" Some idea--a faint one it is
true--will then be had of the multitudes that gave up all they
possessed that liberty might live and rule in this fair land of ours.
They were martyrs in the very highest sense to Freedom's immeasurable
cause. The war was the product of slavery. It was the natural outcome
of the great moral conflict that had so long raged in this country. It
was simply the development of an agitation that had begun on other
lines.
But there were martyrs to the cause of freedom before the war.
Everybody knows more or less of the story of John Brown, of
Ossawatomie, whose soul kept "marching on," although his body was
"a-mouldering in the grave."
There was another case involving the surrender of life to that cause,
which has always struck me as having stronger claims to our sympathies
than that of John Brown and his comrades in self-sacrifice.
I have already referred to Elijah P. Lovejoy who was a young
Congregational clergyman, who went from the State of Maine to St.
Louis, Missouri, in 1839. He became the editor of a religious journal
in which he expressed, in very moderate terms, an opinion that was not
favorable to slave-holding.
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