William Eliot Greenleaf, Jr., founder of Washington University in St. Louis, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts on August 5, 1811 to William Greenleaf and Margaret Dawes Eliot. He graduated from Washington D.C.'s Columbian College in 1830, and from Harvard Divinity School in 1834. After his ordination he moved west to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister. He married Abby Adams Cranch in 1837, and the couple had fourteen children. An ardent believer in Unitarianism, Eliot turned his fledgling St. Louis congregation into a prominent religious community. By 1851 the church had outgrown its first building and erected the Church of the Messiah. Two years later he established Eliot Seminary, which became Washington University by the end of the decade. Eliot served as chancellor in the early 1870s. His interest in education remained strong throughout his life, and he contributed considerable time and energy to the St. Louis public schools, the Mission Free School, and the State Institute for the Blind. He died on January 23, 1887, two years after the publication of his best-known work, The Story of Archer Alexander.

In The Story of Archer Alexander (1885), William Greenleaf Eliot seeks to illustrate "the relation between master and slave, and of the social condition of slave-holding communities," particularly in the border states. Eliot opens with a description of a monument in Washington, D.C., in which Abraham Lincoln is manumitting a slave who kneels before him. The model for the sculpture, fugitive slave Archer Alexander, is the subject of Eliot's work.

Alexander was born into slavery near Richmond, Virginia in 1828. Although the family that owned him generally attempted to keep slave families together, he was separated from his mother and sent to Missouri with his young master when he was eighteen. He spent the next thirty years as a slave there. During that time, Alexander married Louisa, also a slave, and they had several children. When Archer was accused of secretly assisting Union troops in 1863, he decided to escape, rather than go before an examination committee. Eliot eventually employed Alexander, but while living with the Eliot family, Alexander became one of the last fugitive slaves captured under civil law in Missouri. Eliot, with the backing of local law enforcement, had Alexander released and attempted without success to purchase his freedom. Later, Alexander helped his wife and children escape, and they joined him in St. Louis. On January 11, 1865, all slaves in Missouri were manumitted. Alexander remarried after his first wife's death and lived near Eliot until his death ca. 1879.

Throughout the work, Eliot enhances Alexander's tale with background information about the politics and controversies, including the Free-Soil debate and Fugitive Slave Law, in border states during the years prior to the Civil War. He concludes the work with the essay, "Slavery in the Border States."

Works Consulted: Garraty, John A. and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Johnson, Allen and Dumas Mallone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, volume VIII, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959.

Monique Prince
Armistead Lemon