Washington’s Francis LeMoyne, father of cremation, was dedicated abolitionist
Courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society
Washington’s Francis LeMoyne, who is now mostly known for his pioneering advocacy of cremation, was a dedicated opponent of slavery.
Courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society
A newspaper clipping describing the activities of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, of which Francis LeMoyne was a member
Francis LeMoyne found his way into history books for being an advocate of cremation when the practice was viewed as being exotic and perhaps even sinful.
But one of Washington’s most accomplished and most well-known citizens over the last two centuries also made a name for himself as a fierce advocate for the abolition of slavery. In the decades before the Civil War, when slavery was dividing states and neighbors, sometimes to the point of violence, LeMoyne put his personal safety and professional well-being on the line to say that the practice of owning other human beings in order to wring labor from them was morally repugnant and simply wrong.
LeMoyne was born in 1798 in Washington, the son of farmer John Julius LeMoyne and teacher Nancy McCally LeMoyne. He attended what we now know as Washington & Jefferson College and became a doctor in Washington. According to a look back on LeMoyne’s life in a 2018 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine by Todd Mealy, LeMoyne “lived the life of a frontier physician for two decades – treating and operating on patients across large expanses of land, in all weather, and without anesthesia or skilled assistants.” Along the way, he also fathered eight children.
Then, in 1834, when Andrew Jackson was still in the White House, LeMoyne joined the ranks of the anti-slavery movement. Slavery had been abolished across the British Empire the year before, and the drive to put an end to slavery in the United States had started germinating at the start of the 1830s. Historians say American abolitionism sprang from the Second Great Awakening, the Protestant religious revival that saw church attendance soar and outcropping of reform movements grow from that. Along with eliminating slavery, there were temperance campaigns designed to curb the inordinate fondness Americans had at that point for alcohol.
Legend has it that LeMoyne became a convert to the abolitionist cause after he examined the bylaws of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He later said, “I consider nothing more impolitic not considering its injustices than slavery, and nothing more inconsistent with the principles of a republican government ….”
By the time LeMoyne came to adulthood, slavery had largely evaporated in Washington County, though he is reported to have seen gangs of slaves being transported on the National Road, and advertisements for slaves were still being placed in Washington’s Reporter in the 1820s. Washington County was once considered part of Virginia, and there were land owners in the area who still had Virginia land grants. What we now know as West Virginia was still Virginia then, and slavery was continuing there. For LeMoyne and his fellow Washington County abolitionists, slavery was not an abstraction, but something very real and right on their doorstep.
“You see a lot of pro-slavery sentiment,” said Clay Kilgore, executive director of the Washington County Historical Society, pointing out that once the Civil War started, there were people from this area who headed south and fought for the Confederacy.
The continuing support for slavery was evident when LeMoyne and other members of the Washington Anti-Slavery Society brought the Rev. Samuel Gould, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, to speak at Cumberland Presbyterian Church in June 1836. A pro-slavery mob threw stones and other objects at the church, and LeMoyne stopped a young man who broke into the church and was headed toward Gould.
LeMoyne’s activities as an abolitionist led him into politics. In the 1840 presidential election cycle, in which Whig William Henry Harrison defeated incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren, LeMoyne turned down an opportunity to be the vice presidential candidate of the Liberty Party, whose sole objective was the end of slavery. He did, however, agree to be the Liberty Party’s candidate for governor in Pennsylvania three times in the 1840s in order to carry the party’s banner and message, but without any serious intention of winning.
The Liberty Herald in Philadelphia said of LeMoyne: “Since the earliest agitation of the abolition question he has been its hearty advocate. Among the first champions of the good cause, and among the foremost in ability and devotion to it, Dr. LeMoyne is the fittest man we know in the state to represent us in any place of public trust. All who know him, of whatever party or creed, hold him to be a good scholar – a good citizen – a good man, and in every way better qualified to make a good governor than any man that has held that office in the present century.”
LeMoyne himself said, “In view of the circumstances of the case, I feel constrained to accept the nomination, and thus affording abolitionists to bear an open testimony in favor of freedom, and administer a friendly and fearless rebuke to the pro-slavery politicians of the day, and to consistent professing friends of the slave.”
Among abolitionists, LeMoyne was actually something of a radical, Kilgore said. Some abolitionists believed slavery should be ended, but that once freed, Black people should not be put on an equal footing with white people. Some also believed that they should be relocated to build their own society. LeMoyne, however, believed that once they were no longer in bondage, enslaved people should be given equal rights.
LeMoyne’s political activities faded away as the Civil War drew closer and the Republican Party became the primary anti-slavery vehicle in the country’s politics. In the years after the war ended, he donated $20,000 to reconstruct a school for freed enslaved people in Memphis, Tenn. Today, it goes by LeMoyne-Owen College, and is a historically Black institution.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he was a forward-thinking person,” said Kilgore, noting that LeMoyne was also an early advocate for the education and equality of women and a champion for literacy and learning, giving $10,000 later in his life to start Washington’s first public library.
His pioneering advocacy for cremation brings a lot of attention to LeMoyne in the 21st century, but “that’s a small part of who he was,” Kilgore said.