Owen Lovejoy (1811–March 25, 1864), Congregationalist minister, abolitionist, and congressman. His elder brother, minister, and editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, on November 7, 1837. Owen, newly dedicated to the cause of abolition, co-wrote the
Memoir of Elijah P. Lovejoy (1838) at the American Anti-Slavery Society's offices in New York, then began his ministry in Princeton, Illinois (Owen Lovejoy, His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings 1838–64, ed. William F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004], 4). In the years that followed, Lovejoy promoted the foundation of antislavery churches in the state, worked on the Underground Railroad, and played a key role in state and national antislavery politics. He campaigned for the Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the 1840s, then helped to establish the Republican Party on "a popular antislavery basis" that was "more anti-extensionist than abolitionist" (Moore and Moore, xv; Mitchell Snay, "Abraham Lincoln, Owen Lovejoy, and the Emergence of the Republican Party in Illinois," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 22 [2001]: 94). On January 11, 1855, the National Era celebrated his election to the Illinois Legislature as a "Great Triumph" for "our cause." In 1856, with Lincoln's support, Lovejoy won a seat in the House of Representatives. (Though he gave up his position in the church at this time, his religious convictions continued to influence his political activities.) He campaigned strenuously with and for Lincoln in 1858 and 1860, and served in Congress from 1857 until his death in 1864.During his Washington career, Lovejoy championed the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, the emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia, and universal emancipation—among other antislavery measures. At a memorial meeting after his death, members of the Washington Island United Literary Association praised him as "the friend of the Union, the friend of Liberty, and the friend of the colored people of the United States" (
Christian Recorder, April 30, 1864, [2]). National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Oliver Johnson reprinted an obituary from the New York Tribune in his issue of April 2, and published Senator Charles Sumner's tribute on April 23, along with the elegy "On the Death of Owen Lovejoy." Lincoln wrote of Lovejoy that "while he was personally ambitious, he bravely endured the obscurity which the unpopularity of his principles imposed"; "it would scarcely wrong any other to say, he was my most generous friend" (letter dated May 30, 1864, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 7:366).