the end. This sensibility caused restlessness, fretfulness, and depression. "I pray a benediction on drudgery. It ... takes the fever out of my blood and keeps me from moping too much." "I know not in what littlenesses the days speed by; but mostly in attending to everybody's business but my own, and in doing everything but what I most want to do. It frets my life out.'' Abnormal excitement appears in some entries. "It [Niagara] drives me frantic with excitement. My nerves shake like a bridge of wire." More often his nervous delicacy gave delight. "It is raining, raining with a soft and pleasant sound. I cannot read, I cannot write, ... but dream only." "Like delicious perfume, like far-off music, like remembered pictures, came floating before me amid college classes, as through parting clouds, bright glimpses and visions of Tyrolean lakes." "I have still floating through my brain that crowd of fair, slender girls, waving, like lilies on their stems, to the music as to a wind." He had a marked fondness for good dinners, choice wines, and fine clothes. An English traveler who met him at a reception in 1850 pictures him as "dressed very fashionably ... almost too much so, a blue frock coat of Parisian cut, a handsome waistcoat, faultless pantaloons, and primrose-colored 'kids' set off his compact figure, which was not a moment still; for like a butterfly glancing from flower to flower, he was tripping from one lady to another, admired and courted by all" (quoted by Higginson, post, p. 279, from The Home Circle, London, October 1850). He had not yet begun to be St. John.

This artistic sensibility affected his modes of composition. He worked steadily, so far as moods allowed; but he could not twang off a lyric at will or mechanically grind out a long poem. "I was often excited, I knew not why; and wrote with peace in my heart and not without tears in my eyes, 'The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death.' I have had an idea of this kind in my mind for a long time, without finding any expression for it in words. This morning it seemed to crystallize at once, without any effort of my own." "Why do no songs flit through my brain, as of old? It is a consolation to think that they come when least expected."

Longfellow's popularity in his later years was great, both at home and abroad. "No other poet has anything like your vogue," Hawthorne wrote from England in 1855. In London 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish were sold the first day. Before 1900 his poems had been translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Russian. In German thirty-three different translations had appeared, including eight of Evangeline and five of Hiawatha; in French, nine, including four of Evangeline; in Italian, twelve. The prices he received for poems show the growth of his fame: fifteen dollars for "The Village Blacksmith" in 1840; $3,000 for "The Hanging of the Crane" in 1874. Poe was hostile, but most American men of letters praised the new poet warmly. Bryant wrote of his "exquisite music" and "creative power." Motley found himself "more and more fascinated with Evangeline" and the hexameters " 'musical as is Apollo's lute.' " Hawthorne wrote, "I take vast satisfaction in your poetry, and take very little in most other men's.'' Prescott thought the "Skeleton in Armor" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" the best imaginative poems since "The Ancient Mariner." European criticism was also very favorable. Professor Philarete Chasles, of the College of France, wrote in 1851: "Longfellow seems to us to occupy the first place among the poets of his country" (Etudes sur la litterature et les meours des Anglo-Americains au XIX siècle, 1851, p. 299). Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine said in February 1852: "In respect of melody, feeling, pathos, and that exquisite simplicity of expression which is the criterion of a genuine poet, Mr. Longfellow need not shun comparison with any living writer.'' The London Spectator (June 20, 1868) spoke of "the sweet and limpid purity, ... and the thoroughly original conception and treatment, of his later poems, especially that which will doubtless live as long as the English language, 'Hiawatha.'"

Longfellow's writings belong to the Romantic Movement in its milder phases: they have nothing of the Storm-and-Stress mood, except in Hyperion, and nothing of Byron's or Shelley's spirit of revolt. He was a Victorian only in his moderation and decorum, which were a part of his Puritan heritage: social reforms, except the abolition of slavery, did not much interest him; and his Unitarian faith combined with his unspeculative nature to save him alike from the theological struggles of Tennyson, Arnold, and Clough, and from the paganism of Swinburne and Morris. His first prose model was Irving, soon succeeded by the florid German school. His poetic style may have owed its purity to Bryant, whose nature poems he imitated in youth, but it also has something of Goldsmith's soft grace and Keats's sensuous beauty. In his nature poetry as a whole he is more like Keats than Bryant or Wordsworth; but Wordsworth may have quickened his sympathy with children and with common men and women. "The Ancient Mariner" clearly influenced his ballads of the sea. From the Finnish Kalevala he got the metre of Hiawatha; and his use of hexameters, an innovation in American verse, was doubtless due to their success in German narrative poems. The strongest single foreign influence was that of Goethe and the German romantic lyrists. Most of the prose works had only a passing value, but Outre-Mer and Hyperion are still worth reading for their pictures of European life in the early nineteenth century; The poems did a threefold service to American readers: they brought a sense of the beauty in nature and the lives of common people; they gave some feeling for Old-World culture; they handled American themes, especially Indian legends and colonial history, more broadly and attractively than had been done before in verse.

Didacticism is the charge most often brought against Longfellow's poetry. If this means merely that his purpose was to teach, he might well be content to stand with Dante, Spenser, and Milton. The true criticism is that his method is sometimes bald preaching, as in "A Psalm of Life," and sometimes silly symbolism, as in "Excelsior"; that at other times he pins a moral to incident or portrait which needs none, as in "The Village Blacksmith"; and that in general his way of presenting truth lacks the imagination, passion, and power of the great poets. But it is also true that most of his didactic poems are pleasing in form, and that the larger part of his poetry is not didactic at all but depicts various aspects of life for their own sake. His nature poems, such as "An April Day" or "Amalfi," are often purely sensuous; and those on the sea give with rare felicity a sense of its magic and its terror. His ballads are astir with spirited incident. In the delightful poems on children he anticipated Swinburne. His sketches of individuals show vivid appreciation of a wide range of human types-men of action, like the hero in "Victor Galbraith" or "Kambalu"; men of science, like Agassiz; poets, like Dante and Chaucer; ecclesiastics good and bad, like those in The Golden Legend and "The Monk of Casal-Maggiore"; women, like Evangeline, Priscilla, and the heroic mother in "Judas Maccabaeus." His sympathy with the joys and sorrows of "the common lot" is genuine and deep, as in "The Bridge" and "The Goblet of Life." The love scenes in The Spanish Student, Evangeline, and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" have delicate beauty although they lack warmth; and "Stars of the· Summer Night," in the first named, is one of the best serenades in English. The joys of wine and social drinking -are sung jollily in "King Witlaf's Drinking Horn" and with a connoisseur's discrimination in "Catawba Wine."

As interpreter of the Old World to the New, Longfellow still has no rival among American poets. Even now there is cultural charm in "Nuremberg," "The Belfry of Bruges," "Monte inferior. But no one knows Longfellow fully who is not familiar with the sonnets, some of which are among the best of the century; with "Morituri Salutamus," less buoyant than " Rabbi Ben Ezra" and less venturesome than "Ulysses," but more truthful than either in its statement of the mingled weakness and strength of old age; and with "Michael Angelo," in which the elderly poet and scholar moves thoughtfully in high regions of Italian art and character. Longfellow's fame will n eve r again be what it was in his own century; but it remains to be seen whether, by the pure style and gracious humanity of his best poems, he will not outlast louder men, in popular favor.

The principal works published in book form during his lifetime appeared as follows: Outre-Mer (1835); Hyperion (1839); Voices of the Night (1839); Ballads and Other Poems (dated 1842, issued late in 1841); Poems on Slavery (1842); The Spanish Student, a Play in Three Acts (1843); Poems (1845); The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (dated 1846, is sued in December 1845); Evangeline (1847); Kavanagh, a Tale (1849); The Seaside and the Fireside (dated 1850, issued in December 1849); The Golden Legend (1851); The Song of Hiawatha (1855); Prose Works (1857); The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Other Poems (1858); The New England Tragedy (1860); Tale of a Wayside Inn (1863); The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (3 volumes, 1865-67); Flower-de-Luce (title-page dated 1867, published in November 1866); The New England  Tragedies (1868); The Divine Tragedy (1871); Christus, a Mystery (The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend, The New England Tragedies, 3 volumes, 1872); Three Books of Song (1872); Aftermath (1873); The Hanging of the Crane (1874); The Masque of Pandora, and Other Poems (1875); Keramos and Other Poems (1878); Ultima Thule (1880); In the Harbor: Ultima Thule, Part II (1882). The posthumous volume, Michael Angelo, appeared in 1883. A "complete" edition, The Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in eleven volumes, was published in 1886.

[Two useful bibliographies are L. S. Livingston, A Bibliography of the First Editions in Book Form of the Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (p.p. 1908), and bibliog. by H. W. L. Dana, in The Cambridge H ist. of American Literature, II (1918), 425-36. The most important biography is Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence (3 volumes, 1886-87), by his brother, Samuel Longfellow [q.v.]. See also T. W. Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (I 902); "New Longfellow Letters," Harper's Monthly Magazine, April 1903; E. S. Robertson, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1887); G. R. Carpenter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1901); G.L. Austin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His Life, His Works, His friendships (1883), containing the early poems not republished in Voices of the Night; E. W. Longfellow, Random Memories (1922); Annie Fields, Authors and Friends (1896); E. Montegut, " Oeuvres de H. W. Longfellow," Rev1le des Deux Mondes, October 15, 1849; F. Kratz, Das deutsche Element in den Werken H. W. Longfellows (2 volumes, Wasserburg, 1901-02); A. Johnson, "The Relation of Longfellow to Scandinavian Literature," American Scandinavian Review, January 1915; R. H. Stoddard, ed., The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1884), volume VI; J. R. Lowell, in Atlantic Monthly, January 1859; 0. W. Holmes, in Ibid., June 1882; G. E. Woodberry in Harper's Monthly Magazine, February 1903; T. B. Aldrich in Atlantic Monthly, March 1907; P. E. More, Shelburne Essays, 5 series (1908); W. D. Howells, in No. American Rev., March 1907; Bliss Perry, in Atlantic Monthly, March 1907; W. P. Trent, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume II (1918); W. H. O. Smeaton, Longfellow and his Poetry (.1919); H. S. Gorman, A Victorian American: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1926).

J. W.C.B.


LORD, Nathan, 1793-1870, Hanover, New Hampshire, abolitionist, clergyman.  American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1833-1834. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1:

LORD, NATHAN (November 28, 1792-September 9, 1870), Congregational clergyman and college president, was born at South Berwick, Maine, the son of John and Mehitabel (Perkins) Lord and a descendant of Na than Lord of Kent, England, who settled in Kittery, Maine, about 1652. He was educated at the local academy and at Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1809. After two years as a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, he began the study of theology, completing his work in the seminary at Andover in 1815. In May 1816 he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church at Amherst, New Hampshire, and on July 24 of the same year he married Elizabeth King Leland of Saco, Maine. His pastorate lasted twelve years and he was considered one of the ablest and most successful ministers in the state. Certain liberals, however, withdrew from membership in his church and formed a separate congregation.

In 1821 he was elected a trustee of Dartmouth College and in 1828, president. At this time conditions there were far from satisfactory, since the institution was still feeling the effects of its contest with the state in respect to its charter (1816-19). The new president assumed the task of rehabilitation with notable success and great improvements were soon in evidence; but his administration as a whole can hardly be considered noteworthy for financial or other material progress. He was not a pioneer in educational policy, although one innovation, the abolition of honors and prizes, introduced in 1830, attracted some attention-mostly unfavorable. He was an able executive and disciplinarian, however, and like his contemporary Mark Hopkins [q.v.] at Williams, a great teacher, whose character exercised a deep influence on students and associates. For many years he conducted courses in theology and ethics.

Intellectually, he represented a school which was rapidly passing, and his views on the great question of the day-slavery-eventually cost him his position. He had at first supported the Liberty Party, but soon after the Mexican War, an event which drove many other New Englanders into the anti-slavery movement, he became a decided supporter of slavery as an institution. His thesis was simple and logical. Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, it was therefore divinely ordained and not to be questioned on political, humanitarian, or economic grounds. He had no sympathy with "a philosophy which makes happiness the end of living," or with "the sentiment and romance which had infected the descendants of the Puritans." His views on the question are well stated in Letter of Inquiry to Ministers of all, Denominations on Slavery (1854), A Northern Presbyter's Second Letter ... (1855), and in A Letter to I. M. Conrad, Esq., on Slavery (1859). The last-named first appeared in the Richmond Daily Whig, Richmond, Virginia, and denounced the recent raid at Harpers Ferry. A True Picture of Abolition (1863) subjected him to widespread censure, and in July 1863, the trustees, while refusing to remove him from office, expressed such disapproval that he felt obliged to resign. In a dignified statement he defended his views and denied the right of the board to impose any religious, political, or ethical test not authorized by the charter. In spite of the intensity of his views, however, he had what many men of his type have lacked, a genuine sense of humor and a large measure of tolerance and kindliness. Furthermore, he was fond of outdoor life, had athletic tastes and good health, and whatever he may have thought of ultimate human destiny, he enjoyed association with his fellows.

After retirement he spent his last years in Hanover, his friends having provided an annuity in recognition of his long and scantily remunerated services. His last publication, a letter to the alumni on the occasion of the college centennial in 1869, continues to emphasize his opposition to the current philosophy which stressed "the ability, not the weakness of man; his dignity, and not his sinfulness and shame; his rights, and not his duties; and the reorganization of society upon the basis of universal freedom, equality and fraternity."

[Many of his addresses, sermons, and papers were published in pamphlet form and the library of Dartmouth College has, it is believed, a complete collection of manuscript material dealing with his administration. See also C. C. Lord, A History of the Descendants of Nathan Lord of Ancient Kittery, Maine. (1912); J. K. Lord, History of Dartmouth College (1913); Proceedings New Hampshire Historical Society, volume IV (1906); D. F. Secomb, History of the Town of Amherst, New Hampshire (1883).]

W.A.R.


LORING, Ellis Gray, 1803-1858, Boston, Massachusetts, lawyer, abolitionist leader.  Manager and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833. Husband to abolitionist Louisa Loring of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).  Co-founded and wrote the constitution of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.  Financially aided the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator.  Was the attorney for the defense of a slave child in Massachusetts Supreme Court.  This resulted in a landmark ruling that every slave brought to the state by the owner was legally free. 

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 186, 317; Mabee, 1970, p. 124; Yellin, 1994, p. 51; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, p. 27; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 416; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 318).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 416:

LORING, ELLIS GRAY (April 14, 1803- May 24, 1858), lawyer and anti-slavery advocate, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only son of James Tyng Loring, an apothecary; who died in 1805, and Relief (Faxon) Cookson Loring. He was descended from Thomas Loring who emigrated to America in 1634 and settled in Hingham, Massachusetts. From the Latin School, where he was distinguished for scholarship, and where he made Emerson's friendship, he went to Harvard College. He was a member of the class of 1823, attaining membership in Phi Beta Kappa, but he left in May 1823, when members of his class were dismissed for resistance to college discipline. Later he studied law and in 1827 he began a successful career at the bar. Troubled by the existence of slavery, he was "one of the little band who assembled, on the evening of January 1st, 1831, ... to consider the expediency of organizing a New England Anti-Slavery Society" (the Liberator, June 4, 1858, p. 91). These twelve zealots were of divided counsel. Loring favored "gradualism" as opposed to Garrison's "immediateism." The constitution called for "immediate freedom," and Loring withheld his signature. But by January 1833 he was holding office in the society.

There were many aspects to Loring's support of the abolition movement. Unlike Garrison, he had social prominence to lose the movement cost him many clients and the friendly intercourse of leading Boston families. He gave decisive financial support, without which the Liberator could not have continued. On October 29, 1827, he had married Louisa Gilman and together they made their home a center for anti-slavery workers, to whom other doors were closed. Here Harriet Martineau visited and observed the movement at close range. Loring opened his house to fugitive slaves as well and was perhaps the first lawyer to take a colored boy into his office to train him for the bar. More widely known abolitionists, as Dr. Channing, drew strength from his counsel. From his hand Wendell Phillips received his first anti-slavery pamphlet. Though he shrank from speaking in public, Loring could on occasion argue to good purpose, notably in the hearing before the legislative committee considering Gov. Edward Everett's suggestion that the abolitionists be repressed.

In anti-slavery as in other matters, Loring was of liberal but moderate views. He opposed third-party sentiment in the American Anti-Slavery Society and also Phillips' view that abolition must be sought either in blood or over the ruins of the church and the Union. In An Address to the Abolitionists of Massachusetts on the Subject of Political Action, printed about 1838, he sketched the tactics by which agitation should be conducted: by petitioning legislative bodies, by interrogating candidates publicly, and by using the suffrage. In his profession he was rather a chamber counsel than an advocate. His best-known argument was for the slave Med, brought to Massachusetts by her mistress (Commonwealth vs. Thomas Aves, 35 Massachusetts, 193). On habeas corpus proceedings Loring won against Benjamin R. Curtis. The case established the principle that a slave brought voluntarily by his owner into Massachusetts could not be removed from the state against his will. Justice Story wrote: "I have rarely seen so thorough and exact arguments as those made by Mr. B. R. Curtis, and yourself. They exhibit learning, research, and ability, of which any man may be proud" (W. W. Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 1851, II, 235). In his petition for the pardon of Abner Kneeland, convicted of blasphemy, he made a splendid defense of free speech. For some years prior to his death he had withdrawn from public observation, being content that others should assume prominence in the movement he had helped to launch. He has sometimes been confused with his distant kinsman, Edward Greely Loring, United States commissioner, who was attacked by the abolitionists for the rendition of Burns, a fugitive slave.

[W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1875 (4 volumes, 1885-89), volumes I-III; A. H. Grimke, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1891); Lindsay Swift, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1911); W. H. Channing, The Life of Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (1880); Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, volume I (1872); C. H. Pope and K. P. Loring, Loring Genealogy (1917); the Liberator, May 28, June 4, 18, 1858; Boston Transcript, May 25, 1858.]

C.F.


LORING, Louisa, Boston, Massachusetts, leader of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), wife of Ellis Gray Loring (Yellin, 1994, pp. 47-51, 62, 250n, 253n, 262, 269).


LOVE, Alfred Henry (September 7, 1830- June 29, 1913), radical pacifist,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1:

LOVE, ALFRED HENRY (September 7, 1830- June 29, 1913), radical pacifist, son of William Henry and Rachel (Evans) Love, was born and spent his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a high school student he showed a bent for journalism, which later found expression in the periodicals which he edited. His marriage to Susan Henry Brown in January 1853 brought him into affiliation with the Society of Friends, although he did not at once become a formal member of a meeting. From 1853 until his death he was a package woolen commission merchant. When the Civil War came, many Quakers and almost all the members of peace organizations compromised with their principles and accepted the struggle. Unable to make this adjustment, Love defended his position in An Appeal in Vindication of Peace Principles (Philadelphia, 1862). To support the war seemed to him both unchristian and inhuman, and he pointed to the danger of "becoming absorbed in the enthusiasm of the hour" and of floating along "on the swelling tide, forgetful that popular movements always should be watched, often even doubted." Though an active and thoroughgoing friend of the negro, Love did not believe that any great good could be achieved for him through war, which, he maintained, would not be a death-blow to "Slavery in its widest sense." He refused to sell his goods for army use, and his business suffered. In 1863 he was drafted, but he refused to serve or to procure a substitute. William Lloyd Garrison, the high-priest of non-resistance, having accepted the war, wrote to Love that he believed money could be paid in lieu of service "without any compromise of the peace or non-resistance principle" (manuscript "Anti-Slavery Letters Written by William Lloyd Garrison, 1861-65," volume VI, Boston Public Library), but Love thought otherwise and maintained his position.

Since the American Peace Society had justified the Civil War, a handful of non-resistants felt the need for a new and thoroughly radical peace organization. Love assumed the leadership of this movement (Address before the Peace Convention Held in Boston, March 14 and 15, 1866) which resulted in the formation of the Universal Peace Society, later the Universal Peace Union. Its platform was expressed in its motto, "Remove the causes and remove the customs of war! Live the conditions and promulgate the principles of peace." Until his death Love was president of the organization and responsible for its periodical. The society maintained close relations with European peace groups and came to number some ten thousand American adherents. It worked for a reconciliation between North and South, for a more humanitarian treatment of the Indian, for the rights of women, and for the abolition of capital punishment. It also labored for the peaceful adjustment of disputes, local as well as international. In the eighties Love became a pioneer in popularizing the idea of the arbitration of disputes between capital and labor, his own services as a mediator in strikes attesting his faith in the efficacy of pacific principles.

Love was not unknown to congressmen, secretaries of state, and presidents from Lincoln to Wilson. He urged party conventions and presidents- elect to mention international arbitration in their platforms and messages. He instigated delegations and petitions praying for the outlawry of war by constitutional amendment, for the negotiation of permanent treaties of arbitration, and for an international court. He was an uncompromising opponent of militarism in all its forms. Again. and again he wrote vigorously if naively to the secretary of state and to foreign governments suggesting peaceful means for preventing a threatening war. His letters and cables on the eve of the Spanish-American war aroused such indignation among certain patriots that he was burned in effigy. His uncompromising pacifism seemed, in the opinion of certain moderate friends of the cause, to injure the peace movement by making it appear unpractical. As the cause became more realistic and scientific Love's work, which he carried on courageously against great odds, appeared to some of the new leaders sentimental and ineffective. Yet his service in keeping alive the high standard of pacifism in the dark, discouraging days during and after the Civil War, and in forcing the ques tion upon skeptical politicians and an indifferent people, gives him a secure though minor place in the history of American idealism. Love's wife, two sons and a daughter, survived him.

[The above sketch is based largely on material in the periodicals which Love edited: Bond of Peace, Voice of Peace, and The Peacemaker, published in Philadelphia. Consult also: Who's Who in America, 1912-13; A Brief Synopsis of Work Proposed, Aided, and Accomplished by the Universal Peace Union (1912); the Advocate of Peace, November 1913; Friends' Intelligencer, July 26, 1913; Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Ledger (Philadelphia), June 30, 1913. The "Miscellaneous Letters" in the Department of State contain many letters from Love.]

M.E.C. 


LOVEJOY, Elijah Parrish, 1802-1837, newspaper publisher, editor, writer, clergyman, abolitionist leader.  Murdered by anti-abolitionists.  In 1833, he became editor of the St. Louis newspaper the Observer.  In the paper, he opposed slavery and supported graduate emancipation.  Due to threats, he moved the paper to Alton, Illinois, in 1836.  There, his life was threatened and his press was destroyed three times by pro-slave mobs.  A fourth press was established on November 7, 1837, and was immediately destroyed and during the attack, Lovejoy was shot and killed by the mob. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 6, 20, 90-94, 96, 105, 269; Dumond, 1961, pp. 92, 223-226, 232; Pease, 1965, pp. 268-272, 318; Mabee, 1970, pp. 38-50, 67, 116, 249, 277, 292, 293, 295, 296, 279, 375, 377; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 378-380, 601-602; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, pp. 34-35; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 434; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 541-543; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 14, p. 4; Dillon, Merton L. Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editor. 1961.). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 434:

LOVEJOY, ELIJAH PARISH (November 9, 1802-November 7, 1837), the "martyr abolitionist," was born at Albion, Maine, the son of a clergyman, Reverend Daniel Lovejoy, and Elizabeth (Pattee) Lovejoy, both of old New England stock. He graduated from Waterville (now Colby) College in 1826, taught school until May 1827, then emigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, where he again taught school and for a short time edited a Whig newspaper. Determining to follow his father into the ministry he returned to the East in 1832 to attend the seminary at Princeton. He was licensed to preach by the Philadelphia Presbytery in April 1833 and went back to St. Louis as editor of the Presbyterian weekly for the far West, the St. Louis Observer. On March 4, 1835, he married Celia Ann French, the daughter of a nearby planter. His editorial career began peacefully enough, but a spirit like his could not be peaceful long. Fired by the "expanding benevolence" that inspired his church in the early thirties, he enlisted his paper in the Presbyterian war against slavery, intemperance, and "popery." The border-states movement for the gradual abolition of slavery, so nearly successful in Kentucky and Virginia, had not extended to Missouri; and St. Louis, river port for the lower South, would hear no discussion of the subject. Protests multiplied, and rather than moderate his tone, in 1836 Lovejoy moved to Alton, Illinois, twenty-five miles up the river.

At that time Alton was the most prosperous city in Illinois. Emigrants from New England and the Eastern states made up its population; and the doctrine Lovejoy had preached in St. Louis, the evil of slavery and its gradual emancipation, was their own as well. Abolitionism, as the doctrine of immediate emancipation then was called, Lovejoy had denounced in the strongest terms. But even as he left St. Louis for Alton his views were changing. At the next General Assembly, which he attended shortly before he moved to Alton (July 1836), the equivocating course of that body toward abolition petitions so angered him that with his own indignant pen he wrote the protest which the abolitionists published to the church. An abolitionist by conviction and sympathy, if not by affiliation, he returned to edit the Alton Observer.

At the outset he encountered misfortune. His press arrived from St. Louis on a Sabbath morning and Lovejoy's Sabbatarian convictions compelled him to leave it unguarded on the wharf. Some time during Sunday night it was dumped into the river. But the good citizens of Alton called a public meeting, unanimously condemned the outrage and-carefully expressing their disapproval of abolitionism-pledged the money for a new press. On his part Lovejoy expressed his gratitude and promised to edit his paper in the interest of the church alone. That promise he could not keep. Week by week his abolitionism crept into the columns of the Observer: reports of his local anti-slavery society; his abolition resolutions to the Presbyterian Synod; his correspondence with a score of fearless agitators here and there in the state; and even accounts of the progress of the cause in the nation. Finally, July 4, 1837, he printed a call for a meeting of the anti-slavery host at Alton to form a state auxiliary to the American Anti-Slavery Society; and after numerous delays the state society was organized on the 26th of October. Alton citizens were outraged. Mobs destroyed the Observer press again and yet again; but each time the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society sent another. Lovejoy wrote defiantly: "These mobs will cease as soon as some of the mobites are hung up by the neck, and not before. . . . Mercy no less than Justice calls for a summary-execution of some of the wretches as an example to the rest."

After the founding of the state society the press was destroyed again, but news soon arrived that another press from Ohio was on the way. Lovejoy's friends caught his defiant spirit. Sixty young abolitionists from towns nearby assembled with arms in their hands, determined that this press should not go the way of the others. At a public meeting leading citizens implored Lovejoy to leave, but he replied that he was ready for martyrdom. The press arrived on November 7 and was placed in a warehouse under guard. Merchants closed their stores and the whole city waited in dread for the night. An armed mob gathered in the darkness and stormed the warehouse, but the guard fought them back. Some of the mob tried to set the warehouse on fire, and Lovejoy, rushing out to prevent it, was shot dead.

[The chief source for Lovejoy's biography is the Memoir of the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy (1838), by Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy. One of the armed band, Henry Tanner, reported the trials of the rioters, The Alton Trials (1838). His other later accounts are largely based on the Memoir. Edward Beecher's Narrative of the Riots at Alton (1838) is an honest but prejudiced account. Similar in the contrary direction is the account in Thos. Ford, A History of Illinois (1854). Essential to an understanding of the story as part of the national anti-slavery agitation are the Alton Observer 1836-37, the Philanthropist, 1836-38, and the N. Y. Evangelist, 1835-38. For Lovejoy's ancestry see C. E. Lovejoy, The Lovejoy Genealogy (1930).]

G. H. B.


LOVEJOY, Joseph C., Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Corresponding Secretary, 1846, Executive Committee, 1846,1850


LOVEJOY, Julia Louisa

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, pp. 34-35)


LOVEJOY, Owen, 1811-1864, clergyman, abolitionist, U.S. Congressman.  Illinois Anti-Slavery Society.  Active in Underground Railroad.  Member, Illinois State Legislature.  Brother of anti-slavery newspaper publisher, Elijah Parrish Lovejoy.  Like his brother, Owen Lovejoy was a strong supporter of William Lloyd Garrison.  He was elected to Congress in 1856 and actively supported the abolition of slavery in Congress until his death in 1864. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 6, 11, 13, 90-116, 265-270; Dumond, 1961, p. 186; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 4, 48, 91, 131, 188; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 141, 196; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, pp. 34-35; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 435; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 14, p. 6).  

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 435:

LOVEJOY, OWEN. […] had just begun active abolition propaganda and Owen speedily enlisted in the anti-slavery cause. In the growing excitement in Alton he stood steadfastly by his brother, and on the final tragic night after Elijah had been killed, Owen knelt beside his body and vowed "never to forsake the cause that had been sprinkled with his brother's blood." After completing his theological studies, he served as minister of the Congregational church at Princeton, Illinois, for seventeen years. In January 1843 he married a widow, Eunice (Storrs) Dunham, who bore him seven children. He was a popular and devoted minister, but persistently kept his vow, never losing an opportunity to testify to the wrong of slavery. During the decade from 1840 to 1850 he spoke fearlessly for the cause wherever he could find a hearing, despite the Illinois state law prohibiting abolition meetings. Frequently he encountered violence, but his unflinching boldness and the memorable name he bore saved him from injury. His colleague in the Illinois agitation, Ichabod Codding, was an abler orator, but Lovejoy, more than any other man, advanced abolition sentiment in the state.

During the next decade, Lovejoy became increasingly influential; and in 1854, when the Republican organization began, he was elected to the state legislature to lead the forces of freedom. In Illinois the new party embraced antiforeign "Know-Nothings" and Germans representing the hundred thousand foreign-born in Illinois, disgruntled Democrats and their enemies- old-line Whigs, and, feared by all, the Abolitionists. Lovejoy believed that only one man in Illinois could discipline this "rag-tag and bob-tail gang" into party organization, and that man was Abraham Lincoln. He urged Lincoln to lead the new movement, but Lincoln replied that the time was not yet ripe. He even tried to force Lincoln's hand by placing his name at the head of the state central committee for the Republican party. However, when Lincoln came to the Bloomington convention in 1856, it was Lovejoy who compelled the radicals to relinquish their abolition program and to accept Lincoln's conservative leadership. The same year Lovejoy was elected to Congress. There and in the Republican conventions at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia he was a radical leader; but in Illinois he was still Lincoln's henchman. When Lincoln stood for the Senate, Lovejoy put all his influence at his disposal. It was a dangerous gift. If Lincoln's opponents could "make Lincoln hang on Lovejoy's coat tails for Republican strength," the semblance of a bargain with Lovejoy would "choke Lincoln to death." Only Lovejoy's self-effacement prevented this catastrophe. Though he stumped the state in Lincoln's interest, he suffered Lincoln's repudiation of abolitionism gladly. While his contest with Douglas was lost, Lincoln thereby captured radical support, without losing his name for conservatism, for the presidential contest two years later.

In Congress Lovejoy assailed slavery and the South with a violence equaled only by Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner; but when Lincoln came to Washington, Lovejoy once more became his loyal supporter. To William Lloyd Garrison's attacks on Lincoln in 1862 he made fierce rejoinder, and to Thaddeus Stevens' proposals to treat the defeated South as a conquered province, he replied in the spirit of Lincoln's magnanimous reconstruction program. To him fell the honor of proposing the bill by which slavery in all the territories of the United States was abolished forever. He heard at last the Emancipation Proclamation, and died the next year. Lincoln wrote (J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, 1894, II, p. 527): "My personal acquaintance with him ... has been one of increasing respect and esteem, ending, with his life, in no less than affection on my part. ... To the day of his death, it would scarcely wrong any other to say he was my most generous friend."

[See the Liberator, 1862-63; the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1840-58; the Philanthropist, 1836-42; Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (1928); J.C. and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy (1838); T. C. Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (1897); C. E. Lovejoy, The Lovejoy Genealogy (1930); Addresses on the Death of Hon. Owen Lovejoy, Delivered in the Senate and House of Representatives, on Monday, March 28, I864 (1864); Congressional Globe, 35 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 752-54, 36 Congress, 1 Session, App., pp. 202-07, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 194; New York Tribune, Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), March 28, 1864.]

G. H.B.


LOWE, Ralph Phillips (November 27, 1805- December 22, 1883), governor and chief justice of Iowa.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1:

LOWE, RALPH PHILLIPS (November 27, 1805- December 22, 1883), governor and chief justice of Iowa, was the son of Jacob Derrick and Martha (Per-Lee) Lowe, who conducted a tavern in Warren County, Ohio, where the boy early heard great issues discussed by Henry Clay and other distinguished guests. He worked on the farm and acquired enough preparation by 1825 to enter Miami University, from which he graduated in 1829. Estranged from his father on account of his refusal to farm, he made his way to Ashville, Ala., where he taught school, read law, was admitted to the bar, and began to practise. After five years he returned to Ohio to open a law office in Dayton. In 1837 he married Phoebe Carleton and three years later removed to a farm near Bloomington, now Muscatine, Iowa. He quickly became active in public affairs and served in the constitutional convention of 1844. Defeated the following year as the Whig candidate for territorial delegate, he devoted him self to building up a successful practice, served as district attorney and, from 1852 to 1857, was judge of the first district. When, in 1858, he became the first governor under the constitution of 1857, he faced a serious situation. With no banking system of her own, Iowa was overrun with wildcat currency from neighboring states and was still experiencing the disastrous effects of the panic of 1857. She was deeply stirred, too, by the slavery issue. In cooperation with the able Seventh General Assembly, his administration put the new constitution into effect, established a banking system, enacted ample revenue laws, rescued the school lands and funds from fraud and waste, encouraged railway construction, created the state agricultural college, and placed the township and county government on a sounder basis. These measures together with good crops and good prices, in 1860, restored state prosperity. Yet when the time came for the nominating convention in June 1859 Samuel J. Kirkwood [q.v.] had so far established himself as the leader of the antislavery sentiment in Iowa that there was a general desire to make him the next governor. Lowe's record and character undoubtedly entitled him to a renomination, but he was not as popular as Kirkwood. His tolerance, gentleness, and dignity gave the appearance of weakness to what was, in reality, a sturdy, fearless character. In the interest of party harmony he reluctantly consented to go to the supreme bench while Kirkwood became governor.

He served on the bench until 1868, acting as chief justice in 1860 and from 1866-68. As a judge he was broad-minded, sympathetic, and intellectually honest. Being neither deeply read in the law nor thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of the law as a general rule of action he regarded equity as a higher law and rendered decisions that seemed to him just, even if not in strict accord with the technicalities of the law. When he left the bench he was interested in Iowa's "Five Per Cent Claim." He spent some years trying to collect about $800,000, in accordance with the agreement of the federal government to pay the states five per cent. of the proceeds of land sales in return for five years' exemption from state taxation on land sold by the government. In order to prosecute the claim more advantageously he moved to Washington, where he died without knowing that the Supreme Court had already decided against his suit. He was a member of the Presbyterian church and deeply interested in such phases of religious thought as the interpretation of Biblical prophecies and the question of the lost tribes of Israel. His faith in human beings continued to be strong throughout a varied and active life. A colleague wrote of him, that he "was a most credulous man, taking every man to be honest and true until convinced otherwise" (Annals of Iowa, October 189~p. 211).

[B. F. Shambaugh, History of the Constitutions of Iowa (1902); E. H. Stiles, Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa (1916); Iowa Historical Record, October 1891; Annals of Iowa, October 1900; General Catalog of the Graduates and Former Students of Miami University (1910 ?); Iowa State Register, December 23, 1883; Washington Post, December 25, 1883.]

C.F.P.


LOWE, Susan, married to prominent abolitionist Augustus Wattles, helped him found an African American trade school in Indiana (Dumond, 1961, pp. 280-281)


LOWELL, James Russell, 1819-1891, poet, essayist, journalist, anti-slavery activist. Wrote antislavery poetry.

(Filler, 1960, pp. 29, 141, 185; Mabee, 1970, pp. 66, 208, 257, 342; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 155, 267n; Pease, 1965, pp. 310-315; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 468; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, pp. 39-42; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 458; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 14, p. 40). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 458:

LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL (February 22, 1819-August 12, 1891), author, teacher, public servant, foremost American man of letters in his time, was born and died in the same house, "Elmwood," in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, for more than forty years minister of the West Church (Unitarian), Boston, was descended from Perceval Lowell (or Lowle) who emigrated in 1639 from England to settle at New bury in the Massachusetts colony. Immediately back of Charles Lowell in descent were two John Lowells, graduates, like himself, of Harvard College, of which his father, Judge John Lowell, 1743-1802 [q.v.], was a fellow. From Harriet Brackett Spence, daughter of Keith and Mary (Traill) Spence of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the wife of the Reverend Charles Lowell, their poetic son received a sharply different strain of inheritance. Her forebears on both sides had come from the Orkney Islands; she herself, brought up in the Episcopal Church, in which one of her sons, Robert Traill Spence Lowell [q.v.], became a clergyman, was of a mystical strain, with a reputed gift of second sight and a contagious love of old ballads, proper to one not impossibly related to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The spirit of this mother was, indeed, so sensitive that in her final years it fell into a disorder that called forth her son's poem, "The Darkened Mind," ending with the sorrowful lines:

"Not so much of thee is left among us
    As the hum outliving the hushed bell."

Through Lowell's boyhood and younger manhood, however, her influence played a vital part in the forming of the poet, even as the paternal strain fortified the future publicist.

After preparation at the classical school of Mr. William Wells in Cambridge he entered Harvard College. As an undergraduate he took his prescribed duties with a lightness that could meet only with disapproval from academic authorities. Promiscuous reading in the college library was not then encouraged, but without it he could hardly have formed those lasting friendships with books described in his paper on Landor. "It was," he wrote, "the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was ! All the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweetness of truancy to that of study, for I should have been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I do not regret that diversion of time to other than legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn my grandsons to beware of doing the like?" (Latest Literary Essays, p. 54). This tendency might have been overlooked, but at the end of his senior year came a concrete offense which could not escape punishment. In T. W. Higginson's Old Cambridge (1899, p. 157) and Ferris Greenslet's James Russell Lowell (p. 23) may be found good evidence for believing that Lowell's personal celebration of his election as class poet sent him to chapel one afternoon when he might better have gone to his room, for at the beginning of the service he rose in his place and bowed, with smiles, to left and right, as if in acknowledgment of the honor his classmates had paid him. On the ground of "continued neglect of his college duties" the faculty promptly rusticated him to the care and instruction of the Reverend Barzillai Frost in the neighboring town of Concord until "the Saturday before Commencement." Thus he was prevented from reading his own class poem, a young conservative's fling, both jaunty and grave, at causes and persons soon to enlist his sympathies. Here he is even found decrying:

"those who roar and rave
O'er the exaggerated tortures of the slave.''

The poem is not included in his published works, but, filling thirty-nine generous pages of what has now become a rare pamphlet (Class Poem, 1838), it may be read as a truly promising and prophetic performance for the youth of nineteen who received his bachelor's degree with the Harvard class of 1838.

The few years of "finding himself" that followed immediately upon his leaving college were far from placid. He began the study of law, and, in spite of many uncertainties about its continuance, graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1840. An unhappy youthful love affair had made its contribution to the unsettled state of his mind. In 1866 he recalled this distressful time: "I remember in '39 putting a cocked pistol to my forehead- and being afraid to pull the trigger, of which I was heartily ashamed, and am still whenever I think of it" (Letters, II, 136).

It was not until he met and became engaged in marriage to Maria White, the gifted and beautiful sister of a classmate in Watertown, immediately adjoining Cambridge, that his future began to clarify itself. His prospects of self-support were so meager that their marriage had to be deferred for more than four years. Before it occurred (on December 26, 1844) Lowell made his public beginnings as poet, editor, critic, and reformer. In poetry this period marked the appearance of A Year's Life (1841) and Poems (1844). The second volume contained several anti-slavery poems. Now Maria White was a devotee not only of poetry but of anti-slavery sentiments, and the happy "Band" of young people who became Lowell's intimates through his association with her was eagerly devoted to the reforms of the day, among which abolitionism ranked high. Thus the young conservative became something of a radical before he was twenty-five. As a critic of literature he printed his first book, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), the preface of which was dated one week before his marriage. Much of this volume had already appeared serially in the Boston Miscellany, edited by Nathan Hale, even as many poems in the two previous volumes had been printed first in periodicals. Though Lowell declared in later life, "I am a book-man" (see address on "The Place of the Independent in Politics," 1888, Literary and Political Addresses, p. 235), he might have said with equal truth, "I am a magazine man," for both as editor and as contributor he touched the periodicals of his time at an extraordinary number of points.

His first appearance as an editor was in connection with The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine, produced in the months of January, February, and March 1843, by Lowell and his friend Robert Carter as editors and proprietors. Whether through lack of support or through a failure of Lowell's eyesight which drove him to New York for treatment by a specialist, the venture was short-lived; but the three issues, containing contributions from Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, and others whose names _have endured, testify to Lowell's instincts and capacities as an editor. In an introduction to the first issue, setting forth the aims of The Pioneer, he wrote in a vein that seems contemporaneous today, even while it was prophetic of what was to befall Lowell himself: "We hear men speak of the restless spirit of the age, as if our day were peculiar in this regard. But it has always been the same ... still the new spirit yearns and struggles and expects great things; still the Old shakes its head, ominous of universal anarchy; still the world rolls calmly on, and the youth grown old shakes its wise head at the next era."

Before completing this process himself Lowell was to live through some years of relative radicalism. Brought into the anti-slavery movement by his ardent young wife's enthusiasm for the cause and never himself counted one of its more violent advocates, he nevertheless identified himself completely with it by serving in Philadelphia for a few months immediately after his marriage as an editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, by continuing, on his return to Cambridge early in the summer of 1845, to write, in prose and verse, against slavery, and, within a year, by forming a connection with a New York publication, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, of which, two years later, in 1848, he became "corresponding editor."

Not in this quarter only did the sympathy and influence of Lowell's wife prevail with him. Her interest in reform was matched by h er devotion to poetry, in which, besides the gift of appreciation, she possessed a graceful lyric faculty of her own. Their idyllic life together seemed fulfilled in the birth of their fir st child, Blanche, who died (in March 1847) when an infant of less than fifteen months, but lived on in lines among the best known of Lowell's shorter poems: "She Came and Went," "The Changeling, " and "The First Snow-fall." A second daughter, Mabel, who survived him, was born in September 1847. A daughter, Rose, born in 1849, lived but a few months. A son, Walter, born in December 1850, died in Rome in April 1852. Before the end of the next year (October 27, 1853) Mrs. Lowell, deeply affected by these losses, herself died. In 1855 a slender volume, The Poems of Maria Lowell, "privately printed" in Cambridge and thus offered rather to friends than to the general public, bore witness to Lowell's appreciation of his wife's poetic gift.

The year 1848, called by one of Lowell's biographers (Ferris Greenslet) his annus mirabilis, certainly justified that name, for during its course, besides a volume of Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series, he published A Fable for Critics, 1he first volume of The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. To his claims for consideration as a poet and critic, this output added the claims of a humorist and political satirist. Thus at twenty-nine he had made his challenge in all the fields of production in which his ultimate place among American writers must be determined. With regard to his poetry, there would be less dissent today from an opinion of Margaret Fuller's than there was either when she expressed it some three years before the Fable for Critics appeared or in the later decades of the nineteenth century. "His interest in the moral questions of the day," she declared, "has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him" (Papers on Literature and Art, pt. II, 1846, p. 132). If posterity does not forget Margaret Fuller, it may be in part because Lowell included in his Fable such lines about an unmistakable "Miranda" as the following:

"She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva."

As a humorist and satirist Lowell can hardly be considered apart from his qualities as a critic and political observer. In the Fable for Critics humor and criticism are more frankly and plentifully blended than anywhere else in his writings. The critical estimates of his contemporaries among American writers have in general proved surprisingly near to the verdicts of posterity. When he wrote about himself:

"The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching,"

he forestalled what others may still say about a considerable portion of his poetic work. Nearly twenty years later he wrote in a letter to Norton (August 28, 1865), "I shall never be a poet till I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all meeting-house when I was growing up" (Letters, II, 105). Nowhere more clearly than in the Fable for Critics, from its ingeniously rhymed title-page through its seventy-four pages of text in the first edition, does Lowell exhibit his facility in the twisting of words into all the shapes demanded by punning and verse-making. He was indeed an incorrigible punster in prose as well as verse. Even in a serious book review he was capable of applying to certain Shakespearian commentators "the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta"-in which it took a Felton to recognize Eudamidas ("White's Shakespeare," Atlantic Monthly, February 1859, p. 244). This, for all its elaboration, has a neatness that justifies it-which cannot be said for all of Lowell's verbal pranks. Some of his ineptitudes became apparent even to Lowell after their first commission and were removed from later printings. Witness, for example, in the course of so serious and admirable a poem as "The Cathedral" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1870, p. 4), the miserable interchange with an Englishman at Chartres:

"'Esker vous ate a nabitang?' he asked;
'I never ate one; are they good?' asked I."

Such things are incredible, but there they are in the spontaneity of Lowell's first printing, subject to all such discount as the spirit of a period of ponderous jocosity will warrant, yet certainly dimming the luster to which he had so many valid claims as a wit and, in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, a man of taste.

As the Fable for Critics illustrates, from several angles, one aspect of Lowell, so do The Biglow Papers, of which the first series appeared in the same year, 1848. Lowell's preoccupation with words is here displayed through the medium of dialect. Proud of his intimacy with the finer shades of the Yankee vernacular-"I reckon myself a good taster of dialects," he once wrote-he carried to an extreme of phonetic exactness his reproductions of the peculiarities of New England speech. To this somewhat elaborate vehicle of his humor another was added in the academic utterances of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, whose list of degrees in an imaginary college catalogue is one of Lowell's triumphs of fooling. Through the mingled prose and verse of this clergyman, the rustic Hosea Biglow, and other mouthpieces, Lowell delivered himself, in the first series of Biglow Papers, of trenchantly telling criticism of the national government in the conduct of the Mexican War, especially in relation to the possible extension of slavery. These articles, appearing in the periodical press before their assemblage between covers, produced a palpable effect upon public opinion and first gave to Lowell the place he was henceforth to occupy as a patriotic observer of political affairs whose opinions about them must be reckoned with. Nearly twenty years later the same medium of Biglow Papers stood ready to convey his sentiments on the Civil War-sentiments in which a distrust and dislike of England held a surprisingly large place for one who was to become one of the most acceptable of American ministers to Great Britain. Out of all the writings of James Russell Lowell, the two series of Biglow Papers, joining wit, highly skilful writing, and a passionate devotion to liberty and country, may be regarded as his most distinctive contribution to the literature of his time.

Between 1848 and 1853, the year of his wife's death, Lowell spent fifteen months (July 1851-October 1852) in Europe, ripening his powers by observation and study. The death of Mrs. Lowell a year after his return was a desolating blow, yet before and after it fell he busied himself with writing for magazines and with much intercourse with friends. It is significant that between 1849, when he brought out a two-volume edition of his Poems, and 1864, when his Fireside Travels, a volume of essays, appeared, he made no addition to the list of his published books. The decade ending in 1864 was nevertheless of great moment in his career. Early in its course, and immediately after his delivery (January 1855) of a series of Lowell Institute lectures in Boston on the English poets, he was appointed, in succession to Longfellow, Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, and professor of belles-lettres in Harvard College; and in 1857 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, of which the first number was issued in November of that year. In his teaching position the scholarly interests which he had long pursued as an amateur became professional interests, with the large by-product of critical writing which he was henceforth to produce. Through his editorship-four years with the Atlantic Monthly (1857-61), followed for several years beginning in January 1864 by an association with Charles Eliot Norton [q.v.] in the conduct of the North American Review he not only found an outlet for his vigorous thinking on political matters and his appreciations of contemporary letters, but exerted a powerful influence in the direction of public thought and taste.

On Lowell's appointment to the Harvard professorship he went, alone, to Europe (June 1855- August 1856) for studies, especially in Germany and Italy, which should augment his qualifications for the teaching of European letters. He had left his only daughter, Mabel, in Cambridge at the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, in charge of a governess, Frances Dunlap, whose admirable qualities of mind and character led to the fortunate repair of Lowell's shattered domestic structure through his marriage with her in September 1857. This was at the beginning of his second year of college teaching, in which he continued without interruption for sixteen years. After two years' intermission (August 1872-July 1874) he took it up for four years more. Nominally he held the Smith Professorship from 1855 to 1886, when he became professor emeritus for the remaining six years of his life. In Barrett Wendell's Stelligeri (1893, pp. 20 5-17) a sketch of Lowell as a teacher of Dante to a small class in a college lecture-room or, still more personally, in his own study at "Elmwood," shows forth the informal method of the sympathetic, stimulating instruction which made him one of the most memorable influences with many college generations at Cambridge.

Through his identification with the infant Atlantic Monthly Lowell bore a leading part in a highly significant episode in the history of American letters. The remarkable group of writers in and about Boston at the middle of the nineteenth century-Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, and others, who had flowered simultaneously with the Unitarian reaction from the extreme Calvinism of earlier New England- was really the fortuitous springing up of a band of neighbors of diverse gifts yet with much in common. The Atlantic, standing for liberal thought and speech on matters of politics, religion, and letters, provided them with a single mouthpiece and afforded that sense of solidarity which contributes to the formation of a "school." Lowell proved himself an admirable editor, not merely in such larger matters of Atlantic policy as his insistence upon securing contributions from Holmes as a "condition precedent" to his accepting the editorship, but in the minutiae of editing, even with respect to emendations in poems by Emerson and Whittier. He gave evidence, moreover, by his own striking contributions in prose and verse to the pages of his magazine, that he should be counted also among its best contributors.

Lowell laid down his editorship of the Atlantic just about the time the Civil War was beginning, and began his association with the North American Review when, in January 1864, it was nearing its end. During the war, however, the Atlantic published several political papers from his pen, besides the second series of Biglow Papers. From 1864 till late in 1866 he contributed to the North American Review a series of vigorous prose papers, afterwards assembled with earlier articles, and one later, in his Political Essays (1888). To Lowell's passion for freedom there was allied, in all his feeling about the war and its consequences, the poignancy of the deaths of three beloved nephews at the front. No wonder that his writings about the issues of the times, whether in prose or in verse, glowed with a special fervor. No wonder that when it fell to him to produce the "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865," in honor of the sons of his college who had given their lives in the war, he produced the poem which, by common agreement, represents him at his best.

The occasion itself was memorable. Phillips Brooks, then a young clergyman settled in Philadelphia, made a prayer which seemed to eclipse all other utterances of a day on which scholars and soldiers held the center of the stage. Lowell's Ode, written at white heat on the very eve of the celebration, after many fears that it would not " some," suffered grave disadvantages: it was delivered under a strain of weariness from presiding at a Phi Beta Kappa meeting on the day before, and from much sacrifice of sleep for a final copying of the lines; and it lacked the noble strophe relating to Lincoln, which was added after the poem was read. Like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,  it seems to have fallen far short of recognition as an outstanding event of the day: indeed, in two Boston newspapers of the next morning no mention of it is found in the long accounts of the exercises. New York papers did better. From the time of its reaching the general public with its Lincoln strophe, in the Atlantic Monthly for September 1865, it took the place which it has held ever since, in the front rank of poems proceeding from the war and pertinent in its expression of Lowell's exalted spirit of patriotism.

Closely related to Lowell's work as a teacher in Harvard College stands the changed proportion of critical to creative writing as he grew older. A volume of poems, Under the Willows (1869), and a single poem, The Cathedral (1870), followed, to be sure, upon his Fireside Travels; but in 1870 also appeared another volume of essays, Among My Books; in 1871 still another, My Study Windows; and in 1876, Among My Books, second series. Literary criticism was the substance of all these volumes. The topics, such as Dryden, Dante, Shakespeare, and other poets, English and American, were topics with which he dealt in the classroom. They lent themselves well to treatment also for such periodicals as the Atlantic and the North American Review, and to assemblage in book form when they sufficed for a new volume.

As a critic Lowell was highly rated in his day, but with the passing of the years his stature has diminished. In The Romantic Revolution in America (1927), V. L. Parrington has found him an exemplar of Bostonian Victorianism (p. 436), of the limited dignity and conscience of English liberalism and Cambridge Brahminism (p. 472), and has defined him as "a bookish amateur in letters, loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and verbal curiosities" (p. 461). An English student of his writings, John M. Robertson, calls him "a man primarily endowed with a great gift of copious literary expatiation, highly 'impressionistic,' and only under pressure of challenge analytic" (North American Review, February 1919, p. 256). W. C. Brownell, in his American Pros e Masters (1909), alluding to Lowell's cleverness and personal charm, remarks: "Nothing is more envied in the living. Nothing finds prompter interment with their bones" (p. 277); and says of his critical work in general that it "will excel more in finding new beauties in the actual than in discovering new requirements in the ideal" (pp. 300-01). The upshot of Professor Norman Foerster's penetrating study of Lowell in his American Criticism (1928) is that he fell short of realizing his ambitions, "partly because his native force was inadequate, and partly because he was sucked into the current of his times" (p. 156). Nevertheless, every critic must acknowledge the breadth and alertness of his reading, the gusto and common sense that pervaded his prose writings, the exuberance of fancy and expression, the flow of humorous extravagance which he would have done well at times to check, the ardor, even the passion, of his feeling for his native land and its traditional ideals. To these qualities may be attributed his influence upon his contemporaries and the generation following.

The books that Lowell was still to write did not materially affect his place in American literature. Prose was decidedly to predominate over poetry. After 1876 two volumes of verse were published during his lifetime: Three Memorial Poems (1877), and Heartsease and Rue (1888); after his death appeared Last Poems of James Russell Lowell (1895). In prose-omitting pamphlets included also in collected writings-were Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), Political Essays (1888), and, after his death, Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891), The Old English Dramatists (1892), Letters of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1893), edited by Charles Eliot Norton, and New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932), edited by M. A. De Wolfe Howe. Other posthumous publications were reprints or rescues of fugitive writings which had not seemed to him worthy of preservation.

As the literary and political essays included in his earlier volumes had reflected his life as an editor and professor, so the later essays bore a recognizable relation to his later interests as a public servant. These began when, in 1876, he went as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, to bear his part in the defeat of Blaine and the selection of Hayes as a nominee for the presidency. Serving as a member of the Electoral College, after refusing solicitations to run for Congress, he adhered to Hayes, in the election contest with Tilden, on the clear ground that Hayes was the candidate he was chosen to support. For such party service men less qualified than Lowell for a diplomatic post have received their reward. His came in the spring of 1877, in the form of an invitation to assume the post of United States minister to Spain. His saying, "I should like to see a play of Calderon," accounted in part for the acceptance of this offer, · but for nearly three years in Madrid-from the summer of 1877 to the spring of 1880-he enacted the role of minister with much credit to himself and his country, adapting himself well to the formalities of a ceremonious court, appreciating and appreciated by the cultivated society of Madrid, extending his knowledge of the Spanish language and literature, seizing a summer opportunity for visiting Turkey and Greece, yet sorely harassed in the third year of his mission by the serious illness of his wife. When he received notice in January 1880 that the President had nominated him minister to the Court of St. James's, his equipment for service there had greatly improved since he left home, and his immediate perception that his wife's health would probably be much the better for the change gave added reason for accepting the post.

Of Lowell in England, Henry James wrote characteristically that ''some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute' to the dominion of style," and that "the true reward of an English style was to be sent to England" (Essays in London and Elsewhere, 1893, pp. 45, 55). The reward would have seemed more fitting if in earlier years Lowell's antagonism to England and the English had not been so pronounced. During the Civil War, beyond expressing himself frankly as he did in the "Jonathan to John" verses in the Biglow Papers, he found it nearly impossible to write to a single English correspondent. In his essay on "New England Two Centuries Ago" (North American Review, January 1865), he alluded to our "English cousins (as they are fond of calling themselves when they are afraid we may do them a mischief)"; and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1869) contains the remark, "Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back." When Lowell and the English came to know each other, the war was fifteen years in the past and there was as much inclination to forgive on the one side as to forget on the other. Lowell indeed performed a notable mission of good will, besides conducting to the satisfaction of all but certain Irish-Americans the delicate relations growing out of Fenian disturbances and carrying on the general work of the London legation. At private and public dinner tables, as on ceremonial and other occasions-such as his assuming the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute (October 6, 1884), when he delivered one of the best of his addresses, "Democracy"- his gift of informal and formal speech kept him in constant demand. In England, as in America, his friendships with the most interesting men and women of his time played a vital part in his life. In London, as in Madrid, his wife's health was a cause of grave anxiety, and on February 19, 1885, she died. A few months later the newly elected President Cleveland appointed Edward J. Phelps to succeed Lowell in London, and in June 1885 he returned to private life, mainly in America. In his six remaining summers there were four visits to England, where his many associations caused him to feel greatly at home. It was really at home, however, at "Elmwood," on August 12, 1891, that he died, in his seventy-third year.

From Lowell's writings in general his personality is clearly to be deduced-ardent, affectionate, whimsical, deeply serious. In the Letters edited by his friend Charles Eliot Norton his characteristics are revealed perhaps most clearly and consistently. If what seems a consciously "literary" quality in the letters causes a suspicion that ultimate publication was not wholly absent from Lowell's mind, such a suspicion may be dismissed. He was himself conscious of a tendency to write as if for more than a single reader. "It is a bad thing for one's correspondents, I find,'' he wrote to his daughter in 1869, "that one has been lecturing these dozen years" (Letters, II, 215). His letters indeed seem to have been much like his talk, in which he sparkled, perhaps as brightly as his Saturday Club colleague, Dr. Holmes, though with a superiority over that friend in the capacity of listener. One of his pet topics was the detection of a Jewish strain in unexpected quarters, and "to say the truth," wrote Sir Leslie Stephen, "this was the only subject upon which I could conceive Lowell approaching within measurable distance of boring" (Lowell's Letters, III, 336). His occasional speeches, like his vers d' occasion, abounded in felicities. In more serious speeches, of which his address (November 8, 1886) at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University is an admirable example, he gave impressive utterance to his ripened wisdom.

Professor Norman Foerster, in an appraisal of Lowell (American Criticism, p. r 50), states that he "stood forth among his contemporaries because of his accomplished versatility rather than because of high attainment." Lowell himself, in his essay on Carlyle, wrote that "real fame depends rather on the sum of an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special parts" (My Study Windows, p. 58). In special parts Lowell was abundantly brilliant, but the parts were so many and diverse-all of his writings being capable of separate or loosely connected magazine publication-that the effect of his work in its totality is inevitably diffused, and suffers in comparison with that of writers, perhaps of more limited abilities, who employed them with greater concentration. His Biglow Papers, a few of his poems, a few of his essays, seem forty years after his death to be compacted of the stuff of permanence. The great body of his work today offers its reward chiefly to the student of Lowell's time and of Lowell as an eminent figure of that period.

[The first important edition of Lowell 's collected works was The Writings of James Russell Lowell, Riverside Edition (10 volumes, 1890), to which volumes XI and XII, Latest Literary Essays and Addresses and The Old English Dramatists, ed. by C. E. Norton, were added in 1891 and 1892; the most comprehensive collection is The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell, Elmwood Edition (16 volumes, 1904), which includes the letters, ed. by Norton, in 3 volumes Citations in the foregoing article, except where otherwise indicated, are of the Elmwood Edition. Noteworthy collections of fugitive writings are Lectures on English Poets (printed for the Rowfant Club, Cleveland, 1897), being the Lowell Inst. Lectures of 1855, reproduced from the Boston Daily Advertiser; The Anti-Slavery Papers of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1902), reproduced from the Pennsylvania Freeman and the NM. Anti-Slavery Standard; and Impressions of Spain (1899), comp. from the Diplomatic Correspondence by J. B. Gilder, with introduction by A. A. Adee. Bibliographies include: L. S. Livingston, A Bibliog. of the First Editions in Book Form of the Writings of James Russell Lowell (1914); G. W. Cooke, A Bibliog. of James Russell Lowell (1906); and that comp. by Irita Van Doren for The Cambridge History of American Literature, II (1918), 544 ff. The main sources of biographical materia l are Letters of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1894), ed. by C. E. Norton and New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932), ed. by M.A. DeWolfe Howe. The Papers Relating to the Foreign R elations of the U. S., 1877-85, contain the record of his diplomatic career. See also H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (2 volumes 1901); Ferris Greenslet, James Russell Lowell (1905); E. E. Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899); E. E. Hale, Jr., James Russell Lowell (1899); A. L. Lowell, memoir in Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series XI (1897); G. W. Curtis, James Russell Lowell, An Address (1892); A. H. Thorndike, "Lowell," in The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume II (1918); J. J. Reilly, James Russell Lowell as a Critic (1915); E.W. Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club (1918); D.R. Lowell, The Historical Genealogy of the Lowells of America (1899); Letters of John Holmes to James Russell Lowell and Others (1917), ed. by W. R. Thayer; W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900).]

M.A. De W. H. 


LOWELL, John (October 18, 1824-May 14, 1897), jurist,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1:

LOWELL, JOHN (October 18, 1824-May 14, 1897), jurist, was born in Boston. His father, John Amory Lowell, was the son of John Lowell, 1769-1840 [q.v.]; his mother, Susan Cabot (Lowell), was the daughter of Francis Cabot Lowell [q.v.]. From private schools he went to Harvard, graduating from the college with distinction in 1843 and from the law school in 1845. After studying in the office of Charles G. Loring, he was admitted to the Boston bar in 1846. Directly after wards he spent a year abroad. His early practice, in association with his brother-in- law, William Sohier, chiefly concerned trust estates. He began practice alone in 1857. The panic and his family mill connections brought him into much litigation which made him a lifelong expert in insolvency law. In 1853 he married Lucy Buckminster Emerson of Boston, daughter of George B. Emerson [q.v.] and his first wife, Olivia Buckminster, who was of New Hamp shire stock. They had three sons and four daughters. In 1858 Lowell purchased a large farm at Chestnut Hill where he lived the rest of his life. Though he was a small man, not especially robust, his constant activity in walking about his land, planning its development, kept him free from any illness until shortly before his death. The beautiful grounds, with the pond, woods, and wild flowers, were by his tacit consent almost common property. From 1856 to 1860 he edited the Monthly Law Reporter (volumes XIX-XXII), assisted the last two years by S. M. Quincey. An article adversely criticizing the Dred Scott decision, by Lowell and Horace Gray, was published in the Law Reporter, June 1857, and reprinted as a pamphlet with the title, A Legal Review of the Case of, Dred Scott (1857).

In March 1865, President Lincoln appointed Lowell United States district judge for Massachusetts. Many of his most interesting opinions deal with marine controversies. These show a strong sense of practical situations and emergencies. "They smell of the sea; you can almost smell the tar, almost hear the wind rustling through the rigging" (Proceedings of the Bench and Bar, post, p. 23). The enactment in 1867 of a national Bankruptcy Act, after an interval of twenty years, gave him the opportunity to di splay his mastery of that field. His promotion in 1878 to be circuit judge for the fir st circuit transferred his work to the common law and patents. He disliked patent cases at first, but soon handled them with sound common sense and an acute perception of mechanical facts.

In his judicial opinions Lowell cited few cases. His wide knowledge of precedents took shape chiefly in a clear and orderly statement of principles. Every proposition was ultimately tested for its practical working value. He realized keenly the human factors of a case, and had a remarkable instinct for perceiving on which side real justice lay. One of the bar of his court said: "He would not, unless the law and the evidence compelled him, do what he thought was a practical injustice. And it seldom happened that he found himself so compelled. He had a marvellous talent for escaping from that difficulty" (Ibid., p. 45). Consequently, some called him a wayward judge, independent to the verge of wilfulness in establishing justice. When he resigned his office in 1884, the merchants of Boston took the unusual course of giving him a public dinner in recognition of his able solution of commercial questions. They requested him to prepare a new bankruptcy act, that of 1867 having been repealed. His draft was printed but not adopted. He also wrote A Treatise on the Law of Bankruptcy (2 volumes, 1899), which was completed after his death by his son, James A. Lowell, and is still useful, although much of the author's knowledge was superseded by the Act of 1898.

After his retirement Lowell had a large practice. He did not quite cease to be a judge, for-he was frequently selected as arbitrator or referee in important controversies. On the bench his uniform courtesy had often relieved a young practitioner of all embarrassment and aided him in the proper presentation of his case, and in later life his learning and experience were always at the service of younger members of the bar. He was an Overseer of Harvard, and had long service on the board of the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1896 he became chairman of the commission to revise the Massachusetts tax laws.

He was a delightful conversationalist, who walked up and down as he talked. His fund of humor never failed even on the bench. A man of very strong likes and dislikes, he was consciously on guard to prevent their affecting his judicial action.

[Judgments Delivered in the Courts of the U. S. for the Dist. of Massachusetts (2 volumes, 1872-77); Proceedings of the Bench and Bar of the Circuit Court of the U. S., Dist. of Mass., upon the Decease of Hon. John Lowell (1897); T. K. Lothrop, in Proceedings American Acad. Arts and Sci., volume XXXV (1900), and Proceedings Mass. Historical Society, 2 series XI (1897); D. R. Lowell, The Historical Genealogy of the Lowells of America (18 99); Later Y ears of the Saturday Club (1927), ed. by M.A. De W. Howe; Boston Transcript, May 14, 1897. Judge Lowell's portrait hangs in the U. S. District Courtroom in Boston.]

Z. C. Jr.


LOWELL, Maria White, 1821-1853, poet, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, p. 42)


LOWRIE, Walter, 1794-1868, educator, merchant, religious leader, statesman.  U.S. Senator, western Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Senate, 1825-1836.  Member of the Executive Committee, American Colonization Society (ACS).

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 104-105; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, p. 45; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 476; Annals of Congress)

“The Government of the Union flows as directly from the people as does the government of any of the States.  The circumstance that the delegates who formed the present Constitution, were appointed by the State Legislatures does not detract from this idea; because the instrument was afterward submitted to the people, and had it not bee approved by them, it would have had no more authority than the sweeping of you floor.  The Government of the United States, through limited in its powers, is supreme within the proper sphere of its action.  The respective Governments of the United States and of the several States are sovereign within their proper spheres, and no farther.  Hence it follows that the States are limited sovereignties.  It follows, also, that the right to admit new States, being within the sphere of the General Government is a right which, to that Government, is perfect… the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations for the territories, and the power to admit new States into the Union, have been given, by the people of the United States, to Congress.  They are powers of the General Government, within the proper sphere of its action, and of course sovereign and supreme.” (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, 1 Session, 1819-1820, I p. 107). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 476:

LOWRIE, WALTER (December 10, 1784-December 14, 1868), United States senator, missionary secretary, the son of John and Catherine (Cameron) Lowrie; was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. About 1792 his family came to Huntington County, Pennsylvania, and a few years later settled in Butler (then part of Allegheny) County. John Lowrie was an enterprising farmer, a stanch Presbyterian, and influential in his community. Walter was reared on the farm. He attended a subscription school and began to study the classics under Reverend John McPherrin with a view to entering the ministry. Despite his fervent desire to preach the Gospel, unforeseen obstacles made him change his plans, and in 1807 he went to Butler to teach school. There, attracted by the opportunities of public life, he was successively a clerk, member of the· board of commissioners, and justice of the peace. He also opened a store in partnership with his brother. On January 14, 1808, he married Amelia McPherrin, the daughter of his preceptor. In 1811-12 he served in the state House of Representatives and in 1812 was elected state senator as a Democrat, holding his seat until his resignation in 1819 to enter the United States Senate. His maiden effort in the Senate was a speech (January 20, 1820) on the Missouri question in which he boldly announced that "if the alternative be ... a dissolution of this Union, or the extension of slavery over this whole Western country, I, for one, will choose the former" (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 201-09). As a member of the committee on public lands, he opposed a revision of the land policy which would place it upon a cash rather than a credit basis, and other~ wise championed the cause of land purchasers and Western settlers. He was also on the committees on roads and canals,- accounts, finance, and Indian affairs. He was an ardent temperance advocate, and a founder of the congressional prayer meeting. After one term as senator he was secretary of the Senate from 1825 until 1836.

In 1836 Lowrie was elected corresponding secretary of the Western Foreign Missionary Society, which a year later became the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church. Under his guidance, 1838, the organization grew from obscurity to a great missionary enterprise. He later declared that the sacrifices and self-denial involved in the post were the charms by which the office secured its incumbent. Invariably in close touch with all phases of the work, he corresponded extensively with missionaries abroad, solicited contributions for the cause, personally supervised the sending of household provisions and farm implements to the Indians, and frequently visited the Indian missions in the West Three of his sons were foreign missionaries. James Walter Lowrie [q.v.] was his grandson. His first wife, by whom he had eight children, died in 1832, and two years later he married Mary K. Childs. He died in New York City.

[Lowrie edited his son's memoirs, Memoirs of the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie, Missionary to China (1849), which appeared in several editions and contains valuable material. John D. Wells, "The Hon. Walter Lowrie," in The Record of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., April 1869, portrays his activities with the Board of Foreign Missions. See also J. A. McKee, 20th Century History of Butler and Butler County, Pa. (1909); History of Butler County, Pennsylvania (1895), ed. by R. C. Brown; Annual Reports of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyt. Church in the U. S. A., 1838-68; Presbyt. Magazine, March 1855; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); The Centennial of the Western Foreign Missionary Society (1931), ed. by J. A. Kelso; New York Times, December 15, 1868.]

H.P.


LUDLOW, Fitz Hugh (September 11, 1836- September 12, 1870), writer,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1:

LUDLOW, FITZ HUGH (September 11, 1836- September 12, 1870), writer, was born in New York City, son of Reverend Henry G. and Abby (Wills) Ludlow. His father, a prominent abolitionist, was minister of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York, from 1828 to 1837, and for many years pastor of a Presbyterian church at Poughkeepsie. After a bookish boyhood, studying largely at home under his father's guidance, Fitz Hugh Ludlow entered the junior class of the college of New Jersey (1854), but after the burning of Nassau Hall transferred to Union College, where he graduated in 1856. By classmates he is described as brilliant in conversation, genial, generous to a fault, of active physique, with finely chiseled features and most expressive eyes. One of his poems written at Union is still the college song. Before entering college he had become addicted to the narcotic hashish, and in December of his graduation year published "The Apocalypse of Hasheesh" in Putnam’s Magazine. Parts of this article were incorporated into a volume, The Hasheesh Eater (1857), his most remarkable work. It was strongly influenced by De Quincey, but showed original powers of imagination and style. The rest of his life was an almost constant struggle against hashish. He taught a year at Watertown, New York, then studied law in New York City under William Curtis Noyes. Though admitted to the bar in 1859, he never practised, and even during his s studies was engaged largely in writing. In June 1859 he married Rosalie H. Osborne.


LUNDY, Benjamin, 1789-1839, philanthropist, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist leader, anti-slavery author and editor.  American Anti-Slavery Society.  Organized the anti-slavery Union Humane Society, St. Clairsville, Ohio, in 1816.  In 1821, he founded and published the newspaper, Genius of Universal Emancipation, in Greenville, Tennessee.  It was circulated in more than 21 states and territories, including slave states.  He was a member of the Tennessee Manumission Society.  In August 1825, he founded the Maryland Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for direct political action to end slavery.  He lectured extensively and helped organize numerous anti-slavery groups in the Northeast.  Supported establishing colonies of freed slaves in Mexico.  In 1836, published The National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty, a weekly paper.  In 1837, co-founded the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. 

(Adams, 1908; Dillon, 1966; Drake, 1950, pp. 118, 128, 130-131, 136, 156; Dumond, 1961, pp. 95, 136-137, 166; Earle, 1847; Filler, 1960, pp. 5, 26, 55, 57, 60, 99, 101, 105, 128, 130; Mabee, 1970, pp. 11-13, 18, 42, 186, 190, 192, 193, 199, 276, 376, 387n11, 390n21; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 33, 36, 39, 45, 105, 110, 310-311; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. IV, p. 54; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 506; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 546-548; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 14, p. 137; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 308). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 6, Pt. 1, p. 506:

LUNDY, BENJAMIN (January 4, 1789-August 22, 1839), abolitionist, was born in Sussex County, New Jersey, the only child of Joseph and Eliza (Shotwell) Lundy, both Quakers. His great-grandfather, Richard Lundy, son of Richard Lundy who came from Devonshire to Philadelphia in 1682, was a Quaker minister and established several Friends' meetings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Benjamin Lundy received only elementary education, and the strenuous physical labor he undertook in youth is said to have injured his hearing. In 1808 he went to Wheeling, Virginia, to learn the saddler's trade, and there first came into contact with slavery, witnessing coffles of negroes passing through the town in the inter-state slave trade. In 1815, at St. Clairsville, Ohio, to which place he had removed, he organized an anti-slavery group known as "The Union Humane Society," and in January 1816 issued a circular letter urging the formation of anti-slavery societies with common name and constitutions, with machinery for correspondence and cooperative effort, and with general conventions for determining policies. In this suggestion may be seen the germ of the later national anti-slavery societies. He began soon to contribute to The Philanthropist, published by Charles Osborn at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, in which slavery was discussed, and eventually accepted Osborn's invitation to join him in the publication of the paper. This necessitated closing his saddlery, which had been financially profitable; accordingly, he loaded his stock of goods on a flatboat and took it to St. Louis, arriving there in the fall of 1819 at the time when the Missouri slavery question was everywhere under discussion. Lundy at once associated himself with the anti-slavery forces and contributed articles to the newspapers. During his absence from Ohio, Osborn sold The Philanthropist, and when Lundy returned to Mount Pleasant he began publication, January 1821, of a new paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation. After but a few issues it was removed to Greenville, Tennessee, where it was published until the summer of 1824, when Lundy removed it to Baltimore.

During the next decade he became deeply interested in the question of colonization of freed negroes, as a possible solution for the national problem. He spent much time trying to find suitable places for such colonies, journeying to Hayti in 1825 and again in 1829, to the Canadian province of Upper Canada in 1832, and to Texas three times, 1830-31, 1833-34, and 1834-35. While he was absent on his first visit to Hayti, his wife, Esther Lewis, whom he had married in 1815, died at Baltimore. In January 1827 he was assaulted by Austin Woolfolk, a Baltimore slave-dealer, as a result of critical comments in the columns of The Genius upon Woolfolk's business. In 1828 Lundy went on a six months' lecturing trip through the Northern states, in the course of which he met William Lloyd Garrison and sought his help in the publication of The Genius. Garrison at first declined, but in 1829 joined Lundy at Baltimore and became associate editor. His vitriolic pen quickly involved the paper in lawsuits, however, and he and Lundy separated; while growing opposition in Baltimore led to the removal of the paper to Washington. During 1830-31, when Lundy was absent from home to obtain subscribers, he carried part of his equipment with him and had the paper printed in local shops wherever he happened to be. Publication became more and more irregular until finally, toward the end of 1835, The Genius ceased to appear. In the following August, Lundy began the publication in Philadelphia of The National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty, the chief purpose of which seems to have been to expose what the editor regarded as slaveholders' plots to wrest Texas from Mexico. At this time he was in close touch with John Quincy Adams and doubtless supplied Adams with much of the information concerning the Texas situation which he used so effectively in his speeches in Congress. In 1836 Lundy also published his pamphlet, The War in Texas, which presented arguments against the annexation of Texas and was one of the most vigorous of the writings to appear in that controversy. He continued to publish The National Enquirer at Philadelphia until March 1838 when it was taken over by John G. Whittier and its name changed to The Pennsylvania Freeman. In May of that year Lundy lost all his papers and journals when a Philadelphia mob destroyed "Pennsylvania Hall," and in the following summer he left for Illinois where his family resided. There he associated himself with the local anti-slavery societies and reestablished The Genius, twelve issues of which appeared before his death, after a brief illness, in August 1839. Though dated from Hennepin, the Illinois numbers of The Genius were printed at Lowell, Illinois. Lundy was buried in a Friends' graveyard on Clear Creek, in Putnam County.

Cheerful in temperament, gentle and mild in manner, a keen observer of men and nature, as his writings show, he was ready to adapt himself to whatever conditions he encountered. He was a pioneer in the organization of anti-slavery societies and in the publication of an anti-slavery newspaper, and was the most active figure in the whole movement during the twenties, while his enlistment of Garrison brought to the abolitionist cause its chief figure in the later period.

[The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (1847), comp. by Thomas Earle "under the direction and on behalf of his children"; W. C. Armstrong, The Lundy Family and Their Descendants of Whatso ever Surname (1902); files of The Genius of Universal Emancipation; W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (4 volumes, 1885-89); G. A. Lawrence, "Benjamin Lundy-Pioneer of Freedom," in Journal Illinois State Historical Society, July 1913; "The Diary of Benjamin Lundy Written during His Journey through Upper Canada, January 1832," reproduced from The Genius, with notes by Fred Landon, in Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, volume XIX (1222); Fred Landon, "Benjamin Lundy, Abolitionist,' in Dalhousie Review, July 1927.]

F.L.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.