Low-Lym: Lowe through Lyman

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


LOWE, Ralph Phillips (November 27, 1805- December 22, 1883), governor and chief justice of Iowa.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, pp. 451-542:

LOWE, RALPH PHILLIPS (November 27, 1805- December 22, 1883), governor and chief justice of Iowa, was the son of Jacob Derrick and Martha (Per-Lee) Lowe, who conducted a tavern in Warren County, Ohio, where the boy early heard great issues discussed by Henry Clay and other distinguished guests. He worked on the farm and acquired enough preparation by 1825 to enter Miami University, from which he graduated in 1829. Estranged from his father on account of his refusal to farm, he made his way to Ashville, Alabama, where he taught school, read law, was admitted to the bar, and began to practise. After five years he returned to Ohio to open a law office in Dayton. In 1837 he married Phoebe Carleton and three years later removed to a farm near Bloomington, now Muscatine, Iowa. He quickly became active in public affairs and served in the constitutional convention of 1844. Defeated the following year as the Whig candidate for territorial delegate, he devoted him self to building up a successful practice, served as district attorney and, from 1852 to 1857, was judge of the first district. When, in 1858, he became the first governor under the constitution of 1857, he faced a serious situation. With no banking system of her own, Iowa was overrun with wildcat currency from neighboring states and was still experiencing the disastrous effects of the panic of 1857. She was deeply stirred, too, by the slavery issue. In cooperation with the able Seventh General Assembly, his administration put the new constitution into effect, established a banking system, enacted ample revenue laws, rescued the school lands and funds from fraud and waste, encouraged railway construction, created the state agricultural college, and placed the township and county government on a sounder basis. These measures together with good crops and good prices, in 1860, restored state prosperity. Yet when the time came for the nominating convention in June 1859 Samuel J. Kirkwood [q.v.] had so far established himself as the leader of the antislavery sentiment in Iowa that there was a general desire to make him the next governor. Lowe's record and character undoubtedly entitled him to a renomination, but he was not as popular as Kirkwood. His tolerance, gentleness, and dignity gave the appearance of weakness to what was, in reality, a sturdy, fearless character. In the interest of party harmony he reluctantly consented to go to the supreme bench while Kirkwood became governor.

He served on the bench until 1868, acting as chief justice in 1860 and from 1866-68. As a judge he was broad-minded, sympathetic, and intellectually honest. Being neither deeply read in the law nor thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of the law as a general rule of action he regarded equity as a higher law and rendered decisions that seemed to him just, even if not in strict accord with the technicalities of the law. When he left the bench he was interested in Iowa's "Five Per Cent Claim." He spent some years trying to collect about $800,000, in accordance with the agreement of the federal government to pay the states five per cent. of the proceeds of land sales in return for five years' exemption from state taxation on land sold by the government. In order to prosecute the claim more advantageously he moved to Washington, where he died without knowing that the Supreme Court had already decided against his suit. He was a member of the Presbyterian church and deeply interested in such phases of religious thought as the interpretation of Biblical prophecies and the question of the lost tribes of Israel. His faith in human beings continued to be strong throughout a varied and active life. A colleague wrote of him, that he "was a most credulous man, taking every man to be honest and true until convinced otherwise" (Annals of Iowa, October 189~p. 211).

[B. F. Shambaugh, History of the Constitutions of Iowa (1902); E. H. Stiles, Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa (1916); Iowa Historical Record, October 1891; Annals of Iowa, October 1900; General Catalog of the Graduates and Former Students of Miami University (1910 ?); Iowa State Register, December 23, 1883; Washington Post, December 25, 1883.]

C.F.P.


LOWE, Susan, married to prominent abolitionist Augustus Wattles, helped him found an African American trade school in Indiana.

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 280-281)


LOWELL, Charles, 1782-1861, Boston, Massachusetts, clergyman, Union officer, opponent of slavery.

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 42-43.)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 42-43.

LOWELL, Charles Russell, soldier, born in Boston, 2 January, 1835; died near Middletown, Virginia, 20 October, 1864, was graduated at Harvard in 1854, with the first honors, and after several years of European travel was employed for some time in steel and iron works, and on the Burlington and Missouri River railroad. In the spring of 1861, while superintending iron-works in Cumberland valley, Maryland, he offered his services to the government, and on 14 May he was commissioned captain in the 6th cavalry. He served on General McClellan's staff till November, 1862, when he organized the 2d Massachusetts cavalry, and on 15 April, 1863, was made its colonel. He commanded a brigade of cavalry in Virginia, was actively engaged in the pursuit of Mosby's guerillas, and afterward under Sheridan in the Shenandoah valley, and was made brigadier-general of volunteers, to date from 19 October, 1864, on recommendation of General Sheridan, for his services in the latter campaign. In his three years of service twelve horses had been shot under him, yet he escaped without injury till the battle of Cedar Creek, where he was wounded while in the advance of General Getty's division, but refused to leave his command. In the moment of victory he received additional wounds, which caused his death on the following day. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 42-43.


LOWELL, James Russell, 1819-1891, poet, essayist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, temperance and labor reform advocate. Wrote antislavery poetry.  Married to abolitionist Maria White Lowell.  Became a contributing editor to the abolitionist newspaper, Pennsylvania Freeman.  Counsellor, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1847-1852. 

(Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 29, 141, 185; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 66, 208, 257, 342; Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 155, 267n; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 310-315; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 468; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 39-42; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 458; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 14, p. 40). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 458-465:

LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL (February 22, 1819-August 12, 1891), author, teacher, public servant, foremost American man of letters in his time, was born and died in the same house, "Elmwood," in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, for more than forty years minister of the West Church (Unitarian), Boston, was descended from Perceval Lowell (or Lowle) who emigrated in 1639 from England to settle at New bury in the Massachusetts colony. Immediately back of Charles Lowell in descent were two John Lowells, graduates, like himself, of Harvard College, of which his father, Judge John Lowell, 1743-1802 [q.v.], was a fellow. From Harriet Brackett Spence, daughter of Keith and Mary (Traill) Spence of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the wife of the Reverend Charles Lowell, their poetic son received a sharply different strain of inheritance. Her forebears on both sides had come from the Orkney Islands; she herself, brought up in the Episcopal Church, in which one of her sons, Robert Traill Spence Lowell [q.v.], became a clergyman, was of a mystical strain, with a reputed gift of second sight and a contagious love of old ballads, proper to one not impossibly related to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The spirit of this mother was, indeed, so sensitive that in her final years it fell into a disorder that called forth her son's poem, "The Darkened Mind," ending with the sorrowful lines:

"Not so much of thee is left among us
    As the hum outliving the hushed bell."

Through Lowell's boyhood and younger manhood, however, her influence played a vital part in the forming of the poet, even as the paternal strain fortified the future publicist.

After preparation at the classical school of Mr. William Wells in Cambridge he entered Harvard College. As an undergraduate he took his prescribed duties with a lightness that could meet only with disapproval from academic authorities. Promiscuous reading in the college library was not then encouraged, but without it he could hardly have formed those lasting friendships with books described in his paper on Landor. "It was," he wrote, "the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was ! All the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweetness of truancy to that of study, for I should have been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I do not regret that diversion of time to other than legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn my grandsons to beware of doing the like?" (Latest Literary Essays, p. 54). This tendency might have been overlooked, but at the end of his senior year came a concrete offense which could not escape punishment. In T. W. Higginson's Old Cambridge (1899, p. 157) and Ferris Greenslet's James Russell Lowell (p. 23) may be found good evidence for believing that Lowell's personal celebration of his election as class poet sent him to chapel one afternoon when he might better have gone to his room, for at the beginning of the service he rose in his place and bowed, with smiles, to left and right, as if in acknowledgment of the honor his classmates had paid him. On the ground of "continued neglect of his college duties" the faculty promptly rusticated him to the care and instruction of the Reverend Barzillai Frost in the neighboring town of Concord until "the Saturday before Commencement." Thus he was prevented from reading his own class poem, a young conservative's fling, both jaunty and grave, at causes and persons soon to enlist his sympathies. Here he is even found decrying:

"those who roar and rave
O'er the exaggerated tortures of the slave.''

The poem is not included in his published works, but, filling thirty-nine generous pages of what has now become a rare pamphlet (Class Poem, 1838), it may be read as a truly promising and prophetic performance for the youth of nineteen who received his bachelor's degree with the Harvard class of 1838.

The few years of "finding himself" that followed immediately upon his leaving college were far from placid. He began the study of law, and, in spite of many uncertainties about its continuance, graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1840. An unhappy youthful love affair had made its contribution to the unsettled state of his mind. In 1866 he recalled this distressful time: "I remember in '39 putting a cocked pistol to my forehead- and being afraid to pull the trigger, of which I was heartily ashamed, and am still whenever I think of it" (Letters, II, 136).

It was not until he met and became engaged in marriage to Maria White, the gifted and beautiful sister of a classmate in Watertown, immediately adjoining Cambridge, that his future began to clarify itself. His prospects of self-support were so meager that their marriage had to be deferred for more than four years. Before it occurred (on December 26, 1844) Lowell made his public beginnings as poet, editor, critic, and reformer. In poetry this period marked the appearance of A Year's Life (1841) and Poems (1844). The second volume contained several anti-slavery poems. Now Maria White was a devotee not only of poetry but of anti-slavery sentiments, and the happy "Band" of young people who became Lowell's intimates through his association with her was eagerly devoted to the reforms of the day, among which abolitionism ranked high. Thus the young conservative became something of a radical before he was twenty-five. As a critic of literature he printed his first book, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), the preface of which was dated one week before his marriage. Much of this volume had already appeared serially in the Boston Miscellany, edited by Nathan Hale, even as many poems in the two previous volumes had been printed first in periodicals. Though Lowell declared in later life, "I am a book-man" (see address on "The Place of the Independent in Politics," 1888, Literary and Political Addresses, p. 235), he might have said with equal truth, "I am a magazine man," for both as editor and as contributor he touched the periodicals of his time at an extraordinary number of points.

His first appearance as an editor was in connection with The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine, produced in the months of January, February, and March 1843, by Lowell and his friend Robert Carter as editors and proprietors. Whether through lack of support or through a failure of Lowell's eyesight which drove him to New York for treatment by a specialist, the venture was short-lived; but the three issues, containing contributions from Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, and others whose names _have endured, testify to Lowell's instincts and capacities as an editor. In an introduction to the first issue, setting forth the aims of The Pioneer, he wrote in a vein that seems contemporaneous today, even while it was prophetic of what was to befall Lowell himself: "We hear men speak of the restless spirit of the age, as if our day were peculiar in this regard. But it has always been the same ... still the new spirit yearns and struggles and expects great things; still the Old shakes its head, ominous of universal anarchy; still the world rolls calmly on, and the youth grown old shakes its wise head at the next era."

Before completing this process himself Lowell was to live through some years of relative radicalism. Brought into the anti-slavery movement by his ardent young wife's enthusiasm for the cause and never himself counted one of its more violent advocates, he nevertheless identified himself completely with it by serving in Philadelphia for a few months immediately after his marriage as an editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, by continuing, on his return to Cambridge early in the summer of 1845, to write, in prose and verse, against slavery, and, within a year, by forming a connection with a New York publication, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, of which, two years later, in 1848, he became "corresponding editor."

Not in this quarter only did the sympathy and influence of Lowell's wife prevail with him. Her interest in reform was matched by h er devotion to poetry, in which, besides the gift of appreciation, she possessed a graceful lyric faculty of her own. Their idyllic life together seemed fulfilled in the birth of their fir st child, Blanche, who died (in March 1847) when an infant of less than fifteen months, but lived on in lines among the best known of Lowell's shorter poems: "She Came and Went," "The Changeling, " and "The First Snow-fall." A second daughter, Mabel, who survived him, was born in September 1847. A daughter, Rose, born in 1849, lived but a few months. A son, Walter, born in December 1850, died in Rome in April 1852. Before the end of the next year (October 27, 1853) Mrs. Lowell, deeply affected by these losses, herself died. In 1855 a slender volume, The Poems of Maria Lowell, "privately printed" in Cambridge and thus offered rather to friends than to the general public, bore witness to Lowell's appreciation of his wife's poetic gift.

The year 1848, called by one of Lowell's biographers (Ferris Greenslet) his annus mirabilis, certainly justified that name, for during its course, besides a volume of Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series, he published A Fable for Critics, 1he first volume of The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. To his claims for consideration as a poet and critic, this output added the claims of a humorist and political satirist. Thus at twenty-nine he had made his challenge in all the fields of production in which his ultimate place among American writers must be determined. With regard to his poetry, there would be less dissent today from an opinion of Margaret Fuller's than there was either when she expressed it some three years before the Fable for Critics appeared or in the later decades of the nineteenth century. "His interest in the moral questions of the day," she declared, "has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him" (Papers on Literature and Art, pt. II, 1846, p. 132). If posterity does not forget Margaret Fuller, it may be in part because Lowell included in his Fable such lines about an unmistakable "Miranda" as the following:

"She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva."

As a humorist and satirist Lowell can hardly be considered apart from his qualities as a critic and political observer. In the Fable for Critics humor and criticism are more frankly and plentifully blended than anywhere else in his writings. The critical estimates of his contemporaries among American writers have in general proved surprisingly near to the verdicts of posterity. When he wrote about himself:

"The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching,"

he forestalled what others may still say about a considerable portion of his poetic work. Nearly twenty years later he wrote in a letter to Norton (August 28, 1865), "I shall never be a poet till I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all meeting-house when I was growing up" (Letters, II, 105). Nowhere more clearly than in the Fable for Critics, from its ingeniously rhymed title-page through its seventy-four pages of text in the first edition, does Lowell exhibit his facility in the twisting of words into all the shapes demanded by punning and verse-making. He was indeed an incorrigible punster in prose as well as verse. Even in a serious book review he was capable of applying to certain Shakespearian commentators "the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta"-in which it took a Felton to recognize Eudamidas ("White's Shakespeare," Atlantic Monthly, February 1859, p. 244). This, for all its elaboration, has a neatness that justifies it-which cannot be said for all of Lowell's verbal pranks. Some of his ineptitudes became apparent even to Lowell after their first commission and were removed from later printings. Witness, for example, in the course of so serious and admirable a poem as "The Cathedral" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1870, p. 4), the miserable interchange with an Englishman at Chartres:

"'Esker vous ate a nabitang?' he asked;
'I never ate one; are they good?' asked I."

Such things are incredible, but there they are in the spontaneity of Lowell's first printing, subject to all such discount as the spirit of a period of ponderous jocosity will warrant, yet certainly dimming the luster to which he had so many valid claims as a wit and, in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, a man of taste.

As the Fable for Critics illustrates, from several angles, one aspect of Lowell, so do The Biglow Papers, of which the first series appeared in the same year, 1848. Lowell's preoccupation with words is here displayed through the medium of dialect. Proud of his intimacy with the finer shades of the Yankee vernacular-"I reckon myself a good taster of dialects," he once wrote-he carried to an extreme of phonetic exactness his reproductions of the peculiarities of New England speech. To this somewhat elaborate vehicle of his humor another was added in the academic utterances of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, whose list of degrees in an imaginary college catalogue is one of Lowell's triumphs of fooling. Through the mingled prose and verse of this clergyman, the rustic Hosea Biglow, and other mouthpieces, Lowell delivered himself, in the first series of Biglow Papers, of trenchantly telling criticism of the national government in the conduct of the Mexican War, especially in relation to the possible extension of slavery. These articles, appearing in the periodical press before their assemblage between covers, produced a palpable effect upon public opinion and first gave to Lowell the place he was henceforth to occupy as a patriotic observer of political affairs whose opinions about them must be reckoned with. Nearly twenty years later the same medium of Biglow Papers stood ready to convey his sentiments on the Civil War-sentiments in which a distrust and dislike of England held a surprisingly large place for one who was to become one of the most acceptable of American ministers to Great Britain. Out of all the writings of James Russell Lowell, the two series of Biglow Papers, joining wit, highly skilful writing, and a passionate devotion to liberty and country, may be regarded as his most distinctive contribution to the literature of his time.

Between 1848 and 1853, the year of his wife's death, Lowell spent fifteen months (July 1851-October 1852) in Europe, ripening his powers by observation and study. The death of Mrs. Lowell a year after his return was a desolating blow, yet before and after it fell he busied himself with writing for magazines and with much intercourse with friends. It is significant that between 1849, when he brought out a two-volume edition of his Poems, and 1864, when his Fireside Travels, a volume of essays, appeared, he made no addition to the list of his published books. The decade ending in 1864 was nevertheless of great moment in his career. Early in its course, and immediately after his delivery (January 1855) of a series of Lowell Institute lectures in Boston on the English poets, he was appointed, in succession to Longfellow, Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, and professor of belles-lettres in Harvard College; and in 1857 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, of which the first number was issued in November of that year. In his teaching position the scholarly interests which he had long pursued as an amateur became professional interests, with the large by-product of critical writing which he was henceforth to produce. Through his editorship-four years with the Atlantic Monthly (1857-61), followed for several years beginning in January 1864 by an association with Charles Eliot Norton [q.v.] in the conduct of the North American Review he not only found an outlet for his vigorous thinking on political matters and his appreciations of contemporary letters, but exerted a powerful influence in the direction of public thought and taste.

On Lowell's appointment to the Harvard professorship he went, alone, to Europe (June 1855- August 1856) for studies, especially in Germany and Italy, which should augment his qualifications for the teaching of European letters. He had left his only daughter, Mabel, in Cambridge at the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, in charge of a governess, Frances Dunlap, whose admirable qualities of mind and character led to the fortunate repair of Lowell's shattered domestic structure through his marriage with her in September 1857. This was at the beginning of his second year of college teaching, in which he continued without interruption for sixteen years. After two years' intermission (August 1872-July 1874) he took it up for four years more. Nominally he held the Smith Professorship from 1855 to 1886, when he became professor emeritus for the remaining six years of his life. In Barrett Wendell's Stelligeri (1893, pp. 20 5-17) a sketch of Lowell as a teacher of Dante to a small class in a college lecture-room or, still more personally, in his own study at "Elmwood," shows forth the informal method of the sympathetic, stimulating instruction which made him one of the most memorable influences with many college generations at Cambridge.

Through his identification with the infant Atlantic Monthly Lowell bore a leading part in a highly significant episode in the history of American letters. The remarkable group of writers in and about Boston at the middle of the nineteenth century-Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, and others, who had flowered simultaneously with the Unitarian reaction from the extreme Calvinism of earlier New England- was really the fortuitous springing up of a band of neighbors of diverse gifts yet with much in common. The Atlantic, standing for liberal thought and speech on matters of politics, religion, and letters, provided them with a single mouthpiece and afforded that sense of solidarity which contributes to the formation of a "school." Lowell proved himself an admirable editor, not merely in such larger matters of Atlantic policy as his insistence upon securing contributions from Holmes as a "condition precedent" to his accepting the editorship, but in the minutiae of editing, even with respect to emendations in poems by Emerson and Whittier. He gave evidence, moreover, by his own striking contributions in prose and verse to the pages of his magazine, that he should be counted also among its best contributors.

Lowell laid down his editorship of the Atlantic just about the time the Civil War was beginning, and began his association with the North American Review when, in January 1864, it was nearing its end. During the war, however, the Atlantic published several political papers from his pen, besides the second series of Biglow Papers. From 1864 till late in 1866 he contributed to the North American Review a series of vigorous prose papers, afterwards assembled with earlier articles, and one later, in his Political Essays (1888). To Lowell's passion for freedom there was allied, in all his feeling about the war and its consequences, the poignancy of the deaths of three beloved nephews at the front. No wonder that his writings about the issues of the times, whether in prose or in verse, glowed with a special fervor. No wonder that when it fell to him to produce the "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865," in honor of the sons of his college who had given their lives in the war, he produced the poem which, by common agreement, represents him at his best.

The occasion itself was memorable. Phillips Brooks, then a young clergyman settled in Philadelphia, made a prayer which seemed to eclipse all other utterances of a day on which scholars and soldiers held the center of the stage. Lowell's Ode, written at white heat on the very eve of the celebration, after many fears that it would not " some," suffered grave disadvantages: it was delivered under a strain of weariness from presiding at a Phi Beta Kappa meeting on the day before, and from much sacrifice of sleep for a final copying of the lines; and it lacked the noble strophe relating to Lincoln, which was added after the poem was read. Like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,  it seems to have fallen far short of recognition as an outstanding event of the day: indeed, in two Boston newspapers of the next morning no mention of it is found in the long accounts of the exercises. New York papers did better. From the time of its reaching the general public with its Lincoln strophe, in the Atlantic Monthly for September 1865, it took the place which it has held ever since, in the front rank of poems proceeding from the war and pertinent in its expression of Lowell's exalted spirit of patriotism.

Closely related to Lowell's work as a teacher in Harvard College stands the changed proportion of critical to creative writing as he grew older. A volume of poems, Under the Willows (1869), and a single poem, The Cathedral (1870), followed, to be sure, upon his Fireside Travels; but in 1870 also appeared another volume of essays, Among My Books; in 1871 still another, My Study Windows; and in 1876, Among My Books, second series. Literary criticism was the substance of all these volumes. The topics, such as Dryden, Dante, Shakespeare, and other poets, English and American, were topics with which he dealt in the classroom. They lent themselves well to treatment also for such periodicals as the Atlantic and the North American Review, and to assemblage in book form when they sufficed for a new volume.

As a critic Lowell was highly rated in his day, but with the passing of the years his stature has diminished. In The Romantic Revolution in America (1927), V. L. Parrington has found him an exemplar of Bostonian Victorianism (p. 436), of the limited dignity and conscience of English liberalism and Cambridge Brahminism (p. 472), and has defined him as "a bookish amateur in letters, loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and verbal curiosities" (p. 461). An English student of his writings, John M. Robertson, calls him "a man primarily endowed with a great gift of copious literary expatiation, highly 'impressionistic,' and only under pressure of challenge analytic" (North American Review, February 1919, p. 256). W. C. Brownell, in his American Pros e Masters (1909), alluding to Lowell's cleverness and personal charm, remarks: "Nothing is more envied in the living. Nothing finds prompter interment with their bones" (p. 277); and says of his critical work in general that it "will excel more in finding new beauties in the actual than in discovering new requirements in the ideal" (pp. 300-01). The upshot of Professor Norman Foerster's penetrating study of Lowell in his American Criticism (1928) is that he fell short of realizing his ambitions, "partly because his native force was inadequate, and partly because he was sucked into the current of his times" (p. 156). Nevertheless, every critic must acknowledge the breadth and alertness of his reading, the gusto and common sense that pervaded his prose writings, the exuberance of fancy and expression, the flow of humorous extravagance which he would have done well at times to check, the ardor, even the passion, of his feeling for his native land and its traditional ideals. To these qualities may be attributed his influence upon his contemporaries and the generation following.

The books that Lowell was still to write did not materially affect his place in American literature. Prose was decidedly to predominate over poetry. After 1876 two volumes of verse were published during his lifetime: Three Memorial Poems (1877), and Heartsease and Rue (1888); after his death appeared Last Poems of James Russell Lowell (1895). In prose-omitting pamphlets included also in collected writings-were Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), Political Essays (1888), and, after his death, Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891), The Old English Dramatists (1892), Letters of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1893), edited by Charles Eliot Norton, and New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932), edited by M. A. De Wolfe Howe. Other posthumous publications were reprints or rescues of fugitive writings which had not seemed to him worthy of preservation.

As the literary and political essays included in his earlier volumes had reflected his life as an editor and professor, so the later essays bore a recognizable relation to his later interests as a public servant. These began when, in 1876, he went as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, to bear his part in the defeat of Blaine and the selection of Hayes as a nominee for the presidency. Serving as a member of the Electoral College, after refusing solicitations to run for Congress, he adhered to Hayes, in the election contest with Tilden, on the clear ground that Hayes was the candidate he was chosen to support. For such party service men less qualified than Lowell for a diplomatic post have received their reward. His came in the spring of 1877, in the form of an invitation to assume the post of United States minister to Spain. His saying, "I should like to see a play of Calderon," accounted in part for the acceptance of this offer,  but for nearly three years in Madrid-from the summer of 1877 to the spring of 1880-he enacted the role of minister with much credit to himself and his country, adapting himself well to the formalities of a ceremonious court, appreciating and appreciated by the cultivated society of Madrid, extending his knowledge of the Spanish language and literature, seizing a summer opportunity for visiting Turkey and Greece, yet sorely harassed in the third year of his mission by the serious illness of his wife. When he received notice in January 1880 that the President had nominated him minister to the Court of St. James's, his equipment for service there had greatly improved since he left home, and his immediate perception that his wife's health would probably be much the better for the change gave added reason for accepting the post.

Of Lowell in England, Henry James wrote characteristically that ''some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute' to the dominion of style," and that "the true reward of an English style was to be sent to England" (Essays in London and Elsewhere, 1893, pp. 45, 55). The reward would have seemed more fitting if in earlier years Lowell's antagonism to England and the English had not been so pronounced. During the Civil War, beyond expressing himself frankly as he did in the "Jonathan to John" verses in the Biglow Papers, he found it nearly impossible to write to a single English correspondent. In his essay on "New England Two Centuries Ago" (North American Review, January 1865), he alluded to our "English cousins (as they are fond of calling themselves when they are afraid we may do them a mischief)"; and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1869) contains the remark, "Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back." When Lowell and the English came to know each other, the war was fifteen years in the past and there was as much inclination to forgive on the one side as to forget on the other. Lowell indeed performed a notable mission of good will, besides conducting to the satisfaction of all but certain Irish-Americans the delicate relations growing out of Fenian disturbances and carrying on the general work of the London legation. At private and public dinner tables, as on ceremonial and other occasions-such as his assuming the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute (October 6, 1884), when he delivered one of the best of his addresses, "Democracy"- his gift of informal and formal speech kept him in constant demand. In England, as in America, his friendships with the most interesting men and women of his time played a vital part in his life. In London, as in Madrid, his wife's health was a cause of grave anxiety, and on February 19, 1885, she died. A few months later the newly elected President Cleveland appointed Edward J. Phelps to succeed Lowell in London, and in June 1885 he returned to private life, mainly in America. In his six remaining summers there were four visits to England, where his many associations caused him to feel greatly at home. It was really at home, however, at "Elmwood," on August 12, 1891, that he died, in his seventy-third year.

From Lowell's writings in general his personality is clearly to be deduced-ardent, affectionate, whimsical, deeply serious. In the Letters edited by his friend Charles Eliot Norton his characteristics are revealed perhaps most clearly and consistently. If what seems a consciously "literary" quality in the letters causes a suspicion that ultimate publication was not wholly absent from Lowell's mind, such a suspicion may be dismissed. He was himself conscious of a tendency to write as if for more than a single reader. "It is a bad thing for one's correspondents, I find,'' he wrote to his daughter in 1869, "that one has been lecturing these dozen years" (Letters, II, 215). His letters indeed seem to have been much like his talk, in which he sparkled, perhaps as brightly as his Saturday Club colleague, Dr. Holmes, though with a superiority over that friend in the capacity of listener. One of his pet topics was the detection of a Jewish strain in unexpected quarters, and "to say the truth," wrote Sir Leslie Stephen, "this was the only subject upon which I could conceive Lowell approaching within measurable distance of boring" (Lowell's Letters, III, 336). His occasional speeches, like his vers d' occasion, abounded in felicities. In more serious speeches, of which his address (November 8, 1886) at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University is an admirable example, he gave impressive utterance to his ripened wisdom.

Professor Norman Foerster, in an appraisal of Lowell (American Criticism, p. r 50), states that he "stood forth among his contemporaries because of his accomplished versatility rather than because of high attainment." Lowell himself, in his essay on Carlyle, wrote that "real fame depends rather on the sum of an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special parts" (My Study Windows, p. 58). In special parts Lowell was abundantly brilliant, but the parts were so many and diverse-all of his writings being capable of separate or loosely connected magazine publication-that the effect of his work in its totality is inevitably diffused, and suffers in comparison with that of writers, perhaps of more limited abilities, who employed them with greater concentration. His Biglow Papers, a few of his poems, a few of his essays, seem forty years after his death to be compacted of the stuff of permanence. The great body of his work today offers its reward chiefly to the student of Lowell's time and of Lowell as an eminent figure of that period.

[The first important edition of Lowell 's collected works was The Writings of James Russell Lowell, Riverside Edition (10 volumes, 1890), to which volumes XI and XII, Latest Literary Essays and Addresses and The Old English Dramatists, ed. by C. E. Norton, were added in 1891 and 1892; the most comprehensive collection is The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell, Elmwood Edition (16 volumes, 1904), which includes the letters, ed. by Norton, in 3 volumes Citations in the foregoing article, except where otherwise indicated, are of the Elmwood Edition. Noteworthy collections of fugitive writings are Lectures on English Poets (printed for the Rowfant Club, Cleveland, 1897), being the Lowell Inst. Lectures of 1855, reproduced from the Boston Daily Advertiser; The Anti-Slavery Papers of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1902), reproduced from the Pennsylvania Freeman and the NM. Anti-Slavery Standard; and Impressions of Spain (1899), comp. from the Diplomatic Correspondence by J. B. Gilder, with introduction by A. A. Adee. Bibliographies include: L. S. Livingston, A Bibliog. of the First Editions in Book Form of the Writings of James Russell Lowell (1914); G. W. Cooke, A Bibliog. of James Russell Lowell (1906); and that comp. by Irita Van Doren for The Cambridge History of American Literature, II (1918), 544 ff. The main sources of biographical materia l are Letters of James Russell Lowell (2 volumes, 1894), ed. by C. E. Norton and New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932), ed. by M.A. DeWolfe Howe. The Papers Relating to the Foreign R elations of the U. S., 1877-85, contain the record of his diplomatic career. See also H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (2 volumes 1901); Ferris Greenslet, James Russell Lowell (1905); E. E. Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899); E. E. Hale, Jr., James Russell Lowell (1899); A. L. Lowell, memoir in Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series XI (1897); G. W. Curtis, James Russell Lowell, An Address (1892); A. H. Thorndike, "Lowell," in The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume II (1918); J. J. Reilly, James Russell Lowell as a Critic (1915); E.W. Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club (1918); D.R. Lowell, The Historical Genealogy of the Lowells of America (1899); Letters of John Holmes to James Russell Lowell and Others (1917), ed. by W. R. Thayer; W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900).]

M.A. De W. H.  

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 39-42:

LOWELL, James Russell, poet and essayist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22 February, 1819. He is a son of the Reverend Charles Lowell (q. v.), and in genius and character is the hereditary representative of the heart and brains that founded New England. He was the youngest of five children. From both parents were transmitted high intelligence, sound principles, and right ideals, but the poetic and imaginative faculty came from the mother. His birthplace was the old Tory mansion now called “Elm wood” a large three-story, square, wooden house in the early colonial style, situated in spacious grounds, surrounded by magnificent elms and pines planted by his father, with an outlook on Charles river. (See view on page 40.) Lowell was fitted for college by William Wells (who was the senior of the firm to whom we owe the series of Wells and Lilly classics), entered Harvard in his sixteenth year, and was graduated in 1838. His first-published literary production, unless possibly some poems for “Harvardiana,” which he edited in 1837-'8, was his notable class poem, composed under peculiar circumstances. At the time of writing it the collegiate senior was undergoing a brief period of rustication at Concord, in consequence of inattention to his text-books. His forced sojourn in this Arcadia of scholarship and reform brought him into relationship with the transcendentalists, who at that day were in the habit of gathering at the home of Emerson, with whom then began that friendship which, despite the playful sallies of the younger poet in his earlier writings, only terminated with the death of the elder. The young satirist saw the humorous side of the social movements of the day, and the class-poem, scintillating with wit, attacked the abolitionists, Carlyle, Emerson, and the transcendentalists. In the law-school of Harvard, Lowell received the degree of LL. B., and was admitted to the bar in 1840. The only record of the practice of his profession is found in a story entitled “My First Client,” published in the “Boston Miscellany.” Henceforth he gave himself entirely to literature. In 1841 a volume of poems, written under the influence of affection for a woman of genius who became his wife, was published under the title of “A Year's Life.” The key-note of the poems, buoyant with youth and love, is in the closing lines:   
“The poet now his guide hath found,                         
  And follows in the steps of Love.” 

The volume was never re-published, and of the seventy poems only a small part have been deemed worthy of re-printing by the author. His marriage to the woman who inspired these poems took place in 1844. Maria White was an ardent abolitionist, and no doubt her influence assisted in turning his thoughts to the serious side of that cause to which he rendered immortal service. To understand Lowell's career, it is necessary to remember that he was not only a poet, a scholar, and a humorist, but always a conservative and a critic. No man was more thoroughly imbued than he with the fundamental principles of American democracy—a democracy without demagogism—no man more jealous than he of the untarnished reputation of America in politics and literature, no man more quick to see any departure from the high ideal of the republic, and his flaming pen was turned to attack whatever assailed this ideal—at one time slavery, at another time vicious political methods threatening the purity of democratic society. His radicalism was always conservative, his criticism always constructive. Lowell and his wife were regular contributors to the “Liberty Bell,” and his name appears in 1848 in “The Anti-Slavery Standard” as corresponding editor. In this paper, from 1843 to 1846, his poems during that period mostly appeared. Later the “Boston Courier” was the vehicle of his productions, and in its columns the first series of the “Biglow Papers” was given to the public, beginning in the issue for June, 1846, and ending in 1848. This satire was an event of the first importance in the history of the world's literature. In wit, scholarship, and penetrating knowledge of human nature, it took the place, which it has ever since maintained, of a masterpiece. Age has only increased its reputation, and it is a recognized classic both in England and America. The test of its power and universality is the constant quotation from it on both sides of the Atlantic. Locally its effect was amazing. It consisted of a series of poems in the Yankee dialect, ostensibly by Mr. Hosea Biglow, and edited, with an introduction, notes, glossary, index, and “notices of an independent press,” by “Homer Wilbur, A. M., pastor of the first church in Jaalam, and prospective member of many literary, learned, and scientific societies.” In the main it was a satire on slavery and the Mexican war, but there was scarcely any cant, hypocrisy, or meanness in politics, the pulpit, and the press that was not hit by it. The hitherto despised abolitionists, the subject of gibes and satire, found a champion who turned the batteries of the scholar, in unequalled wit, merriment, and ridicule, upon their enemies and the enemies of the free republic, exposing to the laughter of the world the sneaking attitude of compromising politicians and of those who wore the livery of heaven in the cause of human slavery. Thereafter the fight took on a very different character; it was respectable to be on the side of freedom. The “Biglow Papers” will no doubt preserve the Yankee dialect, and cause it to be studied ages hence in order to the comprehension of the effect upon our national life of one of the most opportune allies that freedom ever had.    

His interest in the anti-slavery contest did not prevent Lowell from purely literary labors. In 1843 he undertook the editing of “The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine,” in joint editor-ship with Robert Carter (q. v.); and Poe, Hawthorne, Neal, Dwight, Jones Very, Parsons, Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning), Whittier, and William W. Story were contributors. Only three numbers were published, the venture failing through financial disaster to the publishers. In this magazine was begun a series of essays on the poets and dramatists, which afterward formed the material for “Conversations with Some of the Old Poets” (Cambridge, 1845). In 1844 came a volume of verse, containing “A Legend of Brittany,” with thirty-three miscellaneous poems and thirty-seven sonnets (among them sonnets to Wendell Phillips and Joshua R. Giddings), written in a vein that foreshadowed and even announced the poet's position in the great anti-slavery revolution. These were followed in 1845 by “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” one of the most exquisite productions of his genius, a poem founded on the legend of the Holy Grail, which is said to have been composed in a sort of frenzy in about forty-eight hours, during which the poet scarcely ate or slept. The “Conversations on the Poets” was Lowell's first work in literary criticism, and was the basis of his lectures before the Lowell institute, 1854-'5, and of his lectures in Harvard university during his professorship of modern languages and belles-lettres. A third volume of poems, containing many new anti-slavery pieces, was published in 1848, and the same year was brought out anonymously the “Fable for Critics,” a youthfully daring but amusing and racy skit at the American poets, in which the laughing author did not spare himself. In 1849 a collected edition of his poems in two volumes was published, the “Biglow Papers” and “A Year's Life” being omitted. In the mean time Lowell had been a contributor to the “Dial,” the “Democratic Review,” the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” in which he reviewed Thoreau's first volume in 1849, and to “Putnam's Monthly” in 1853 and several years later. In 1851 the poet and his wife travelled in Europe, visiting England, France, and Switzerland, and residing for some time in Italy. The chief fruits of this journey were the essays on Italian art and literature and his eminence as a student and interpreter of Dante. In the autumn of 1852 he was again in America and in October, 1853, he sustained the greatest sorrow of his life in the death of his wife, who had long been an invalid. In January, 1855, on Mr. Longfellow's resignation, Lowell was appointed his successor as professor of modern languages and belles-lettres in Harvard university, and after two years' study abroad, during which time he greatly extended his knowledge of Italian, French, and Spanish, and became one of the first authorities in old French and Provençal poetry, he assumed the duties of his professorship. From 1857 till 1862 he wrote many essays, not since re-published, for the “Atlantic Monthly,” and in 1863 he became, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the “North American Review,” a connection which he maintained till 1872. The “Atlantic Monthly,” founded in 1857, of which Lowell was the first editor, was set on foot by Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell, and Emerson's study was the scene of the gathering of the great literary lights of Boston, when the enterprise was discussed and the character of the magazine settled upon.       
The Kansas struggle, 1856-'8, enlisted Lowell's sympathies; he was in accord with the leading anti-slavery men, and at one time, says Frank B. Sanborn, contemplated transferring his Hosea Biglow to Kansas to report in the vernacular the doings there, but “the flighty purpose never was o'ertook.” The outbreak of the civil war caused a revival of the dramatis personæ of the “Biglow Papers,” in which the disunionists at home and their sympathizers in England were equally brought under the lash of his stinging satire. It went straight to the American heart. This second series of “Biglow Papers” first appeared in the “Atlantic,” and was published in a volume in 1867. The “Fireside Travels,” containing the pleasant gossip about “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” the delightful “Moosehead Journal,” and notes of travel on the Mediterranean and in Italy, had appeared in the mean time. The “Atlantic” for January, 1867, contained “Fitz Adam's Story,” a poem intended to form part of a longer one, “The Nooning,” which has been announced as about to be published as far back as 1851, but has never been completed. It was omitted from “Under the Willows, and other Poems” (Boston, 1869), with the following explanation: “‘Fitz Adam’s Story,’ which some good friends will miss, is also left to stand over, because it belongs to a connected series, which it is hoped may be completed if the days should be propitious.” The volumes of prose, “Among my Books” and “My Study Windows,” issued in 1870, comprising the choicest of Lowell's literary essays, seemed to mark the close of his greatest literary activity; but the appearance recently of such a paper as that on the poet Grey shows that only opportunity is needed for the gathering of the maturest fruits of his critical genius. In 1872 he made another visit to Europe, and on his return the “Centennial” period called out his efforts in the production of three patriotic odes, the first at Concord, 19 April, 1875, the second under the Washington elm, 3 July of the same year, and the third for 4 July, 1876. He was a presidential elector in 1876.     

In 1877 Mr. Lowell was appointed by President Hayes to the Spanish mission, from which he was transferred in 1880 to the court of St. James. His diplomatic career closed with his recall by President Cleveland in 1885. In Madrid, in an atmosphere congenial to him as a student, he sustained the honor of the American name, and received the confidence and admiration that had been formerly extended to Washington Irving. His residence in London, although clouded and saddened by the long illness and by the death in February, 1885, of his second wife, Miss Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine, whom he had married in September, 1857, was as honorable to him as to the country he represented, an unbroken series of successes in the world of society and the world of letters. Called upon to settle no serious international differences, he bore himself with the tact and dignity that was to be desired in our representative to a great and friendly power, mindful always that his mission was to maintain cordial amity instead of seeking causes of alienation. And no man in our generation has done more than Lowell to raise American institutions and American character in the estimation of our English kin. His graceful and natural oratory was in demand on scores of public occasions. The most noteworthy of his public addresses was that on Coleridge, delivered at the unveiling of the bust of the poet in Westminster Abbey in May, 1885. The volume entitled “Democracy and other Addresses” (Boston, 1887) includes the foreign speeches, and those spoken at the dedication of the public library of Chelsea and at the Harvard anniversary. Mr. Lowell's political life is confined within the eight years of his terms of office at Madrid and London. His recall brought out expressions of deep regret in the English press, and he returned to the United States to receive the plaudits of his countrymen. Temporary political criticisms there were, but they were such as a man can afford to leave to the judgment of time, which will not fail to compare his own ideal of what the republic should be with the notions of his critics. Since his return to private life Mr. Lowell's home has been with his only child, the wife of Edward Burnett, at Southboro, Massachusetts. He resumed his lectures at Cambridge, and in the winter of 1887 gave a course on the English dramatists before the Lowell institute. The same winter he read a paper before the Union league club of Chicago on the authorship of Richard III. In the summer of 1887 he again visited England, receiving everywhere the highest honors that could be paid to a private citizen. The degree of D. C. L. was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford in 1873, and that of LL. D. by the University of Cambridge, England, in 1874. During his residence in England as minister he was elected rector of the University of St. Andrews.       
The following is a list of his works and their various editions: “Class Poem” (Boston, 1838); “A Year's Life” (1841); “Poems” (Cambridge, 1844); “The Vision of Sir Launfal” (Boston, 1845; 2d ed., 1848, and included in “Vest-Pocket Series”); “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” (1845); “Poems” (1848); “The Biglow Papers” (1848); “A Fable for Critics” (1848); “Poems” (2 vols., 1849); “Life of Keats,” prefacing an edition of his works (1854); “Poems” (2 vols., 1854); “Poetical Works” (2 vols., 1858); “Mason and Slidell, a Yankee Idyl” (1862); “Fireside Travels” (1864); “The President's Policy” (1864); “Ode recited at the Commemoration of the Living and Dead Soldiers of Harvard University,” 21 July, 1865; “The Biglow Papers,” 2d series (1867); “Under the Willows, and other Poems” (1869); “Among my Books” (1870); “The Courtin’” (1874); “Three Memorial Poems” (1876); “Among my Books,” 2d series (1876); and “Democracy, and other Addresses” (1887). “The Literary World” (Boston) of 27 June, 1885, is a Lowell number, containing estimates of Mr. Lowell's literary and personal qualities, with testimonies from prominent writers, and a bibliography. Francis H. Underwood published in 1882 a biographical sketch; and Stedman's “American Poets,” a volume called “Homes and Haunts of our Elder Poets,” and Haweis's “American Humorists,” contain essays upon Mr. Lowell. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 39-42.


LOWELL, John (October 18, 1824-May 14, 1897), jurist. An article adversely criticizing the Dred Scott decision, by Lowell and Horace Gray, was published in the Law Reporter, June 1857, and reprinted as a pamphlet with the title, A Legal Review of the Case of, Dred Scott (1857). In March 1865, President Lincoln appointed Lowell United States district judge for Massachusetts.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, pp. 466-467:

LOWELL, JOHN (October 18, 1824-May 14, 1897), jurist, was born in Boston. His father, John Amory Lowell, was the son of John Lowell, 1769-1840 [q.v.]; his mother, Susan Cabot (Lowell), was the daughter of Francis Cabot Lowell [q.v.]. From private schools he went to Harvard, graduating from the college with distinction in 1843 and from the law school in 1845. After studying in the office of Charles G. Loring, he was admitted to the Boston bar in 1846. Directly after wards he spent a year abroad. His early practice, in association with his brother-in- law, William Sohier, chiefly concerned trust estates. He began practice alone in 1857. The panic and his family mill connections brought him into much litigation which made him a lifelong expert in insolvency law. In 1853 he married Lucy Buckminster Emerson of Boston, daughter of George B. Emerson [q.v.] and his first wife, Olivia Buckminster, who was of New Hamp shire stock. They had three sons and four daughters. In 1858 Lowell purchased a large farm at Chestnut Hill where he lived the rest of his life. Though he was a small man, not especially robust, his constant activity in walking about his land, planning its development, kept him free from any illness until shortly before his death. The beautiful grounds, with the pond, woods, and wild flowers, were by his tacit consent almost common property. From 1856 to 1860 he edited the Monthly Law Reporter (volumes XIX-XXII), assisted the last two years by S. M. Quincey. An article adversely criticizing the Dred Scott decision, by Lowell and Horace Gray, was published in the Law Reporter, June 1857, and reprinted as a pamphlet with the title, A Legal Review of the Case of, Dred Scott (1857).

In March 1865, President Lincoln appointed Lowell United States district judge for Massachusetts. Many of his most interesting opinions deal with marine controversies. These show a strong sense of practical situations and emergencies. "They smell of the sea; you can almost smell the tar, almost hear the wind rustling through the rigging" (Proceedings of the Bench and Bar, post, p. 23). The enactment in 1867 of a national Bankruptcy Act, after an interval of twenty years, gave him the opportunity to di splay his mastery of that field. His promotion in 1878 to be circuit judge for the fir st circuit transferred his work to the common law and patents. He disliked patent cases at first, but soon handled them with sound common sense and an acute perception of mechanical facts.

In his judicial opinions Lowell cited few cases. His wide knowledge of precedents took shape chiefly in a clear and orderly statement of principles. Every proposition was ultimately tested for its practical working value. He realized keenly the human factors of a case, and had a remarkable instinct for perceiving on which side real justice lay. One of the bar of his court said: "He would not, unless the law and the evidence compelled him, do what he thought was a practical injustice. And it seldom happened that he found himself so compelled. He had a marvellous talent for escaping from that difficulty" (Ibid., p. 45). Consequently, some called him a wayward judge, independent to the verge of wilfulness in establishing justice. When he resigned his office in 1884, the merchants of Boston took the unusual course of giving him a public dinner in recognition of his able solution of commercial questions. They requested him to prepare a new bankruptcy act, that of 1867 having been repealed. His draft was printed but not adopted. He also wrote A Treatise on the Law of Bankruptcy (2 volumes, 1899), which was completed after his death by his son, James A. Lowell, and is still useful, although much of the author's knowledge was superseded by the Act of 1898.

After his retirement Lowell had a large practice. He did not quite cease to be a judge, for-he was frequently selected as arbitrator or referee in important controversies. On the bench his uniform courtesy had often relieved a young practitioner of all embarrassment and aided him in the proper presentation of his case, and in later life his learning and experience were always at the service of younger members of the bar. He was an Overseer of Harvard, and had long service on the board of the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1896 he became chairman of the commission to revise the Massachusetts tax laws.

He was a delightful conversationalist, who walked up and down as he talked. His fund of humor never failed even on the bench. A man of very strong likes and dislikes, he was consciously on guard to prevent their affecting his judicial action.

[Judgments Delivered in the Courts of the U. S. for the Dist. of Massachusetts (2 volumes, 1872-77); Proceedings of the Bench and Bar of the Circuit Court of the U. S., Dist. of Massachusetts, upon the Decease of Hon. John Lowell (1897); T. K. Lothrop, in Proceedings American Acad. Arts and Sci., volume XXXV (1900), and Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series XI (1897); D. R. Lowell, The Historical Genealogy of the Lowells of America (18 99); Later Y ears of the Saturday Club (1927), ed. by M.A. De W. Howe; Boston Transcript, May 14, 1897. Judge Lowell's portrait hangs in the U. S. District Courtroom in Boston.]

Z. C. Jr.


LOWELL, Maria White, 1821-1853, Watertown, Massachusetts, poet, abolitionist, temperance advocate, women’s rights activist, wife of poet and anti-slavery activist James Russell Lowell.  Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 42)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 42:

LOWELL, Maria White, poet, born in Watertown, Massachusetts, 8 July, 1821; died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 27 October, 1853, married Mr. Lowell in 1844. She possessed great beauty of person and character, and was an accomplished linguist. Her death, which took place the same night that one of Mr. Longfellow's children was born, called forth from Longfellow his poem beginning,  

“Two angels, one of life and one of death,      
  Passed o'er our village, as the morning broke.”  

A volume of her poems, which are characterized by tenderness and delicacy of feeling, was printed privately after her death (Cambridge, 1855). The best known of them are “The Alpine Shepherd” and “The Morning-Glory.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 42. 


LOWNES, Caleb, abolitionist leader, Committee of Twenty-Four/Committee of Education, the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 129)


LOWRIE, Walter, 1784-1868, New York, New York, educator, merchant, religious leader, statesman.  U.S. Senator, western Pennsylvania, 1819-1825, Secretary of the Senate, 1825-1836.  Member of the Executive Committee, American Colonization Society (ACS), Manager, 1834-1837, Vice President, 1836-1841.

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 104-105; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 45; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 476; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 230, 235; Annals of Congress)

“The Government of the Union flows as directly from the people as does the government of any of the States.  The circumstance that the delegates who formed the present Constitution, were appointed by the State Legislatures does not detract from this idea; because the instrument was afterward submitted to the people, and had it not been approved by them, it would have had no more authority than the sweeping of you floor.  The Government of the United States, through limited in its powers, is supreme within the proper sphere of its action.  The respective Governments of the United States and of the several States are sovereign within their proper spheres, and no farther.  Hence it follows that the States are limited sovereignties.  It follows, also, that the right to admit new States, being within the sphere of the General Government is a right which, to that Government, is perfect… the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations for the territories, and the power to admit new States into the Union, have been given, by the people of the United States, to Congress.  They are powers of the General Government, within the proper sphere of its action, and of course sovereign and supreme.” (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, 1 Session, 1819-1820, I p. 107). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 476:

LOWRIE, WALTER (December 10, 1784-December 14, 1868), United States senator, missionary secretary, the son of John and Catherine (Cameron) Lowrie; was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. About 1792 his family came to Huntington County, Pennsylvania, and a few years later settled in Butler (then part of Allegheny) County. John Lowrie was an enterprising farmer, a stanch Presbyterian, and influential in his community. Walter was reared on the farm. He attended a subscription school and began to study the classics under Reverend John McPherrin with a view to entering the ministry. Despite his fervent desire to preach the Gospel, unforeseen obstacles made him change his plans, and in 1807 he went to Butler to teach school. There, attracted by the opportunities of public life, he was successively a clerk, member of the board of commissioners, and justice of the peace. He also opened a store in partnership with his brother. On January 14, 1808, he married Amelia McPherrin, the daughter of his preceptor. In 1811-12 he served in the state House of Representatives and in 1812 was elected state senator as a Democrat, holding his seat until his resignation in 1819 to enter the United States Senate. His maiden effort in the Senate was a speech (January 20, 1820) on the Missouri question in which he boldly announced that "if the alternative be ... a dissolution of this Union, or the extension of slavery over this whole Western country, I, for one, will choose the former" (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 201-09). As a member of the committee on public lands, he opposed a revision of the land policy which would place it upon a cash rather than a credit basis, and other wise championed the cause of land purchasers and Western settlers. He was also on the committees on roads and canals,- accounts, finance, and Indian affairs. He was an ardent temperance advocate, and a founder of the congressional prayer meeting. After one term as senator he was secretary of the Senate from 1825 until 1836.

In 1836 Lowrie was elected corresponding secretary of the Western Foreign Missionary Society, which a year later became the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church. Under his guidance, 1838, the organization grew from obscurity to a great missionary enterprise. He later declared that the sacrifices and self-denial involved in the post were the charms by which the office secured its incumbent. Invariably in close touch with all phases of the work, he corresponded extensively with missionaries abroad, solicited contributions for the cause, personally supervised the sending of household provisions and farm implements to the Indians, and frequently visited the Indian missions in the West Three of his sons were foreign missionaries. James Walter Lowrie [q.v.] was his grandson. His first wife, by whom he had eight children, died in 1832, and two years later he married Mary K. Childs. He died in New York City.

[Lowrie edited his son's memoirs, Memoirs of the Reverend Walter M. Lowrie, Missionary to China (1849), which appeared in several editions and contains valuable material. John D. Wells, "The Hon. Walter Lowrie," in The Record of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., April 1869, portrays his activities with the Board of Foreign Missions. See also J. A. McKee, 20th Century History of Butler and Butler County, Pennsylvania (1909); History of Butler County, Pennsylvania (1895), ed. by R. C. Brown; Annual Reports of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyt. Church in the U. S. A., 1838-68; Presbyt. Magazine, March 1855; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); The Centennial of the Western Foreign Missionary Society (1931), ed. by J. A. Kelso; New York Times, December 15, 1868.]

H.P.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 45:

LOWRIE, Walter, senator, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 10 December, 1784; died in New York city, 14 December, 1868. He was brought to the United States when eight years of age by his parents, who settled in Huntingdon county, Pennsylvania, but subsequently removed to Butler county. Young Lowrie received a good education, but prosecuted his studies amid many difficulties. At the age of eighteen, he began a course of study with a view to entering the ministry, but was led to change his purpose. He was subsequently a member of the legislature for several years, and was afterward elected U. S. senator from Pennsylvania, and served from 6 December, 1819, till 3 March, 1825. On the expiration of his term he was elected secretary of the U. S. senate, an office he held for twelve years. While in the latter body he made his influence felt as a decided and earnest religious man. He was a founder of the Congressional prayer-meeting and the Congressional temperance society, and for many years served as a member of the executive committee of the American colonization society. In 1836 he became corresponding secretary of the Western foreign missionary society, afterward the Presbyterian board of foreign missions. He continued in the charge of his various duties until he was disabled by old age in 1868. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 45.

LOWRY, John, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


LOZIER, Clemence Sophia Harned, 1813-1888, Plainfield, New Jersey, physician, abolitionist, feminist activist.  President of New York Suffrage League. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 48; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 480)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 48:

LOZIER, Clemence Sophia, physician, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, 11 December, 1812; died in New York city, 26 April, 1888. She was the youngest daughter of David Harned, and in 1829 married Abraham W. Lozier, of New York, but soon afterward, her husband's health failing, she opened a select school and taught for eleven years. During this time she was associated with Mrs. Margaret Pryor in visiting the poor and abandoned, under the auspices of the Moral reform society. After her husband's death she determined to study medicine, attended her first lectures at Rochester eclectic medical college in 1849, and was graduated at the Syracuse medical college in 1853. Dr. Lozier at once began practice as a homœpathist in New York, where she continued to reside, and in the surgery required by the diseases of her own sex displayed peculiar skill, performing many capital operations in the removal of tumors. In 1860 she began a course of lectures on medical subjects in her own parlors, which in 1863 resulted in the founding of the New York medical college and hospital for women, where she was clinical professor of diseases of women and children, and also dean of the faculty, for more than twenty years. This institution was the first distinctively woman's medical college to be established in New York state. Dr. Lozier took an active interest in all that pertains to the elevation of her sex, for thirteen years was president of the New York city woman suffrage society, and for four years of the National woman suffrage society. She also held office in other philanthropic and reform associations, and was an occasional contributor to medical journals. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


LUCA, Alexander C., New Haven, Connecticut, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-1840.


LUDLOW, Fitz Hugh (September 11, 1836- September 12, 1870), writer.  His father, a prominent abolitionist, was minister of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York, from 1828 to 1837, and for many years pastor of a Presbyterian church at Poughkeepsie.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 491:

LUDLOW, FITZ HUGH (September 11, 1836- September 12, 1870), writer, was born in New York City, son of Reverend Henry G. and Abby (Wills) Ludlow. His father, a prominent abolitionist, was minister of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York, from 1828 to 1837, and for many years pastor of a Presbyterian church at Poughkeepsie. After a bookish boyhood, studying largely at home under his father's guidance, Fitz Hugh Ludlow entered the junior class of the college of New Jersey (1854), but after the burning of Nassau Hall transferred to Union College, where he graduated in 1856. By classmates he is described as brilliant in conversation, genial, generous to a fault, of active physique, with finely chiseled features and most expressive eyes. One of his poems written at Union is still the college song. Before entering college he had become addicted to the narcotic hashish, and in December of his graduation year published "The Apocalypse of Hasheesh" in Putnam’s Magazine. Parts of this article were incorporated into a volume, The Hasheesh Eater (1857), his most remarkable work. It was strongly influenced by De Quincey, but showed original powers of imagination and style. The rest of his life was an almost constant struggle against hashish. He taught a year at Watertown, New York, then studied law in New York City under William Curtis Noyes. Though admitted to the bar in 1859, he never practised, and even during his studies was engaged largely in writing. In June 1859 he married Rosalie H. Osborne.


LUDLOW, Henry G., 1797-1867, New York, New York, abolitionist, clergyman.  American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1834-1837.  Worked with the New York Amistad Committee.


LUDLOW, James D., Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-36.


LUDLOW, James G., Cincinnati, Ohio, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-1840.


LUFBOROUGH, Nathan, founding charter member of the American Colonization Society in Washington, DC, in 1816. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 258n14)


LUNDY, Benjamin, 1789-1839, philanthropist, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist leader, anti-slavery author and editor.  American Anti-Slavery Society.  Organized the anti-slavery Union Humane Society, St. Clairsville, Ohio, in 1816.  In 1821, he founded and published the newspaper, Genius of Universal Emancipation, in Greenville, Tennessee.  It was circulated in more than 21 states and territories, including slave states.  He was a member of the Tennessee Manumission Society.  In August 1825, he founded the Maryland Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for direct political action to end slavery.  He lectured extensively and helped organize numerous anti-slavery groups in the Northeast.  Supported establishing colonies of freed slaves in Mexico.  In 1836, published The National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty, a weekly paper.  In 1837, co-founded the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. 

(Adams, 1908; Dillon, 1966; Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 118, 128, 130-131, 136, 156; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 95, 136-137, 166; Earle, 1847; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 5, 26, 55, 57, 60, 99, 101, 105, 128, 130; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 11-13, 18, 42, 186, 190, 192, 193, 199, 276, 376, 387n11, 390n21; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 33, 36, 39, 45, 105, 110, 310-311; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 54; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, p. 506; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 546-548; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 14, p. 137; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 308). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 6, Pt. 1, pp. 506-507:

LUNDY, BENJAMIN (January 4, 1789-August 22, 1839), abolitionist, was born in Sussex County, New Jersey, the only child of Joseph and Eliza (Shotwell) Lundy, both Quakers. His great-grandfather, Richard Lundy, son of Richard Lundy who came from Devonshire to Philadelphia in 1682, was a Quaker minister and established several Friends' meetings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Benjamin Lundy received only elementary education, and the strenuous physical labor he undertook in youth is said to have injured his hearing. In 1808 he went to Wheeling, Virginia, to learn the saddler's trade, and there first came into contact with slavery, witnessing coffles of negroes passing through the town in the inter-state slave trade. In 1815, at St. Clairsville, Ohio, to which place he had removed, he organized an anti-slavery group known as "The Union Humane Society," and in January 1816 issued a circular letter urging the formation of anti-slavery societies with common name and constitutions, with machinery for correspondence and cooperative effort, and with general conventions for determining policies. In this suggestion may be seen the germ of the later national anti-slavery societies. He began soon to contribute to The Philanthropist, published by Charles Osborn at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, in which slavery was discussed, and eventually accepted Osborn's invitation to join him in the publication of the paper. This necessitated closing his saddlery, which had been financially profitable; accordingly, he loaded his stock of goods on a flatboat and took it to St. Louis, arriving there in the fall of 1819 at the time when the Missouri slavery question was everywhere under discussion. Lundy at once associated himself with the anti-slavery forces and contributed articles to the newspapers. During his absence from Ohio, Osborn sold The Philanthropist, and when Lundy returned to Mount Pleasant he began publication, January 1821, of a new paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation. After but a few issues it was removed to Greenville, Tennessee, where it was published until the summer of 1824, when Lundy removed it to Baltimore.

During the next decade he became deeply interested in the question of colonization of freed negroes, as a possible solution for the national problem. He spent much time trying to find suitable places for such colonies, journeying to Hayti in 1825 and again in 1829, to the Canadian province of Upper Canada in 1832, and to Texas three times, 1830-31, 1833-34, and 1834-35. While he was absent on his first visit to Hayti, his wife, Esther Lewis, whom he had married in 1815, died at Baltimore. In January 1827 he was assaulted by Austin Woolfolk, a Baltimore slave-dealer, as a result of critical comments in the columns of The Genius upon Woolfolk's business. In 1828 Lundy went on a six months' lecturing trip through the Northern states, in the course of which he met William Lloyd Garrison and sought his help in the publication of The Genius. Garrison at first declined, but in 1829 joined Lundy at Baltimore and became associate editor. His vitriolic pen quickly involved the paper in lawsuits, however, and he and Lundy separated; while growing opposition in Baltimore led to the removal of the paper to Washington. During 1830-31, when Lundy was absent from home to obtain subscribers, he carried part of his equipment with him and had the paper printed in local shops wherever he happened to be. Publication became more and more irregular until finally, toward the end of 1835, The Genius ceased to appear. In the following August, Lundy began the publication in Philadelphia of The National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty, the chief purpose of which seems to have been to expose what the editor regarded as slaveholders' plots to wrest Texas from Mexico. At this time he was in close touch with John Quincy Adams and doubtless supplied Adams with much of the information concerning the Texas situation which he used so effectively in his speeches in Congress. In 1836 Lundy also published his pamphlet, The War in Texas, which presented arguments against the annexation of Texas and was one of the most vigorous of the writings to appear in that controversy. He continued to publish The National Enquirer at Philadelphia until March 1838 when it was taken over by John G. Whittier and its name changed to The Pennsylvania Freeman. In May of that year Lundy lost all his papers and journals when a Philadelphia mob destroyed "Pennsylvania Hall," and in the following summer he left for Illinois where his family resided. There he associated himself with the local anti-slavery societies and reestablished The Genius, twelve issues of which appeared before his death, after a brief illness, in August 1839. Though dated from Hennepin, the Illinois numbers of The Genius were printed at Lowell, Illinois. Lundy was buried in a Friends' graveyard on Clear Creek, in Putnam County.

Cheerful in temperament, gentle and mild in manner, a keen observer of men and nature, as his writings show, he was ready to adapt himself to whatever conditions he encountered. He was a pioneer in the organization of anti-slavery societies and in the publication of an anti-slavery newspaper, and was the most active figure in the whole movement during the twenties, while his enlistment of Garrison brought to the abolitionist cause its chief figure in the later period.

[The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (1847), comp. by Thomas Earle "under the direction and on behalf of his children"; W. C. Armstrong, The Lundy Family and Their Descendants of Whatso ever Surname (1902); files of The Genius of Universal Emancipation; W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (4 volumes, 1885-89); G. A. Lawrence, "Benjamin Lundy-Pioneer of Freedom," in Journal Illinois State Historical Society, July 1913; "The Diary of Benjamin Lundy Written during His Journey through Upper Canada, January 1832," reproduced from The Genius, with notes by Fred Landon, in Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, volume XIX (1222); Fred Landon, "Benjamin Lundy, Abolitionist,' in Dalhousie Review, July 1927.]

F.L.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 54:

LUNDY, Benjamin, philanthropist, born in Hardwick, Warren county, New Jersey, 4 January, 1789; died in Lowell, La Salle county, Illinois, 22 August, 1839. His parents were members of the Society of Friends. When he was about nineteen years of age he removed to Wheeling, Virginia, where he remained for four years, working the first eighteen months as an apprentice to a saddler. While there his attention was first directed to the evils of slavery, and determined his future course as an Abolitionist. On leaving Wheeling he went to Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, and then to St. Clairsville in that state, where, in 1815, he originated an anti-slavery association, called the “Union humane society,” and wrote an appeal on the subject of slavery. Soon afterward he became a contributor of anti-slavery articles to the “Philanthropist” newspaper, published at Mt. Pleasant. In the autumn of 1819 he removed to St. Louis, Missouri, at the time that the Missouri question was attracting universal attention, and devoted himself to an exposition of the evils of slavery in the newspapers of that state and Illinois. Returning to Mt. Pleasant, he began in January, 1812, the publication of the “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” a monthly, the office of which was soon removed to Jonesborough, Tennessee, and thence to Baltimore in 1824, when it became a weekly. In the latter part of 1825 Mr. Lundy visited Hayti to make arrangements with the government of that island for the settlement of such freed slaves as might be sent thither. In 1828 he visited the eastern states, where he lectured and formed the acquaintance of William Lloyd Garrison, with whom he afterward became associated in editing his journal. In the winter of 1828-'9 he was assaulted for an alleged libel and nearly killed in Baltimore by a slave-dealer named Austin Woolfolk. Lundy was indirectly censured by the court and compelled to remove his paper to Washington, and finally to Philadelphia, where he gave it the name of “The National Inquirer,” and finally it merged into “The Pennsylvania Freeman.” In 1829 he went a second time to Hayti, and took with him several slaves that had been emancipated for that purpose. In the winter of 1830 he visited the Wilberforce colony of fugitive slaves in Canada, and then went to Texas to provide a similar asylum under the Mexican flag, renewing his visit in 1833, but was baffled by the events that led to the annexation of Texas. In 1838 his property was burned by the pro-slavery mob that fired Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia. In the winter of 1838-'9 he removed to Lowell, La Salle county, Illinois, with the intention of publishing the '”Genius” there, but his design was frustrated by his death. He was the first to establish anti-slavery periodicals and to deliver anti-slavery lectures, and probably the first to induce the formation of societies for the encouragement of the produce of free labor. See “The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy.” By Thomas Earl (Philadelphia, 1847).  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 54.

Chapter, “Early Antislavery Movements: Benjamin Lundy - William Lloyd Garrison,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872:

But far the most devoted, effective, and prominent antislavery worker of those days was Benjamin Lundy. From 1815 to 1830 his labors were immense, involving great personal hardship and sacrifice, and placing him far in advance of all contemporaneous or earlier Abolitionists. He was a native of New Jersey, and of Quaker origin. At the age of nineteen he went to. Wheeling, in Western Virginia, where he served an apprenticeship and worked at the trade of saddler. He was evidently from the outset an earnest and thoughtful man. While his companions were prone to dissipation, he devoted his leisure hours to reading; and he was also a regular attendant on the meetings of his denomination. Wheeling being a great thoroughfare for the slave-trade, through which often passed the coffles of that nefarious traffic, his sympathies were largely enlisted in behalf of its helpless and hopeless victims. “My heart," he said,” was deeply grieved at the gross abomination. I heard the wail of the captive, I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul." Though he did not then and there enter upon what soon became his life work, yet he unquestionably received his baptism into the spirit of the great reform of which he was an honored pioneer, while largely instrumental in persuading others to enter upon it.
Even Mr. Garrison thus gratefully and gracefully refers to his obligations to Mr. Lundy: " Now, if I have in any way, however humble, done anything toward calling attention to slavery, or bringing about the glorious prospect of a complete jubilee in our country at no distant day, I feel that I owe everything in this matter, instrumentally and under God, to Benjamin Lundy . . . .. I feel it due to the memory of one who devoted so many years of his life so faithfully to the cause of the oppressed that I should state this reminiscence."

Having married, he settled in Ohio, a few miles west of Wheeling. He was prosperous in business, and happy in his domestic relations; "having," he said," a loving wife and two beautiful little daughters, that it was a real happiness to possess and cherish." But, notwithstanding his success in business and the, attractions of his home, he felt and yielded to the higher claims of humanity. His heart was troubled at the sad condition of the slaves, whose wrongs and sufferings he well knew. He enjoyed, he said, no peace of mind, and came to the conclusion that, he must not only feel, but act for the suffering bondmen. Calling a few friends together at his house, he unbosomed his feelings. An antislavery organization, called “The Union Humane Society,'' was formed; which within a few months contained nearly five hundred members, residing in several counties in that section of the state. This society was formed in 1815.Hle soon issued an appeal to the philanthropists of the United States, in which he proposed that societies should be formed wherever a sufficient number of persons would be found to join them, with a uniform title and constitution. It was also suggested that these societies should correspond with each other, and co-operate in the general measures of their organization.

Not long afterward Mr. Charles Osborn commenced the publication of a journal at Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, called “The Philanthropist." For it Mr. Lundy furnished articles, and he was soon invited to take an interest in the paper and superintend the office. That he might be able to accept the invitation, he must disencumber himself of his business, which he unsuccessfully attempted to do by taking his stock in trade to St. Louis. Reaching that city in the midst of the Missouri struggle, and comprehendi1Jg at a glance the nature of the question at issue, he entered into the conflict with great earnestness and vigor. Through the newspapers of Missouri and Illinois he portrayed the evils of slavery and the wickedness of its needless expansion.

Returning to Ohio, he commenced the publication of a paper whose spirit and purpose were well expressed by its name, the “Genius of Universal Emancipation,"--a journal that was destined from the start to a marked and stormy career. After several months it was removed to Tennessee, where it obtained quite a wide circulation, and was at that time the only distinctive antislavery paper in the country. During his residence there he visited Philadelphia for the purpose of attending the American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery," travelling," he says, " six hundred miles on horseback in midwinter, and at his own expense," -- a cost of time, labor, and money not often, if ever, equaled by the most devoted antislavery men of later years. During this time he made the acquaintance of other Abolitionists; and, though without much encouragement, concluded to remove' his paper to Baltimore. “Having arranged," he said,” my business in Tennessee, I shouldered my knapsack, and set out for Baltimore on foot in the summer of 1824." At Deep Creek, North Carolina, he gave his first public lecture on slavery. He delivered fifteen or twenty antislavery addresses in different parts of the State, and assisted in the organization of a dozen antislavery societies, which largely and rapidly increased, until in three years they embraced some three thousand members, comprising many persons of position and eminence.

Pursuing his journey through the middle of Virginia, he held meetings, and effected the organization of several antislavery societies in that State. Arriving at Baltimore, where he proposed to establish his paper, he was received, he tells us, even by the antislavery men, "civilly, but coolly enough." They expressed strong doubts of his success, and gave him very little encouragement. Still he determined to persevere, and in 1824 commenced its publication. The next year he visited Hayti; but found, on his return, that his wife had died during his absence, that his home was broken up, and his children scattered. Collecting them, and placing them with friends in whom he confided, he says: “I renewed my vows to devote my energies to the cause of the slave, until the nation shall be effectually roused in his behalf." With the aid of a few warm friends, whose sympathy and counsel were freely given, he not only continued the publication of his paper, but was successful in 1'he organization of several societies.
Believing the question of emancipation to be a political one, he took a deep interest in the presidential election of 1824, and rendered effective service to the victorious party. He also avowed his readiness to support the Colonization Society," if' it united with its policy that great work of justice and righteousness, the total extirpation of slavery from the soil of America." Avowing emancipation to be the primary object with him, he could not for a moment think of joining in any colonization scheme which had not that object in view. In the summer of 1825 he commenced a series of articles on the domestic slave-trade, which greatly excited the slave-dealers of Baltimore, and unquestionably was the provoking cause of the brutal assault made upon him, in the streets of that city, occasioning; in the end, his removal.

In the year 1826 the American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery was holden in Baltimore, through his influence; in which were represented, directly and indirectly, eighty-one societies, seventy-three being located in slaveholding States. There were at that time about one hundred and forty antislavery societies in the country, of which one hundred and six were in the Southern States. About the same time Mr. Lundy issued, an address to the Abolitionists, maintaining that the most expedient course to be pursued was to " go straight forward with firmness and resolution in the road we have already begun to travel, neither turning to the right hand nor to the left, until we reach the glorious mansion where justice sits crowned with mercy, and where men esteem their fellow-men as brethren. For my own part," he said,” I never calculate how soon the cause of rational liberty will triumph over that of cruelty and despotism in the country." Though these were his sentiments of uncalculating devotion, and he was regardless of personal consequences and secondary considerations, it is evident, from some recorded remarks of his, a few months later, on the rapid growth of antis-slavery sentiment and societies during the twenty preceding years, that, like most of the early Abolitionists, he calculated on a far easier and earlier triumph than the nation was destined to witness. They saw and felt the wickedness of slavery; but they did not, as they could not, comprehend how firmly it was embedded in the very foundation of the civil, industrial, social, and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, or estimate aright the tenacity of its hold on life.
Mr. Lundy, however, clearly comprehended and fully acknowledged the necessity and the duty of political action. In commenting, in the summer of 1827, on the resolution of a county antislavery society in Ohio, that its members would support no persons for office who were not opposed to slavery, and who would not use all lawful means to remedy the evil by the most speedy and efficient measures, he declared that if the friends of genuine republicanism would act upon that principle, a change for the better would soon be witnessed. He held it to be a grand mistake that the people of the free States had nothing to do with slaves. “They guarantee," he said,” the oppression of the colored man in this country. Let them wash their hands of the crime; there is blood on every finger." Later he said: “I now fearlessly and boldly assert that the subject of slavery is no State-rights matter, but that all the citizens in this republic are interested in its extinction, and, if ever we abolish it, the influence and government of the United States must effect it." Still later, in 1837, he said: ''The question of abolishing slavery, when it shall be acted on, must be settled at the ballot." Thus clearly defined and lucidly expressed were his views of the evil and its remedy. The discussions of thirty years did not materially enlarge or improve the argument.

In May; 1828, Mr. Lundy made a journey to the Eastern States. At New York he formed the acquaintance of Arthur Tappan. At Providence he met William Goodell, of whom, considering the latter's subsequent career, he has left the singular record: “I endeavored to arouse him, but he was at that time slow of speech on that subject." At Boston he said he could hear of no Abolitionists resident in the place. In the house where he boarded he met Mr. Garrison, whom he wished to find, but who had not then turned his attention particularly to the subject, though he had noticed favorably his paper in " The National Philanthropist," a temperance journal he was then editing. He found in him a congenial spirit, most welcome in the surrounding apathy. Honestly inquiring and receptive, he not only responded favorably to his appeals, but rendered present aid in procuring subscribers and getting up meetings. Mr. Lundy also visited the clergy and called a meeting, at which eight were present, to whom he unfolded his plans. Most assented, -- at least, did not oppose, -- excepting one, whom he challenged to public debate. His challenge, however, was not accepted. He also visited New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and New York. During this tour of five months he travelled hundreds of miles, often on foot, and delivered forty-three public addresses; " scattering," he said, " the seed of antislavery in strong and luxuriant soil," although it " was then the very winter of philanthropy."
Returning to Baltimore, he attended, as delegate from Maryland, the American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery. At this meeting it was resolved that the Convention should thereafter be permanently held in the city of Washington. One was held in the winter of 1829. But that was the last, notwithstanding this resolution, of a series of conventions inaugurated in 1794; so little did the antislavery men of those days understand the strength of the foe or their own weakness. But while others faltered, Mr. Lundy did not, though he felt the need of help. He remembered his visit to Boston, and his interview with Mr. Garrison; and he longed to have him for a coadjutor in this unequal strife. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1828, he visited New England, to persuade him, if possible, to join him in the editorial management of the “Genius." Mr. Garrison was then editing a paper in Vermont, and he thus describes Mr. Lundy's visit: “He had taken his staff in hand and travelled all the way to the Green Mountains. He came to lay it on my conscience and my soul that I should join him in this work of seeking the abolition of slavery. And he so presented the case, with the growing disposition I had to take up the cause, that I said to him: ' I will join you as soon as my engagement ends here; and then we will see what can be done.' "

In the summer of the following year Mr. Garrison, on Mr. Lundy's return from Hayti, fulfilled his promise, and became one of the editors of the paper, though the two were not in full accord in all their sentiments. But they were both honest and earnest, and their aims were one. Elizabeth Margaret Chandler was also engaged as an assistant, and the paper was changed from a monthly to a weekly journal, and was vigorously conducted in the interests of temperance, emancipation, and peace. Miss Chandler soon issued an appeal to the ladies of the United States, urging them to enlist in the cause of emancipation, and to form female antislavery societies, like those in Great Britain.

At about the same time Mr. Lundy announced through his columns, that the American government was attempting a negotiation with Mexico for the purchase of Texas. With his usual practical sagacity, assuming that all such attempted negotiations were made for the support of slavery, he sounded the alarm and began an opposition which he never remitted. Nor was he content with this general protest; he soon proceeded, at the cost of much persop.al sacrifice, exposure, and danger, to visit and travel once and again over large portions of that country and of Mexico, often in disguise. By this personal inspection, made in the general behalf of the slave and escaped fugitives, he became familiar with the whole Texan plot, so that the information gained was of great service to John Quincy Adams and others during the annexation struggle, even then casting its baleful shadows before.

The connection between Mr. Lundy and Mr. Garrison was not, however, productive of all the good the former had fondly anticipated. The growing exasperation of the slaveholding portion of the city at any interference with the system was greatly intensified and brought to a crisis by the severe attacks of Mr. Garrison upon the domestic slave-traffic in general, and. upon the conduct of a New England master of a vessel, in particular, in taking a cargo of slaves to the New Orleans market. A prosecution, trial, conviction, and imprisonment were the result, rendering a dissolution of their partnership inevitable. Another circumstance had unquestionably added fuel to the flame already burning fiercely. A colored man, in Boston, by the name of Walker, had published a pamphlet, which was freely condemned by Mr. Lundy, in which, arraigning with terrible and merciless severity the slave-masters for their wrongs inflicted on the poor bondmen, and breathing a most vindictive spirit, he counselled the colored race to take vengeance into their own hands.

Consequently, when Mr. Garrison had been driven from the city, the same spirit of persecution followed Mr. Lundy. The governor required him to give bail, libel suits and threatened imprisonment lowered, and personal outrage and violence in the streets rendered longer residence unsafe. He was finally compelled to succumb and remove his paper to Washington. Through his influence, while in that city, an antislavery society was formed; and a memorial, signed by more than a thousand citizens of the District of Columbia, was presented to Congress for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade.

His paper failing for want of patronage, he started another in 1836, in Philadelphia, called the “National Inquirer." Retiring from this in 1838, and being succeeded by John G. Whittier, who changed the name to "The Pennsylvania Freeman,'' he proposed to go West, and resume the publication of the "Genius" in some town in the great valley, Having gathered up his little store of earthly possessions, he deposited them in the new Pennsylvania Hall, which, with his deposit, was burned by the mob in the spring of 1838.. Nothing daunted or disheartened by what he termed this total sacrifice on the altar of universal emancipation," saying, '' they have not yet got my conscience, they have not taken my heart.," he still persisted in his purpose of going West. After many disappointments, he succeeded in getting out a few numbers; but, for lack of funds and help, it could not be said to have been established. But the good man's work was finished. He was attacked with the fever of the country, and., after a brief illness, died on the 23d of August, 1839, in the fifty-first year of his age.

Thus passed away in the prime of his manhood and in the full maturity of his powers one of the most humane, unselfish, laborious, and persistent of men. There have been abler men, men rendering greater service; but few have possessed more largeness of heart, more uncalculating self-abnegation, or have filled up the measure of their lives with more self-sacrificing labors for the good of others. From the year 1820 to 1830 he states that he travelled twenty-five thousand miles, five thousand on foot; that he visited nineteen States, made two voyages to Hayti, and delivered more than two hundred public addresses. Nor were the last nine years of his life less replete with like achievements. During those years, in addition to his other abundant labors, he made several tours to Canada, Texas, and Mexico, in the earnest, but vain search after shelter and relief for the lowly ones who could not find protection in their native land. Indeed, as richly did he merit, as he on whom it was bestowed, -- as his service was more laborious, more protracted, and more widely extended, -- the splendid eulogium of Burke on the philanthropist Howard: “His was a voyage of discovery, a circumnavigation of charity?"

And this service was rendered under circumstances well calculated to try his temper and test his strength of principle; for not only did he perform those journeyings often on foot and always without the modern appliances of travel, but most of his multitudinous labors were performed without the stimulus of success or the cheering words of sympathy and encouragement. His pilgrimage from Maryland to Vermont, "staff in hand," for the simple chance of enlisting a co-laborer was sadly significant. He was called to lead the “forlorn hope “of a desperate cause against opposing foes increasing in numbers and flushed with recent victories. And not only that, but he was compelled to witness the manifest decadence of the spirit of liberty in the government, and of resistance to the demands of slavery among the masses of his countrymen.

Twenty-three years of such labor, under such circumstances, are not often paralleled even in the annals of Christian missions and reforms. Well does his biographer, Mr. Thomas Earle, say of him: “Having resolved, twenty-three years before his decease, to devote his energies to the relief of the suffering slave and the oppressed man of color, he persevered to the end, undeterred by difficulties and undismayed by dangers, undiscouraged by disappointments and unsubdued by sacrifices. Alone, often on foot, he encountered fatigue, hunger, and exposure, the frosts and snows of winter, the rains and scorching sun of summer, the contagion of pestilence and the miasmatic effluvia of insalubrious regions, ever pressing onward toward the attainment of the great object to which he had dedicated his existence."

Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 167-176.


LYMAN, Huntington, New Orleans, Louisiana, abolitionist agent.  Manager, 1834-1835, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), Ohio area.

(Abolitionist; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 163, 184-185)


LYMAN, Samuel, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.