It found ready access to the simple American folk in villages, in the smaller towns, and in the rural districts of New England and the North.

And already from these independent and uncorrupted sons and daughters of freedom had started the deep ground swell which was to lift the level of Northern public opinion on the question of slavery.
This Walpurgis period of the movement culminated on November 7, 1837, in a terrible tragedy.

The place was a little Illinois town, Alton, just over the Mississippi River from St.Louis, and the victim was Elijah P.
Lovejoy.

He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and the editor of a weekly religious newspaper, first published in St.Louis and removed by him later to Alton.

His sin was that he did not hold his peace on the subject of slavery in the columns of his paper.