Ken Ellingwood

Lovejoy, a white evangelical who insisted on his right to publish against slavery even in pro-slavery towns, was unbending and was eventually the first publisher killed by a pro-slavery mob, though not the last. An important reminder—his white murderers were, as far as the facts indicate, not themselves enslavers (he was killed in a theoretically free state), but felt their interests challenged by his opposition to it, since their town was economically sustained by trade with enslavers and they shared white fear of “servile insurrection” spurred by abolition talk.… (meer)