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 slavery's expansion and tried to find a place outside the United States to establish a colony in which freed slaves might relocate.

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 black people were still enslaved.

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.

On his birthday, January 4, 1816, Lundy published a circular indicating his intent to found a national anti-slavery society to focus antislavery sentiment and activity.

The intrepid activist lost goods he valued at over $1000, then trudged 700 miles back to St. Clairville, only to find that Osborne had sold his printing business to Elisha Bates, who did not need additional help.

Lundy then established his own anti-slavery paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, with the first issue published in January 1821.

However, anti-slavery activism did not pay well, and slaveholders did not believe Lundy's arguments that slavery stifled progress, despite his comparisons of the relative prosperity of New York and Pennsylvania with Virginia.

Lundy had been recruited to Greenville, Tennessee to work against slavery in a slave state after the death of Elihu Embree, but he found the hostility formidable.

Within a few months, while Lundy traveled in Mexico, Garrison published an exposé of an October slaving voyage of a ship owned by his former neighbor, Francis Todd of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in a deal brokered by Woolfolk.

[7] However, Garrison returned to Boston (where he suffered a mob attack in 1835), although Woolfolk's trade also diminished, supplanted by Franklin & Armfield of Alexandria (at the time in the District of Columbia).

Between 1820 and 1830, he traveled “more than 5000 miles on foot and 20,000 in other ways, visited 19 states of the Union, and held more than 200 public meetings.” Slaveholders bitterly denounced him, and many non-slaveholders disapproved his anti-slavery agitation.

The tribute reads, "It was his lot to struggle, for years almost alone, a solitary voice crying in the wilderness, and, amidst all, faithful to his one great purpose, the emancipation of the slaves.

Self-taught, unaided, poor, reviled, contemned Beset with enemies, by friends betrayed ; As madman and fanatic oft condemned, Yet in thy noble cause still undismayed !

Leonidas thy courage could not boast; Less numerous were his foes, his band more strong; Alone unto a more than Persian host Thou hast undauntedly giv'n battle long.

Nor shalt thou singly wage th' unequal strife; Unto thy aid with spear and shield I rush, And freely do I offer up my life, And bid my heart's blood find a wound to gush!