Joshua Leavitt

Joshua Leavitt (September 8, 1794, Heath, Massachusetts – January 16, 1873, Brooklyn, New York) was an American Congregationalist minister and former lawyer who became a prominent writer, editor and publisher of abolitionist literature.

[1] Born in Heath, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, Leavitt attended Yale College, where he graduated at age twenty.

Leavitt decamped for New York City, where he first became secretary of the American Seamens' Friend Society, and began his 44-year career as editor of Sailors' Magazine.

Thus was Leavitt launched on his career as social reformer, temperance spokesman, editor, abolitionist and religious proselytizer.

[2] Leavitt was heavily involved in a series of high-profile anti-slavery cases, including the escape of the slave Basil Dorsey from Maryland into Massachusetts (Leavitt aided Dorsey's passage northward, and members of the extended Leavitt family helped shelter Dorsey in Massachusetts), as well as the La Amistad case, in which enslaved Africans on a Spanish ship rebelled and took control.

[4] One of Leavitt's major accomplishments was helping to provide the intellectual underpinnings of the abolitionist argument through his writing and publishing.

Abolitionist editor and publisher Rev. Joshua Leavitt, photographed by Mathew B. Brady . Ca. 1860
The Emancipator , an abolitionist broadsheet edited by Rev. Joshua Leavitt
Letter by Leavitt, Henry Ward Beecher , Theodore Tilton and other abolitionists to Abraham Lincoln requesting raising of black regiments in Union Army, August 1862