Benjamin Lundy (January 4, 1789 – August 22, 1839) was an American Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey of the United States who established several anti-slavery newspapers and traveled widely. He lectured and published seeking to limit slavery's expansion and tried to find a place outside the United States to establish a colony in which freed slaves might relocate.

As William Lloyd Garrison pointed out in a eulogy, Lundy was not the first American abolitionist, but "he was the first of our countrymen who devoted his life and all his power exclusively to the cause of the slaves."

Lundy was born to Joseph and Elizabeth Shotwell Lundy, both Quakers, at Greensville, Hardwick Township, Sussex County, New Jersey. His mother died when he was four, but he became close to his stepmother, Mary Titus Lundy. As a boy, he worked on his father's farm, attending school for only brief periods. In 1804, New Jersey passed a law allowing gradual emancipation of slaves, although the 1810 census in Sussex County showed that more than half of the 758 black people were still enslaved.

However, by that time, young Lundy had moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). In 1808 he was apprenticed to a saddler. On the Ohio River, Wheeling was on important transit point of the interstate slave trade, with coffles of slaves often marched through town. Many would be shipped down the Ohio River toward Kentucky (a slave state) and additional slave states down the Mississippi River. In Wheeling, Lundy saw firsthand many iniquities inherent in the institution of slavery, including the use of horsewhips and bludgeons to force barefoot human beings to walk through mud and snow. He determined to devote his life to the cause of abolition.

Lundy also became acquainted with a local Quaker family, the Stantons, who lived a dozen miles west from Wheeling, in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. Ohio did not permit slavery, and Benjamin Stanton would become a U.S. Congressman from that district, and two decades after Lundy's death, his brother Edwin Stanton would become Secretary of War under President Abraham Lincoln.

In December 1814 Lundy and Esther Lewis declared their intent to marry in the local Quaker meeting, and did so on February 13, 1815. Her brother William married Lydia Stanton, sister of David Stanton (Edwin Stanton's father). On November 18, 1815, they had their first child, Susan Maria Lundy Wierman (d. 1899). In the following decades, Esther bore two more sons, Charles Tallmadge Lundy (1821–1870) and Benjamin Clarkson Lundy (1826–1861), and two additional daughters, Elizabeth (1818–1879) and Esther (1826–1917).

The young family settled in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, where Lundy soon built up a profitable saddlery business along the highway west (that later became Interstate 70). In 1815, he and five others also organized an anti-slavery association, known as the Union Humane Society, which within a few months had a membership of more than 500. Prominent members included lawyer journalist Charles Hammond, James Wilson (grandfather of President Woodrow Wilson) and Joseph Howells (father of William Dean Howells). Fellow Quaker Charles Osborne, who editing the Philanthropist (later moved to Cincinnati), also showed him journalism and printing basics.

On his birthday, January 4, 1816, Lundy published a circular indicating his intent to found a national anti-slavery society to focus antislavery sentiment and activity. That became his life's work. He named his first son to honor James Tallmadge, whose antislavery speech in the U.S. House on February 16, 1819, Lundy printed in full.