LUN'DY, BENJAMIN (1789-1839). An Ameri can anti-slavery agitator. born of Quaker parent age at Hardwick, Warren County. N. J. At the age of nineteen he went to Wheeling, on the Ohio, where he worked as a saddler's apprentice. The town was a great thoroughfare for the slave trade, and Lundy's indignation was quickly aroused against the whole slave system. Ilis ap prenticeship completed, he married, and, settling in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, soon built up a profit able business. It was not long before he organized The 'Union Humane Society,' which soon numbered nearly five hundred members. in 1S19 he went to Missouri in the hope of strength ening the opposition to the admission of the Ter ritory as a slave State, where he wrote a number of articles exposing the evils of slavery and the wickedness of its extension. After losing nearly all his property, he returned to Ohio in 1821 and began the publication at Mount Pleasant of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. which he shortly afterwards removed to Jonesborough, Tenn., and then again, in 1824, to Baltimore, Md. In 1825 he visited Haiti in search of a refuge for emancipated blacks, and four years later made another voyage to that country for the same purpose. Two years later he was brutally as saulted by a Baltimore slave-dealer enraged over an article in the Genius. In 1528 he jour neyed on foot through the Eastern States, and made forty-three public addresses. In the fall of 1829 William Lloyd Garrison (q.v.) joined Lundy in Baltimore as assistant editor of the Genius. The two were alike in their hostility to slavery, but Garrison was an advocate of immediate eman cipation on the soil, while Lundy was committed to schemes of colonization abroad. Within a few
months, while Lundy was absent in Mexico. Gar rison published extremely radical articles de manding immediate emancipation and asserting that the domestic slave trade was as piratical as the foreign. Garrison was brought to trial for criminal libel, and fined and imprisoned. This occurrence so reduced the circulation of the Genius that a friendly dissolution of partnership between Lundy and Garrison took place. It also raised up such a hostile spirit in Baltimore that Lundy shortly afterwards removed the paper to Washington, where, after some years, it failed. in the winter of 1830-31 Lundy visited the Wil berforce colony of fugitive slaves in Canada. In the following two years he made two trips to Texas in an attempt to secure an asylum for negroes under the Mexican flag. In 1836 he 'started the :Vational Inquirer in Philadelphia, but retired from it in 183S. In the latter year almost all his possessions, which were stored in Pennsylvania Hall. Philadelphia. were destroyed by a mob, which burned the building. In the following winter he removed to Lowell. Ill., where he reestablished the Genius of Universal Enamel.
pation; but after issuing a few numbers he was seized with a fever, and died August 2•. 1839. Consult Earle, Life, Tra r, fs, and ()pinions of Benjamin. Lundy (Philadelphia, 1847).