It found ready access to the simple American folk in villages, in the smaller towns, and in the rural districts of New England and the North. And already from these independent and uncorrupted sons and daughters of freedom had started the deep ground swell which was to lift the level of Northern public opinion on the question of slavery. This Walpurgis period of the movement culminated on November 7, 1837, in a terrible tragedy. The place was a little Illinois town, Alton, just over the Mississippi River from St. Louis, and the victim was Elijah P. Lovejoy. He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and the editor of a weekly religious newspaper, first published in St. Louis and removed by him later to Alton. His sin was that he did not hold his peace on the subject of slavery in the columns of his paper. He was warned "to pass over in silence everything connected" with that question. But he had no choice, he had to cry aloud against iniquities, which, as a Christian minister and a Christian editor, he dared not ignore. His troubles with the people of St. Louis took in the spring of 1836 a sanguinary turn, when he denounced the lynching of a negro by a St. Louis mob, perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. In consequence of his outspoken condemnation of the horror, his office was broken into and destroyed by a mob. Lovejoy thereupon removed his paper to Alton, but the wild-cat-like spirit pursued him across the river and destroyed his press. He replaced his broken press with a new one, only to have his property a second time destroyed. He replaced the second with a third press, but a third time the mob destroyed his property. Then he bought a fourth press, and resolved to defend it with his life. Pierced by bullets he fell, resisting the attack of a mob bent on the destruction of his rights. Lovejoy died a martyr to free speech and the freedom of the press.