The Morning Star (New Hampshire newspaper)

The Morning Star was a weekly newspaper owned and published by Freewill Baptists in 19th-century New England, which campaigned vigorously for the abolition of slavery long before such a political stance was widely considered to be respectable in America.

[4] On the death of the editor Samuel Beede in March 1834, however, control was passed to William Burr, who immediately re-launched The Morning Star as a newspaper that would campaign vigorously and tirelessly for the complete abolition of slavery.

This was a remarkable position for an American publication to take at that time, especially in an overwhelmingly white town where the major employers were large cotton mills: Dover's prosperity depended to a great extent, indirectly, on slave labor in the South.

Sales plummeted, and the editor was denounced by delegates to the 1837 General Conference of Freewill Baptists, who put forward a motion calling for the paper to cease its campaign against slavery "so as to avert from the denomination the public odium heaped upon abolitionists, and to reconcile the disaffected members."

[6] In 1841, in protest at the authorities' refusal to act to prevent attacks on black people and abolitionists in segregated railway carriages (including highly publicized incidents involving Charles Lenox Remond and David Ruggles) The Morning Star printed a call for readers to boycott the Eastern Railroad - a remarkable step at that time.

[9] When, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln visited Dover to canvass support in the presidential elections of that year, editor William Burr was among those invited to join him on the speaker's platform.