*Brown had been hired out briefly in St. Louis to the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, for whom he worked “mainly in the printing office.” After Lovejoy was murdered, Brown wrote of him that he was “a very good man, and decidedly the best master that I ever had. I am chiefly indebted to him . . . for what little learning I obtained while in slavery.” Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (Boston, 1847; repr., Slave Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr. [New York: Library of America, 2000]), 383.