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.

As William Lloyd Garrison pointed out in a eulogy, Lundy was not the first American abolitionist, but "he was the first of our countrymen who devoted his life and all his power exclusively to the cause of the slaves."^[1]

Lundy was born to Joseph and Elizabeth Shotwell Lundy, both Quakers, at Greensville, Hardwick Township, Sussex County, New Jersey. His mother died when he was four, but he became close to his stepmother, Mary Titus Lundy.^[2] As a boy, he worked on his father's farm, attending school for only brief periods. 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.

However, by that time, young Lundy had moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). In 1808 he was apprenticed to a saddler. On the Ohio River, Wheeling was on important transit point of the interstate slave trade, with coffles of slaves often marched through town. Many would be shipped down the Ohio River toward Kentucky (a slave state) and additional slave states down the Mississippi River. 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. He determined to devote his life to the cause of abolition.^[2]

Lundy also became acquainted with a local Quaker family, the Stantons, who lived a dozen miles west from Wheeling, in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. Ohio did not permit slavery, and Benjamin Stanton would become a U.S. Congressman from that district, and two decades after Lundy's death, his brother Edwin Stanton would become Secretary of War under President Abraham Lincoln.

In December 1814 Lundy and Esther Lewis declared their intent to marry in the local Quaker meeting, and did so on February 13, 1815. Her brother William married Lydia Stanton, sister of David Stanton (Edwin Stanton's father). On November 18, 1815 they had their first child, Susan Maria Lundy Wierman (d. 1899). In the following decades, Esther bore two more sons, Charles Tallmadge Lundy (1821-1870) and Benjamin Clarkson Lundy (1826-1861), and two additional daughters, Elizabeth (1818-1879) and Esther (1826-1917).

The young family settled in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, where Lundy soon built up a profitable saddlery business along the highway west (that later became Interstate 70). In 1815, he and five others also organized an anti-slavery association, known as the Union Humane Society,^[3] which within a few months had a membership of more than 500. Prominent members included lawyer journalist Charles Hammond, James Wilson (grandfather of President Woodrow Wilson) and Joseph Howells (father of William Dean Howells). Fellow Quaker Charles Osborne, who editing the Philanthropist (later moved to Cincinnati), also showed him journalism and printing basics.

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. That became his life's work. He named his first son to honor James Tallmadge, whose antislavery speech in the U.S. House on February 16, 1819, Lundy printed in full.^[2]

Lundy died after an August fever and brief illness at his farm in Lowell, aged fifty. Shortly after his death, his family and friends in Philadelphia published his autobiographical Life Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy.^[8] Lucretia Mott remembered him in her 1848 speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York.

One hundred years later, a bronze plaque was dedicated to the pioneer abolitionist and placed at his gravesite. 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."^[10]

His house in Mount Pleasant is a National Historic Landmark.

• Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret (1845). The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, with a memoir of her life and character, by Benjamin Lundy. Philadelphia and New York: T. E. Chapman (Philadelphia); Baker, Crane and Day (New York).
• Lundy, Benjamin (1845). Anti-Texass [sic] Legion: Protest of some free men, states and presses against the Texass rebellion, against the laws of nature and of nations. "Delenda est Texas". Albany, New York. Archived from the original on 2006-03-23.
• Lundy, Benjamin (1837). The war in Texas, a review of facts and circumstances, showing that this contest is a crusade against Mexico, set on foot and supported by slaveholders, land-speculators, &c., in order to re-establish, extend, and perpetuate the system of slavery and the slave trade (2nd, "revised, and enlarged" ed.). Philadelphia.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lundy, Benjamin". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Lundy, Benjamin" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.