ABSTRACT
Slavery had been a controversial issue since the founding of the United States, but economic developments in the 1820s created a geographic fault line that split the country. The North began to industrialize, with a burgeoning of urban-based factories, while the South remained an agrarian society, with an economy dominated by the production of cotton and tobacco, both relying on slave labor to make a profit. In the decades leading up to the war between the North and the South, the emotionalism was focuses on the issue of slavery, and the journalistic force that placed that debate on the national agenda was the abolitionist press. Antislavery newspapers such as Elijah Lovejoy's St. Louis Observer and William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator raised the consciousness of the nation to a sinful abomination in fundamental conflict with the ideals of democracy. In addition to swelling the antislavery ranks, Lovejoy's martyrdom also propelled the Abolition Movement into a new phase.
