Chapter 35: Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy is murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois.

In November 1837 the attack on Abolitionists ratchets up when Lovejoy’s warehouse is stormed by anti-black protesters who kill him and toss his printing presses into the nearby Mississippi River. A jury trial then finds all twelve defendants “not guilty.”

But the violence is condemned by a youthful Abraham Lincoln and also by one John Brown who rises in his Ohio Church and announces:

“Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate
my life to the destruction of slavery.”