The first speech of his political career that brought Abraham Lincoln notice beyond the prairie confines of Illinois was his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, given on January 27, 1838. In his speech, later printed by Simeon Francis’s Sangamo Journal and distributed nationally, the twenty-eight-year-old state legislator used the recent murder of Elijah Lovejoy at the hands of the mob in Alton, as well as the earlier lynching death of Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, to argue about the importance of the rule of law and the dangers of “the wild and furious passions” of the “savage mobs.” In the line most often cited by historians as the political awakening of the future president, the young Lincoln proclaimed, “Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own and his children’s liberty.”
Lovejoy’s murder in November 1837 stunned the nation and became a rallying point for antislavery sentiment. Former president John Quincy Adams called “the catastrophe of Mr. Lovejoy’s death . . . a shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent.” Over a century later, Senator Paul Simon, in his biography of Lovejoy, called the Abolitionist’s murder “one of the two greatest boosts the antislavery movement had from the day of independence to the outbreak of the Civil War,” the other being the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.
No one was ever punished for the murders of Elijah Lovejoy or Francis McIntosh. In Alton, a grand jury in January 1838 indicted eight members of the mob that had killed Lovejoy for “violent riot” as well as twelve defenders of Lovejoy’s press for “violent resistance to riot.” In a series of trials, no one on either side was found guilty. In St. Louis, McIntosh’s lynching was investigated by a slave-owning judge named—in a twist that new author from England, Charles Dickens, surely would have appreciated—Luke Edward Lawless. Judge Lawless directed the grand jury to indict none of the men involved in McIntosh’s lynching on the basis that the root cause of his killing was, in fact, Abolitionist newspapers that “fanaticize the Negro and excite him against the white man.”
In 1897, Elijah Lovejoy’s remains were exhumed from their unmarked grave and moved to Alton City Cemetery, where a monument was erected to honor the Abolitionist. The inscription on the monument reads, “Historic Alton—Alton that slew him and Alton that defended him. Lovejoy and Alton. Names as inseparable and as dear to the people of Illinois as those of Lincoln and Springfield.”
The notion advanced by the Lovejoys that all enslaved persons should be freed immediately was a radical one in 1837. Other groups, such as the American Colonization Society, favored sending the slaves back to Africa as free men and women. In his Lyceum speech, Lincoln argued, “Although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.” At the time, slavery was the law of the land in thirteen of the twenty-six states. In a similar vein, when he was one of six Illinois state legislators to vote against a proslavery resolution in early 1837, Lincoln had nonetheless issued a public statement saying that while slavery “is founded both in Injustice and bad policy . . . the promulgation of Abolition Doctrines tends to Increase rather than abate its evils.”
Spurred by the horror of witnessing his brother’s murder, Owen Lovejoy abandoned his plans to enter the ministry and became an ardent lifelong Abolitionist. He and Lincoln knew each other well. As a fellow Illinois member of Lincoln’s Whig Party (and later Republican Party), Owen Lovejoy was a loud and frequent critic of Lincoln from the radical left, demanding an immediate end to slavery and complaining of Lincoln’s more cautious, incremental approach. But as the two men aged (and the country spiraled toward the Civil War), their views became more aligned, and Lincoln seems to have used Lovejoy as a dependable foil for his own views. Lovejoy served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1856 to his death from cancer in 1864. When he died, Lincoln was heard to remark he had lost his best friend in Congress.
Owen Lovejoy was also a prominent early promoter of what became known as the underground railroad. Almost from the start of widespread navigation of the nation’s inland waterways by the great steamboats in the 1820s, opponents and proponents of slavery alike realized the potential for steamers to provide enslaved persons with a possible means of escape. (For those numerous slaves who worked along the rivers, these vehicles of potential freedom would literally pass in front of their eyes many times every day.) As the Missouri Supreme Court was heard to warn in 1846, “The facility of escaping on the boats navigating our waters will induce many slaves to leave the service of their masters. Their ingenuity will be exerted to invent means of eluding the vigilance of Captains, and many ways will be employed to get off unnoticed.”
As a result, many southern states passed laws specifically targeted at requiring steamboat captains and steamboat owners to exercise vigilance in preventing slaves from using their ships as a means of flight. Any activities to assist or harbor escaping slaves were also circumscribed by the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In Illinois, a free state but an overwhelmingly proslavery one at this time, by state law any person found harboring a fugitive slave or interfering with his recapture by his “lawful owner” was subject to fines and imprisonment. The Autobiography of William Wells Brown is one classic account of a slave escape via steamboat; coincidentally, Brown worked for Elijah Lovejoy as a printer’s assistant in St. Louis prior to his escape to freedom.
Despite the support of white Abolitionists like Lovejoy, especially in its early days, the underground railroad was principally the work of free African Americans and former slaves, like (the fictional) Sary and (the historical) Captain Limus depicted in the novel.
While Perish from the Earth is a work of imaginative fiction, the people, places, and cases populating it are drawn from Lincoln’s actual life and times. Lincoln and Speed shared a bed in the room atop Speed’s general store in Springfield from 1837 to 1841. Lincoln often left Springfield to ride the circuit through the surrounding counties, and his fellow circuit riders included Judge Jesse B. Thomas, state’s attorney David Prickett, and his fellow Springfield lawyers Stephen Logan and Ninian Edwards. George Devol was a legendary Mississippi riverboat gambler of the mid-nineteenth century, while George Bingham was a noted painter of the great American rivers and the men and women who worked along them.
Lieutenant (later major) Robert E. Lee spent 1837 and 1838 in St. Louis in charge of a project for the War Department’s Engineering Corps (the precursor to the Army Corps of Engineers), seeking to fix the dire situation along the St. Louis waterfront, where sand and silt were threatening to swallow the wharf and leave it a half mile from the river channel. Despite a cutoff of federal funding in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, Lee and his men were able to save the wharf and with it the commercial importance of the city.
There are two somewhat conflicting versions from nineteenth-century sources of the 1831 meeting between twenty-two-year-old Lincoln and Colonel William T. Ferguson of Memphis; one suggests Lincoln stopped briefly while going downriver on his flatboat to chop wood for Ferguson, while the other (adopted here) says he was heading back upriver on a steamboat and bereft of funds when he lived for a period in Ferguson’s house while earning enough money from chopping wood to pay for the rest of his return voyage to Illinois. Either way, President Lincoln received his old friend Ferguson in the White House in March 1861. As the Baltimore Sun reported, “They had a chat about old times and the present price of cordwood.”
In Alton, the Illinois State Prison opened to great fanfare in 1833 but soon fell into disrepair due to poor building methods and inadequate maintenance. In the 1850s, the social reformer Dorothea Dix wrote that it was “badly situated too near the river, undrained and ungraded and generally unsanitary. It is not fit for human habitation.” Nonetheless, it became an infamous Union prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Several thousand soldiers were held in cells designed for no more than several hundred persons, and well over one thousand prisoners died at the prison from the waves of disease that swept through it.
The ancient painting of the Piasa Bird (pronounced “PIE-a-saw”), whose location on the Alton cliffs was immediately below the prison site, was destroyed by quarrying conducted on the bluff by prison inmates in the 1840s. What little remained was finally ruined by the forced labor of the Confederate inmates in the 1860s. A modern reproduction exists at a nearby site today. But it is the original building that housed Captain Ryder’s shipping offices, where Lincoln tried cases when he came to Alton, that still stands on the same spot. It is, today, a popular lunch shop called My Just Desserts. I recommend the All-Star Sandwich.