It is interesting to note that the descendants of Daniel Lovejoy found expression for their religious and moral sensibilities in the causes of freedom for all peoples, and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Their great-uncle, Capt. Abiel Lovejoy, was among that minority of early planters in what was to become Maine who were slave-owners. Several stories touching on his slaves are included in the Lovejoy genealogy. His early years on the frontier had been spent warring on shifting fronts with the native inhabitants."Elijah Lovejoy, eldest child of the Reverend Daniel and Elizabeth Lovejoy, was born November 9, 1802, near Albion, Maine, on the frontier farm his grandfather had begun to clear from the wilderness only a few years earlier. There in the small frame house overlooking the quiet waters of Lovejoy Pond, the seven Lovejoy children grew up in an atmosphere of stern Puritan morality and of sincere, though somewhat erratic, piety. The existence of absolute right and absolute wrong was a conviction the Lovejoy household accepted without question. From their infancy the children were taught to revere the Bible, to do their duty, and to suspect the pleasures and the standards that much of the world calls good. "The glitter of this world is captivating and a competency of its good things very desirable," Daniel Lovejoy once told his eldest son; "but our days are as grass," he added. "An unknown and endless eternity is just before us." A consideration so solemn led the Lovejoy children to scrutinize their minds and hearts constantly for evidence of their own fitness for eternity. It inclined them, too, toward critical examination of the society in which they lived.
Elizabeth [Patee] Lovejoy, the mother, also was unusually devout. Indeed, the few of her letters that survive express a religious fervor far beyond the degree convention demanded of the professing Christian. Her religious views did not proceed altogether from undisciplined piety. She had thought much about spiritual matters, had in her youth discussed theological problems with clergymen who visited her father's home, and had studied serious works of systematic theology. She appears to have been at least as well informed on religious matters has her husband."
"The Reverend Daniel Lovejoy had tried with indifferent success to be both a farmer and a Congregational preacher. Deciding at the somewhat advanced age of nineteen to begin his formal education, he had left his father's farm to study at the academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, where he lived in the household of the Reverend Elijah Parish, the noted Congregational divine. The affection between the two had been great, and it was for Parish that Daniel Lovejoy named his first-born son. But the promise Elijah Parish had seen in the younger man was not to be realized. Daniel Lovejoy seems to have doubted his own convictions and ability, and a life of frontier hardship and disappointment only added to his debilitating lack of confidence. Fervently religious but short on learning and inclined to be quarrelsome, he was further handicapped by "an unnatural elevation and depression of spirits" that adversely affected his pulpit performance. His unstable personality likewise produced its effect in the home, and as his daughter Sybil grew up, she too became "subject to great depression of spirits.""
"In spite of these "depressed spirits" around him, Elijah Lovejoy - who was always called "Parish" by his family - spent a normal-enough childhood. Endowed with a strong, stocky body, this dark-haired, dark-eyed youth enjoyed all the usual boyhood sports, especially swimming in the lake conveniently located directly behind the house. Those activities, alternating with the wholesome labor of guiding the plow and wielding the ax and the scythe, helped to spare him and his younger brothers, Daniel, Joseph, Owen, and John, from the most extreme forms of personality derangement. But even they, like their sister Sybil, possessed rather melancholy temperaments. Elijah, especially, suffered from a sharp sense of isolation at certain periods of his life."
"Perhaps because he had himself failed to achieve his ambition to be a truly learned man, Daniel Lovejoy placed a particularly high value on education and encouraged his sons to become scholars. The demands for labor on the frontier farm and the family's lack of means limited the boys' opportunities for schooling, yet the children made full use of the resources available. Elizabeth Lovejoy taught Elijah to read the Bible when he was four years old and through the long Maine winters encouraged him to accomplish the precocious, if somewhat useless, feat of memorizing 150 of Isaac Watt's hymns. Before long the boy was reading the few theological books his father owned and borrowing others from the local library. As soon as he was old enough, he attended the public schools, and then, when time and money were available, the academies in the nearby towns of Monmouth and China. There he learned enough Latin and mathematics to qualify for entrance to Waterville [now Colby] College as a sophomore, just before his twenty-first birthday."