26. John Fowler Trow.
Alton Trials: of Winthrop S. Gilman, Who Was Indicted with Enoch Long, Amos B. Roff[,] George H. Walworth, George H. Whitney, William Harned, John S. Noble, James Morss, Jr., Henry Tanner, Royal Weller, Reuben Gerry, and Thaddeus B. Hurlbut; for the Crime of Riot, Committed on the night of the 7th of November, 1837, while engaged in defending a Printing Press, from an Attack Made on It at That Time, by an Armed Mob Also, the Trial of John Solomon, Levi Palmer, Horace Beall, Josiah Nutter, Jacob Smith, David Butler, William Carr, and James M. Rock, Indicted with James Jennings, Solomon Morgan, and Frederick Bruchy; for a Riot Committed in Alton, On the night of the 7th of November, 1837, in unlawfully and forcibly entering the Warehouse of Godfrey, Gilman & Co., and breaking up and destroying a Printing Press   (New York: John F. Trow, 1838). From Peabody Books, CFPL Vault Collection.

 

MURDER OF ELIJAH LOVEJOY IN ALTON, ILLINOIS

On November 7, 1837, antislavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy died at the hands of rioters in Alton, Illinois.  Emerson was appalled by the incident and, in response, delivered an address in Concord focusing on the necessity of preserving free speech.   (The address does not survive in finished form.)  Emerson's biographer James Elliot Cabot wrote of the reception of the speech: "To the abolitionists, this tone appeared rather cool and philosophical, and some of his friends tried to rouse him to a fuller sense of the occasion.  He was insufficiently alive, they told him, to the interests of humanity, and apt to allow his disgust at the methods or manners of the philanthropists to blind him to the substantial importance of their work."  

The Concord Free Public Library's printed volume of Alton trial proceedings came from the collection of Transcendentalist, educational reformer, and social activist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.