1. Daniel A. Graff, Ph.D.
“Lovejoy’s Legacies: Race, Religion, and Freedom in St. Louis (and American) Memory”
Paper presented at the Fontbonne University Symposium,
“Collective Memory in St. Louis: Recollection, Forgetting and the Common Good,”
October 23, 2010*
“We have broken our truce with this spirit of darkness. Henceforth we stand in direct and
uncompromising hostility to it. … We were loathe to believe – what we are now fully convinced
of – that it is a spirit of unmixed evil.”1 Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor of the St. Louis Observer,
published these words in 1834, echoing the brashness and certainty of fellow printer William
Lloyd Garrison, who had launched his pioneering, Boston‐based abolitionist journal The
Liberator three years earlier with a similar, and much more famous, declaration: “I will be as
harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. … I am in earnest … and I WILL BE HEARD.”2
Like Garrison, Lovejoy was a white native of New England who achieved national prominence –
or, more aptly, notoriety – for his aggressive antislavery politics in antebellum America.
Unlike Garrison, however, Lovejoy left New England and migrated west to St. Louis in
the 1820s, where he made a living as an editor and a Presbyterian minister. In 1836, Lovejoy
was the only St. Louisan to publicly challenge the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a free black
*Daniel A. Graff teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, where he serves as Director of Undergraduate
Studies in the Department of History and Associate Director of the Higgins Labor Studies Program. He thanks the
following for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper: Heath Carter, Jon Coleman, Patrick Griffin, Nicole
MacLaughlin, John McGreevy, Mark Noll, as well as his superb undergraduate students in his fall 2010 course on
Jacksonian America. He also thanks the organizers of the Fontbonne University October 2010 symposium on St.
Louis memory, especially Mary Beth Gallagher and Randy Rosenberg.
1 St. Louis Observer, Sep. 4, 1834, quoted in Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editor (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1961), 40.
2 The Liberator, Jan. 1, 1831, quoted in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of
America, 1815‐1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 425.

2. boatworker who had been tied to a tree and burned alive after murdering a St. Louis police
officer. Blaming slavery’s corrupting influence on respect for law and order, Lovejoy repeatedly
castigated city leaders for tolerating this mob action. In response, hostile crowds repeatedly
destroyed his printing equipment. After enduring months of vandalism and threats to his
safety, Lovejoy decided to leave St. Louis for the nearby town of Alton, whose location across
the Mississippi River seemed to promise a more congenial climate for his controversial
editorials. It was there, in free‐state Illinois a year later, that Lovejoy lost his life, killed by
gunfire while trying to prevent the destruction of yet another printing press.3
Lovejoy’s violent end instantly converted him from local provocateur to national – or at
least northern – martyr, as abolitionists not only condemned the rampant lawlessness of the
slave states, but also warned free‐state residents that all aspects of personal liberty were at
stake in the struggle over slavery. While it would take another two decades for the national
debate over slavery to culminate in the Civil War, Lovejoy’s martyrdom certainly represented
one of the sparks that lit the sectional fire. Fittingly, then, Lovejoy has continued to hold a place
in American memory, with his heroic efforts on behalf of antislavery and press liberty meriting a
mention in most US history survey textbooks. One popular title, for example, praises Lovejoy
for “pressing the issues of emancipation and equality” upon a reluctant nation.4
3 The standard scholarly biographies of Lovejoy remain Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, and John Gill, Tide without Turning:
Elijah P. Lovejoy and Freedom of the Press (Boston: Starr King Press, 1958). On possible St. Louis connections to
nd
Lovejoy’s murder in Alton, see James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri (2 ed., 1990), 185.
4 James Henretta, et al., America’s History: Volume I: To 1877, 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 357.
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3. Modern American historians, in other words, tend to adopt wholesale the contemporary
abolitionist portrait of Lovejoy as heroic victim of proslavery censorship and violence. And in
the St. Louis area, that scholarly consensus is both echoed and made highly visible, with Lovejoy
commemorated in several public spaces. In Alton, Lovejoy’s gravesite features a towering
monument praising “the valor, devotion and sacrifice of the noble Defenders of the Press, who
… made the first armed resistance to the aggressions of the slave power in America.”5 A short
distance to the south at Southern Illinois University‐Edwardsville, the campus library bears
Lovejoy’s name.6 To the west, still in Illinois, the small village of Brooklyn, originally settled by
African Americans, is often called Lovejoy, cementing the editor’s link to the cause of black
liberty. And returning west across the river to the city that once expelled him, Lovejoy now
enjoys a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame honoring “great St. Louisans.”7 In public memory,
then, Elijah Lovejoy comes across as St. Louis’s own William Lloyd Garrison, a fiery and
uncompromising speaker of truth to power in the name of liberty for all.
The problem with such an appealing picture is that it masks a fundamental component
of Lovejoy’s activism – his strident anti‐Catholicism. The words opening this paper, for example,
though certainly Garrisonian in tone, were not directed at slavery at all. Instead, Lovejoy was
denouncing the Catholic Church. Let me repeat those lines: “We have broken our truce with
5 The website for the Illinois State Historical Library features a section on Elijah P. Lovejoy, including information on
and pictures of the Lovejoy monument in Alton, which was erected in the 1890s. See
http://www.state.il.us/hpa/lovejoy/monument.htm.
6 The website for the Lovejoy Library of the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville contains a link for “About
the Library.” See http://www.library.siue.edu/lib/gen0.html.
7 See the St. Louis Walk of Fame’s website at http://stlouiswalkoffame.org/foreword/, which includes the text
accompanying Lovejoy’s star on Delmar Boulevard in University City to the west of St. Louis.
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4. this spirit of darkness. Henceforth we stand in direct and uncompromising hostility to it. … We
were loathe to believe – what we are now fully convinced of – that it is a spirit of unmixed
evil.”8 Although completely dropped from both scholarly and public memory, Lovejoy’s anti‐
Catholicism was not only central to his politics, but also prior to – and just as important as ‐‐ his
antislavery activism.
To Lovejoy, a committed evangelical Protestant, the Catholic Church was the most
dangerous threat to the American republic, and he originally moved to St. Louis not to combat
slavery but to save the west from what he called “the principles of Popery.” Like many eastern
evangelicals, he saw St. Louis as a frontier community in desperate need of guidance and
salvation – which he sought to provide and encourage through not only his editorial leadership,
but also his participation in organizations such as the Missouri and Illinois Tract Society and the
American Sunday School Union. From the first, then, Lovejoy’s sojourn to the west was
distinctly missionary in nature, but he wasn’t on a mission to free any slaves.9
Lovejoy’s evangelical commitments fused with a fierce nationalism, and he identified
himself as a “Christian patriot.”10 To Lovejoy, in fact, these two identities were inseparable,
because he believed that his New England Puritan forebears had introduced to the continent
the principles of freedom and independence that had culminated in the American Revolution.
As he boasted to his readers, “Kindred blood to that which flows in my veins, flowed freely to
8 St. Louis Observer, Sep. 4, 1834, quoted in Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, 40.
9 Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editor, 11‐35.
10 St. Louis Observer, Nov. 5, 1835.
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5. water the tree of Christian liberty, planted by the Puritans on the rugged soil of New England.”
Now, as heir to this tradition, Lovejoy was more than willing to shed his blood to fertilize the
liberty tree’s offshoots in the west. To Lovejoy, in short, the causes of religion and the republic
were intertwined and inseparable, and he vowed “to maintain my rights as a republican citizen,
free‐born, of these United States, and to defend, fearlessly, the cause of TRUTH AND
RIGHTEOUSNESS.”11
That cause, as he saw it, demanded his fierce opposition to Roman Catholicism.12 To
Lovejoy, American Catholics owed their allegiance to the Pope, and hence they could never act
as independent citizens dedicated to the republic. According to him and many other American
evangelicals, the “the principles of Popery”, from canonization to ordination to the alleged
pomp of ceremonies and rituals, threatened independent thinking and republican citizenship.
As Lovejoy concluded, “So true is it, that Popery in its very essential principles is incompatible
with … civil or religious liberty.”13 And the problem was especially acute in 1830s St. Louis,
where the Church’s presence predated the arrival of Protestantism and still claimed the
allegiance of one‐third of the population.14
11 St. Louis Observer, Nov. 5, 1835. Here, and throughout the paper, quotes are exactly as they appear in the cited
source.
12 Biographers such as Dillon (see notes above) have not ignored Lovejoy’s anti‐Catholicism, but the Lovejoy in
American memory is generally known only for his antislavery and free press credentials. See also the important,
though brief, uncredited article, “Elijah P. Lovejoy As An Anti‐Catholic,” Records of the American Catholic Historical
Society of Philadelphia 62 (1951), 172‐80. For an exploration of the relationship between anti‐Catholicism and
antislavery, one that includes a brief reference to Lovejoy, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American
Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 43‐67.
13 St. Louis Observer, Jul. 21, 1836.
14 St. Louis Observer, Nov. 5, 1835; “Elijah P. Lovejoy As An Anti‐Catholic,” 174‐75; Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, 39.
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6. In the evangelical Protestant imagination, the west represented the battleground for
the nation’s soul, which is why Lovejoy migrated to St. Louis in the first place.15 But he
constantly worried because other migrants, especially those from Ireland, proved less than
interested in his missionary efforts. He also feared that “Christian patriots” like himself were
losing souls to the Catholic church, who sent foreign clergy trained by Rome to open churches
and schools in St. Louis and throughout the west, in an effort to tie America’s youth to the
“yoke of the Vatican,” thereby preventing their intellectual and spiritual independence.16
Accordingly, to prevent the Mississippi Valley from falling into “the hands of strangers, the well‐
known oppressors and persecutors of mankind,” Lovejoy advocated the revision of
naturalization laws to make it harder for immigrants to become citizens. 17
Lovejoy’s strident anti‐Catholicism made him many enemies in St. Louis, though
historians and commemorators have forgotten this. Lovejoy himself knew better. As he put it
just before leaving St. Louis, “the real origin of the cry, ‘Down with the Observer,’ is to be
looked for in its opposition to Popery. The fire that is now blazing and crackling through this
city, was kindled on Popish altars, and has been assiduously blown up by Jesuit breath.”18
Although he probably underestimated the extent to which his antislavery views contributed to
the hostility he faced, he was right that his opposition to Catholics also made him serious
15 The most prominent contemporary title was Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith,
1835). The classic historical study remains Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800‐1860 (New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1938).
16 St. Louis Observer, Dec. 31, 1835, quoted in “Elijah P. Lovejoy As An Anti‐Catholic,” 175.
17 St. Louis Observer, Oct. 15, 1835, quoted in “Elijah P. Lovejoy As An Anti‐Catholic,” 175.
18 St. Louis Observer, Nov. 5, 1835.
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7. enemies in the city.19 My aim here, however, is not to claim that anti‐Catholicism was more
fundamental to his thinking than antislavery – my point is that they were fundamentally
inseparable. But in our haste to commemorate this antislavery martyr, we have obscured that
connection and lost an important part of the story.
What was at stake in 1830s St. Louis was nothing less than two competing visions of
American citizenship. The dominant view, ascendant at the polls and in the streets, embraced
white political equality while resting on black subjugation and exclusion. This vision, articulated
most forcefully by the Jacksonian Democrats but crossing party lines within St. Louis, saw all
European‐Americans, regardless of religion or place of birth, as eligible for membership and
needed in the defense of slavery and white supremacy. Lovejoy countered with an alternative
conception of citizenship, one rooted not in race but in religion and nativity. He explicitly
rejected Catholics, especially immigrant Catholics, as unsuited for membership in the polity.20
These competing visions of citizenship shared much: they embraced republicanism,
believing that government must rest upon the consent of the governed; they advocated for an
equality amongst the citizenry that rejected European social ranks; and they believed in
America’s destiny to serve as the beacon of liberty for the rest of the world. We might label
both visions as democratic in their commitments to republicanism, equality, and liberty. But
despite their democratic fervor, both visions also shared another characteristic: each rested on
19 “Elijah P. Lovejoy As An Anti‐Catholic,” 178.
20 This and future paragraphs draw from my wider book manuscript, “Forging an American St. Louis: Labor, Race,
and Citizenship in the Making of a Nineteenth‐Century Metropolis.” See also my dissertation, “Forging an American
St. Louis: Labor, Race, and Citizenship from the Louisiana Purchase to Dred Scott” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Wisconsin‐Madison, 2004).
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8. an exclusive definition of citizenship that marked the outsiders as nothing less than enemies of
the republic, or anti‐citizens. For most white St. Louisans, the enemies were African Americans,
whether free or slave; for Lovejoy, the anti‐citizens were Catholics, especially Irish immigrant
Catholics. The reason for Lovejoy’s expulsion from St. Louis, then, was not just his antislavery
views, but his unceasing denunciations of Roman Catholics, Irish immigrants, and slaveholders,
which struck at the white solidarity at the heart of the political order, especially in the wake of
the McIntosh lynching. And no one better defended that political order than circuit court judge
Luke Lawless, who presided over the proceedings investigating McIntosh’s death.
Lawless, an Irish immigrant, a Catholic, and a firm defender of slavery, recommended
that the grand jury indict no one, because in his view the entire white community had united as
one to avenge the black boatworker’s horrible crime of killing a police officer. In fact, Lawless
actually went beyond this step and encouraged the grand jury to adopt a resolution urging the
state legislature to outlaw the printing of abolitionist publications. According to Lawless,
McIntosh was “only the blind instrument in the hands of abolitionist fanatics,” whose
incendiary opposition to slavery and racial hierarchy inspired the black boatman in his hatred
for the agents of law and order. He singled out Lovejoy for particular scorn. “It seems to me
impossible,” he thundered, “that while such language is used and published … there can be any
safety in a slave‐holding state.”21 Published widely throughout the city, Lawless’ speech
21 Missouri Argus, May 27, 1836.
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9. inspired repeated attacks on Lovejoy’s office and prompted the editor’s decision to leave St.
Louis.22
But before departing for Alton, Lovejoy took a final shot at Lawless. According to
Lovejoy, Judge Lawless “exemplified and illustrated the truth of the doctrine we have been
endeavoring to impress on the minds of our countrymen, … that foreigners educated in the old
world, never can come to have a proper understanding of American constitutional law.” Unlike
“home educated republicans” like Lovejoy, Lawless was “a foreigner – a naturalized one, it is
true, but still to all intents and purposes a foreigner – he was educated and received his notions
of government amidst the turbulent agitations of Ireland.” Worse than that, he was also “a
Papist; and in his Charge we see the cloven foot of Jesuitism, peeping out from under the veil of
almost every paragraph … ”23
In their heated confrontation in 1836, Luke Lawless and Elijah Lovejoy personified the
clashing visions of citizenship animating St. Louis, a battle won by Lawless, at least in the short
run. We’ve come a long way since then, of course, and contemporary American citizenship
corresponds with neither of these visions. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution explicitly
defines anyone born on US soil a citizen of the United States, and the 1st Amendment in its
current interpretation protects religious freedom.24 But consider this. We would never think of
naming a library after Luke Lawless, nor placing his star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, because
22 Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, 84‐85.
23 St. Louis Observer, Jul. 21, 1836.
24 The National Archives provides the text and commentary on the United States Constitution at
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html.
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10. we find repulsive his proslavery and white supremacist views. We would also reject, I’m sure,
the notion of commemorating Elijah Lovejoy’s intolerance toward Catholics. Yet Lovejoy
occupies a very visible and secure place in our public memory.
Is this a problem? Well, my goal is not to debunk Elijah Lovejoy’s reputation, nor to
decry the commemoration of antislavery activism. If anything, I would argue that we need more
efforts in our schools, museums, and memorial sites that reassert the centrality of slavery in
American history, as well as the antislavery activism that led to its destruction. Still, while I
wouldn’t advocate the removal of Lovejoy’s name from our public landscape, I do think there
are costs to commemorating Lovejoy’s antislavery while erasing his anti‐Catholicism.
These costs are most apparent in a new trend within American history scholarship.
Daniel Walker Howe won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book What Hath God Wrought: The
Transformation of America, 1815‐1848, an entry in the Oxford University Press’s History of the
United States series. Expansively conceived and beautifully written, Howe’s story has clear
heroes and villains. The good guys are those he calls “the Improvers,” politicians and reformers
who embraced the developing market economy, advocated an end to slavery, and labored to
perfect American society through curbing drunkenness. The bad guys are Andrew Jackson, his
Democratic Party, and their supporters, presented here as white supremacists, sexists, and
critics of perfectionist reform. In Howe’s telling, improvers like John Quincy Adams pointed
toward an American future inclusive of women and blacks, while Jackson and his followers
clung to a dying, exclusionary past.25
25 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, passim.
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11. Howe’s prize‐winning interpretation turns previous generations of historical scholarship
upside down. From Arthur Schlesinger to Charles Sellers to Sean Wilentz, most American
historians have painted Jackson and the Democrats as the political modernizers, ushering in a
new era rooted in mass participation and a more open government, while they portray the
Whigs as defenders of an old order premised on a restricted suffrage and governance by
economic elites. Recently, to be sure, the reputations of the Jacksonians have suffered, as
historians have begun to recognize just how thoroughly racialized was their vision of
democracy. That is all to the good, but Howe goes further and anoints their opponents as the
true democratizers. And that’s highly problematic. Just as the Jacksonians only appear
democratic to us if we ignore their commitment to white supremacy, the Whigs and cultural
reformers only appear democratic in a modern sense if we ignore their commitment to anti‐
Catholicism. While the Democrats embraced white Catholics and European immigrants as
citizens equal to all others, the Whigs represented a uniquely Protestant sensibility that saw
Catholicism, like drunkenness and Sabbath‐breaking and (in the case of northern Whigs)
slavery, as a foe needing to be conquered.26
Elijah Lovejoy himself merits only a sentence in Howe’s massive study, but it is
reformers like Lovejoy whom Howe identifies as the heroes of the era and the forerunners to
modern American democracy. To accomplish this, Howe must completely underplay the
26 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1945); Charles Sellers, The Market
Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815‐1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of
American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005). The literature challenging the
democratic standing of the Jacksonian Democrats is vast and growing: for starters, see David R. Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Mary
Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s,”
Journal of American History 86 (1999), 15‐40.
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12. nativism and anti‐Catholicism animating the Protestant reform impulse. Accordingly, despite
the tome’s expansive coverage, issues of religious persecution or intolerance merit only a few
short mentions in a book of over 900 pages.
Daniel Walker Howe’s search for historical heroes and villains illustrates perfectly the
problems associated with commemorating individuals like Elijah Lovejoy as embodying
enduring American values or principles, whether antislavery, freedom of the press, or even
democracy itself. For the fact is that Lovejoy’s antislavery activism was part of his broader
vision of citizenship, a vision premised on the exclusion of Catholics from the body politic. And
this anti‐Catholicism was not simply incidental, and thereby unrelated to, his antislavery views.
After all, Lovejoy’s courage to publish his newspaper and defend his printing press in the face of
repeated mob actions – indeed the very courage that led to his martyrdom which we
commemorate – was rooted in his faith that he had been sent by God to the west to save it
from the clutches of Popery.
It’s important for us to recognize that Lovejoy’s God was a Protestant God, one with
little tolerance for non‐believers or believers in a rival Christian God. By doing so, we won’t
appreciate any less the causes for which Lovejoy lost his life but we will appreciate more the
complicated history of American democracy. No less than antislavery or freedom of speech,
democracy has been a principle over which Americans have repeatedly fought, and the fight
over democracy has often taken the form of a struggle over citizenship: who is entitled to it,
who is eligible for it, who is worthy of it – and who is not.
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13. In the 1830s, Elijah Lovejoy, Luke Lawless, St. Louisans, and indeed the republic at large,
fought to restrict citizenship – indeed, to define democracy itself – on the basis of race, religion,
or nativity. Nearly two hundred years later, Americans today confront renewed attempts to
constrict citizenship using the same terms. Perhaps unknowingly, the current advocates of
restricting citizenship resurrect arguments from an earlier era, but they target different
populations – Latin American immigrants and their American‐born children, on the one hand,
and American Muslims, whether American‐born or not, on the other. Perhaps if we better
integrate into our historical narratives and public monuments the battles over citizenship that
have defined much of American history, we can better prepare to understand and confront
these challenges to an expansive citizenship in our own time.27
27 For a shared concern about the rise of nativism in contemporary American politics, see the essay by my Notre
Dame colleagues R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy, “Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque,” New York Review
of Books 57 (Sep. 30, 2010), available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/catholics‐
muslims‐and‐mosque/.
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