St. Louis was all excitement and alarm. The newspapers had attacked the _Observer_ so bitterly that the owners had stopped printing it. A mob had planned to wreck the office, but had postponed the task for a few days. Men went to Lovejoy and told him he would not be safe in the streets by day or night. Even the men of his church would not stand by him, and a religious paper declared "that they would soon free the church of the rotten sheep in it," by which they meant Elijah Lovejoy and others who opposed slavery. This Yankee, however, like many others who had gone to that border country in the days when bitterness ran high, had a heroic sense of duty. He wrote and printed a letter to the people, stating that men had no right to own their brothers, no matter what the law might say. The letter caused more excitement than ever. The owners of the _Observer_ went to Lovejoy and requested him to retire as its editor. For two days it was a question what the angry mobs would do to him. Then a little better feeling set in. Men came to him, and told him that he must go on printing his paper or there would be no voice of freedom in all that part of the country. A friend bought the newspaper from its owners, and urged Lovejoy to write as boldly as before. This friend, however, suggested that he should move the newspaper across the state line to Alton, Illinois, where feeling was not so intense. Lovejoy agreed, and set out for Alton; but while he was preparing to issue the paper there the same friend and others wrote him that his pen was so much needed in St. Louis that he must come back. He did so, and the _Observer_ continued its existence in St. Louis until June, 1836. There was so much strife and ill feeling, however, in Missouri that the editor decided his newspaper would be better supported, and would exert more influence, in Illinois. Accordingly he arranged to move his printing-press to the town of Alton in July. Just before he left St. Louis he published severe criticisms of a judge of that city who had sided with slave-owners, and these articles roused even greater resentment among the rabble who hated Lovejoy's freedom of speech. If some of the people of Alton were glad to have this fearless editor come to their town, many were not. Slavery was too sore a subject for them to wish it talked about publicly. Many people all through that part of the country looked upon an Abolitionist as a man who delighted in stirring up ill feeling. Lovejoy sent his printing-press to Alton by steamboat, and it was delivered at the wharf on a Sunday morning, about daybreak. The steamboat company had agreed to land the press on Monday, and Lovejoy refused to move it from the dock on the Sabbath. Early Monday morning five or six men went down to the river bank and destroyed the printing-press.