Oliver Johnson (writer)

Oliver Johnson (December 27, 1809 – December 10, 1889) was an American abolitionist, journalist, editor, lecturer, and Underground Railroad conductor who was once described as the "first lieutenant" of William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of ''The Liberator'' newspaper. Johnson regarded slavery as the "sum of all villainies" and in the period leading up to the American Civil War was so loathed in the south that "as quiet as a Quaker in his personal disposition, yet the time was...when Oliver Johnson would have lost his life within forty-eight hours after crossing Mason and Dixon's line." Johnson wrote a biography of his friend and colleague called ''Garrison: An Outline of His Life''. After the war, Johnson was employed as an editor and writer at various New York-based newspapers including the ''Tribune'' and the ''Independent''.

Life and work

Johnson was born in Peacham, Vermont, the youngest child of Ziba Johnson and Sally Lincoln, natives of Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He was raised in Vermont and began his working life as a printer. In his 20s he was a "well-connected route manager" on the Underground Railroad, with strong ties to Quaker station managers and a focus on navigating people through New England to the Canadian border.

On December 10, 1831, he was one of the cofounders of the Abolition Party, along with Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, Ellis Gray Loring, David Lee Child, Isaac Knapp, Robert B. Hall, Isaac Child, John Cutts Smith, and Joshua Coffin. On January 6, 1832, he was one of the 12 original signatories to the charter of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, along with William Lloyd Garrison, Robert T. Hall, Arnold Buffum, William J. Snelling, John E. Fuller, Moses Thacher, Joshua Coffin, Stillman B. Newcomb, Benjamin C. Bacon, Isaac Knapp, and Henry K. Stockton. Near the end of his life, Johnson recalled that it was a dark and frigid night, and the ground was covered with slush as they left the building, now called the African Meeting House, and "I doubt if any one of our number could have contributed $100 to the society's treasury without bankrupting himself." In these early days, Johnson ran an abolitionist newspaper called ''Christian Soldier'', and later edited the ''Anti-Slavery Standard''.

An example of his reporting is an 1841 account from Hope H. Slatter's slave pen in Baltimore—the jailer and Shadrack H. Slatter initially took him for a prospective buyer—about which wrote in ''The Liberator'':

In 1862 Oliver Johnson met with Abraham Lincoln as the head of a delegation from the Religious Society of Progressive Friends with an "earnest demand" that he make some kind of emancipation proclamation in regards to the enslaved of the rebel states.

Johnson was the father of a daughter with his second wife, whom he married after the death of his first wife in 1872. Johnson died in Brooklyn and was buried in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

References

Further reading

*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Oliver
1809 births
1889 deaths
American abolitionists
People from Vermont
American newspaper editors
American printers
Underground Railroad people
19th-century American journalists
19th-century American male writers