The Emancipator was originally founded in 1819 by Elihu Embree, the son of a Quaker minister, as the Manumission Intelligencier, and was an abolitionist newspaper in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It was published from April 1820 to October 1820, when publication ceased due to Embree's illness, and then sold to Benjamin Lundy in 1821, when it became The Genius of Universal Emancipation. The editor was Theodore Dwight Weld.