Imagine that in November of 1837 you were a SCUBA diver and you were exploring the bottom of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, just across that mighty river from St. Louis, Missouri.  If so, you might have come across a bizarre sight — four printing presses, all similar, and all lying near each other as if they had been pitched into the water one after the other.

Which, in a way, they had.  They all belonged to the same man, the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton to publish his fiery anti-slavery newspaper because it was no longer safe to do so in pro-slavery Missouri.

His reception in Alton, alas, was no improvement.  In fact, upon his arrival the first of his printing presses was thrown into the Mississippi by an angry mob as a warning that abolitionist ideas were no more tolerated in Alton than in St. Louis.

Lovejoy was then given another printing press by the more tolerant citizens of Alton, who had decried the mob actions of their fellow citizens, but who had nevertheless made Lovejoy promise he would tone down his anti-slavery rhetoric.  When he ignored that promise, the Alton mob tossed his second printing press into the Mississippi.

His third press was paid for by abolitionists nationwide, who were outraged at the attempts to silence Lovejoy’s voice, but the Alton mobsters — seeing even less reason to tolerate a printing press paid for by “outsider” abolitionists than the one previously paid for by their fellow citizens — tossed number three into the river alongside the others.

When Lovejoy’s fourth printing press arrived in Alton, he placed it in a warehouse for safekeeping, but that same Alton mob soon surrounded the warehouse and demanded that Lovejoy hand over his newest press.  When Lovejoy refused, the mob set the warehouse on fire, and one of them fired a shotgun blast at Lovejoy, who died as a result, this week (Nov. 7) in 1837.  His fourth printing press subsequently joined its predecessors on the bottom of the Mississippi River.

And so Elijah Lovejoy became a martyr, not only for the cause of freedom versus slavery, but also for the rule of law versus mob rule, as a young politician named Abe Lincoln pointed out in his first major public speech, delivered two months later at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.  Lincoln’s message, inspired by Lovejoy’s death, was that no one had the right to take the law into his own hands, including, he would later make clear, the rebellious Confederate states with whom he fought our Civil War.

Lovejoy’s death was also, not incidentally, a freedom of the press issue. Or in this case, presses.

This week (June 15) in 1864, Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs, who had been appointed Quartermaster General of the Union Army in 1861, established Arlington House, the former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, as a cemetery for the Union’s soldiers.  Today Arlington National Cemetery is America’s national military burial ground.

Montgomery Meigs was one of the true unsung heroes of the Civil War.  As Quartermaster General he was charged with ensuring that military supplies — food, clothing, munitions, weapons — were effectively delivered to the Union armies in the field.  It was a huge undertaking, involving more than 130,000 employees, yet Meigs did a first-rate job.  Not only did he establish a transport system that was highly efficient, but he was also scrupulously honest.  By war’s end Meigs’s department had spent nearly half a billion dollars, yet a later congressional audit found not one penny unaccounted for in any contract Meigs authorized.

And then in 1864 Meigs was charged with finding a new site for a military cemetery because — in a war that eventually resulted in 620,000 dead soldiers on both sides — all the nearby Union military cemeteries were full.

Meigs’s gaze soon fell on Arlington House, which the Lee family had evacuated when the war began because it was located in Union-held territory near the federal capital, Washington, D.C.  Although a native of Georgia, one of the first states to join the Confederacy, Meigs was a loyal Unionist who despised all southerners who had chosen secession.  That meant Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most celebrated soldier, was high on Meigs’s hate list.  So in May of 1864 Meigs ordered that Union soldiers be buried in graves that would eventually surround Lee’s home.   By the time Arlington House was officially designated a military cemetery in June, more than 2,500 soldiers were buried on its grounds.

That number would increase exponentially, and by 1865 it became obvious that regardless of the war’s aftermath, disinterment of that many soldiers was politically (and morally) impossible, meaning Robert E. Lee and his family could never again call Arlington House home — which had been Meigs’s intent all along.  Indeed, although Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, later successfully sued the federal government to return Arlington House to the Lee family, he quickly realized they could never again live there, so he sold it back to the government for a paltry $150,000.

As a postscript, in October of 1864, Meigs’s own son John, then a 1^st Lieutenant in the Union Army, was killed in battle near Swift Run Gap, Virginia.  John too was subsequently buried in the grounds of Arlington House.  To be specific, he was buried in Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s rose garden.