The Sight That Changed a Life: Benjamin Lundy, Wheeling, and St. Clairsville

Part Two of “Across the River: A Centennial Reflection on Belmont County”

One of the most consequential moments recorded in Belmont County’s 1903 centennial history did not occur in Belmont County.

It occurred across the river in Wheeling.

Benjamin Lundy was a young Quaker working in a Wheeling saddlery when he encountered the brutality of the domestic slave trade. According to the centennial history, he saw groups of enslaved people driven along Main Street and heard their cries as they were forced forward under the threat of violence.

The book states that the experience filled him with an “indomitable purpose” to devote his life to their liberation.

Whether Lundy understood it at that moment or not, Wheeling had shown him the contradiction at the heart of the Upper Ohio Valley. Communities on the Ohio side described themselves as free, yet human beings were being bought, sold, and transported within sight of the opposite shore. The river divided legal systems, but it could not prevent residents on one bank from witnessing the injustices committed on the other.

Lundy carried what he had witnessed in Wheeling to St. Clairsville.

Organizing in Belmont County

The centennial history reports that Lundy began his organized antislavery work in St. Clairsville in 1815. There, he gathered sympathetic residents and helped establish the Union Humane Society.

The 1903 book calls it the first antislavery society in the United States. That sweeping “first” claim should be treated cautiously. Other historical accounts describe it more narrowly as one of the earliest antislavery organizations in the country or the first of its kind west of the Appalachian Mountains.

What is not in dispute is the significance of the movement Lundy helped build.

According to the book, the Union Humane Society grew to approximately 600 members within six months. Lundy also produced an “Appeal to Philanthropists” and contributed to Charles Osborn’s The Philanthropist, an antislavery publication associated with nearby Mount Pleasant.

He later published The Genius of Universal Emancipation, traveled extensively, organized additional societies, lectured against slavery, and worked alongside other abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, who later became one of the nation’s best-known antislavery voices, worked with Lundy and praised his extraordinary persistence.

The movement grew far beyond St. Clairsville, but the Upper Ohio Valley remained central to its origin story.

A Regional Story, Not Two Separate Histories

Lundy’s experience demonstrates why Wheeling and Belmont County cannot be understood separately.

Wheeling confronted him with slavery’s cruelty. St. Clairsville gave him a place to organize. Mount Pleasant became part of the publishing network that carried antislavery ideas to a wider audience.

The river did not divide this story. It connected its parts.

Lundy’s work also reminds us that witnessing injustice creates a choice. A person may turn away, accept what custom permits, or decide that what is legal is not necessarily what is right.

He chose action.

We should not allow the heroic language of later histories to turn Lundy into a solitary savior. Black people resisted enslavement for generations, often at extraordinary personal risk. Freedom seekers, free Black communities, Black religious leaders, and Black conductors were not simply beneficiaries of an antislavery movement; they were among its essential architects.

Lundy’s importance lies in the fact that he saw the injustice before him, listened to his conscience, and committed his voice and labor to a struggle already being carried forward by those most directly affected.

The Power of a Place

Today, Main Street in Wheeling and the roads leading west toward St. Clairsville may appear to be ordinary parts of the regional landscape. Yet more than two centuries ago, movement along those roads helped awaken and sustain an antislavery campaign with national consequences.

That is one of the enduring lessons of Upper Ohio Valley history: events of national importance do not always begin in capitals or celebrated institutions.

Sometimes they begin at a workbench, with one person looking out upon an injustice and deciding that silence is no longer possible.

-T

Research note: The central account appears in McKelvey’s Centennial History of Belmont County, pp. 87–88. Additional background is available from the Ohio History Connection and the Ohio historical marker account of the Benjamin Lundy Home and Free Labor Store.