Anti-slavery advocates were outraged by the murder on 7 November 1837 of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a white man and editor of an abolitionist newspaper, by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois. This was soon followed by the destruction by arson, three days after it opened, of abolition's great new building, Pennsylvania Hall. Except for the burning of the U.S. Capitol and the White House by the British during the War of 1812, it was the worst case of arson in the country up to that date. Fire companies were prevented by violence from saving the building.