Benjamin Lundy

Benjamin Lundy (January 4, 1789 – August 22, 1839) was an American Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey of the United States who established several anti-slavery newspapers and traveled widely. He lectured and published seeking to limit the slavery's expansion, and also tried to find a place outside the United States to establish a colony where freed slaves might relocate.

Lundy was born to Joseph and Elizabeth Shotwell Lundy, both Quakers, at Greensville, Hardwick Township, Sussex County, New Jersey. His mother died when he was four, but he became close to his stepmother, Mary Titus Lundy. As a boy, he worked on his father's farm, attending school for only brief periods. In 1804, New Jersey passed a law allowing gradual emancipation of slaves, although the 1810 census in Sussex County showed that more than half of the 758 Negroes were still enslaved.

However, by that time, young Lundy had moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). In 1808 he was apprenticed to a saddler. On the Ohio River, Wheeling was on important transit point of the interstate slave trade, with coffles of slaves often marched through town. Many would be shipped down the Ohio River toward Kentucky (a slave state) and additional slave states down the Mississippi River. In Wheeling, Lundy saw firsthand many iniquities inherent in the institution of slavery, including the use of horsewhips and bludgeons to force barefoot human beings to walk through mud and snow. He determined to devote his life to the cause of abolition.

Lundy also became acquainted with a local Quaker family, the Stantons, who lived a dozen miles west from Wheeling, in Mt. Pleasant. Ohio did not permit slavery, and Benjamin Stanton would become a U.S. Congressman from that district, and two decades after Lundy's death, his brother Edwin Stanton would become Secretary of War under President Abraham Lincoln.

...
Wikipedia