Elihu Burritt

Blacksmith and reformer, born in New Britain, Connecticut, USA. After working as a blacksmith in New Britain, CT, and Worcester, MA (1827–37), and mastering several languages in his spare time, he toured as a lyceum lecturer, gaining his nickname. In Worcester he founded a newspaper, the Christian Citizen (1844), especially to propagate his views on Christian pacifism, and he travelled to England (1846) as an ‘apostle of peace’. In 1858 he founded a journal devoted to the cause of buying and emancipating slaves. Despite his opposition to the Civil War, President Lincoln appointed him consular agent at Birmingham, England (1863–70).

Elihu Burritt (1810–1879) was an American philanthropist, linguist, and social activist born in the town of New Britain, Connecticut in 1810. In 1847, his pamphlet Four Months in Skibbereen made residents of the United States more aware of the Potato Famine in Ireland.

He possessed an extraordinary aptitude for languages which allowed him to attain his marvelously rapid mastery of them.

During a trip abroad in 1846–47, he was deeply touched by the suffering of the Irish peasantry. In 1848, he organized a precursive entity to the League of Nations and the United Nations called the first international congress of the Friends of Peace, which convened in Brussels in September, 1848. A second "Peace Congress" met in Paris in 1849 presided over by Victor Hugo. Burritt attended the "Peace Congresses" at Frankfort on the-Main in 1850, London in 1851, Manchester in 1852, and Edinburgh in 1853.

The outbreak of the Crimean War in Europe and the War of the Rebellion in the United States jolted his senses.