He was warned "to pass over in silence everything connected" with that question.

But he had no choice, he had to cry aloud against iniquities, which, as a Christian minister and a Christian editor, he dared not ignore.

His troubles with the people of St.Louis took in the spring of 1836 a sanguinary turn, when he denounced the lynching of a negro by a St.Louis mob, perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar atrocity.

In consequence of his outspoken condemnation of the horror, his office was broken into and destroyed by a mob.

Lovejoy thereupon removed his paper to Alton, but the wild-cat-like spirit pursued him across the river and destroyed his press.