Elihu Burritt

Elihu Burritt (December 8, 1810 – March 6, 1879) was an American diplomat, philanthropist, social activist, and blacksmith. He was also a prolific lecturer, journalist and writer who traveled widely in the United States and Europe.

Early life Elihu Burritt was born December 8, 1810, in New Britain, Connecticut. He first worked as a blacksmith. As an adult he was active as a lecturer in many causes, opposing slavery, working for temperance, and trying to achieve world peace.

In the early 1840s Burritt began to tour New England, speaking against war and promoting brotherhood. His sobriquet "Learned Blacksmith" arose from a period when he earned a living as a blacksmith in Worcester, Massachusetts. He founded a weekly paper, the Christian Citizen, in Worcester in 1844.

Move to England In the summer of 1846, the disillusioned Burritt left the cautious Beckwith, and went to England. He stayed initially with Joseph Sturge. Setting off in July on a walking tour, he went to Worcester, the namesake town, to speak. He travelled widely around a new home in Harborne, then a rural village, largely on foot. He was sympathetic to the industrial and political culture of Birmingham, and became a friend of many of its leading citizens, so that what he wrote about it was largely positive.

"The peace movement", as an umbrella term that included supporters of William Lloyd Garrison and the "moral force" Chartists, as well as the league and Peace Society radicals, was popularized by Burritt from 1847.

Burritt organized the first international congress of the Friends of Peace, which convened in Brussels in September 1848.

A second International Peace Congress met in Paris in 1849, presided over by Victor Hugo. Burritt attended the "Peace Congresses" at Frankfurt in 1850, London in 1851, Manchester in 1852 and Edinburgh in 1853. The outbreak of the Crimean War and then the American Civil War jolted his views.

Later life Burritt's first stay in Britain ended in 1853. He returned to New England, taking an interest in farming and agricultural methods.

Burritt was appointed United States consul in Birmingham, England by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. When Ulysses S. Grant was elected in 1868, he was not reappointed to the post. It was the third of the travel books he wrote about Britain for American readers. A Walk from London to John O'Groat's, with notes by the way (1864) and A walk from London to Land's End and back, with notes by the way (1865): These two books are thought to have influenced John and Robert Naylor who undertook the first recorded walk from Land's End to John o' Groats in 1874 and published their book on it in 1916

Legacy

Each August, New Marlborough, Massachusetts, hosts an annual crafts and community fair in honor of Elihu Burritt. Burritt resided in the Berkshire County Town in 1830. He is one of several blacksmiths who may have inspired the poem "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Burritt College, which operated in Spencer, Tennessee, from 1848 to 1939, was named in his honor.

The library at the Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut is named in his honor – The Elihu Burritt Library. It holds an archive of his work and correspondence. Another archive is held as part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.