Evangelical Man-Stealers: An Address Delivered in Manchester, England, on October 12, 1846
EVANGELICAL MAN-STEALERS: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, ON 12 OCTOBER 1846
Manchester and Salford Advertiser and Chronicle, 17 October 1846. Other texts in Manchester Times, 16 October 1846; Manchester Examiner, 17 October 1846; Aberdeen Herald, 24 October 1846.
In a letter to Elizabeth Pease dated 12 October 1846, Garrison explained that he was “just preparing to leave for Manchester, where we are to have a great meeting this evening, in regard to the Evangelical Alliance, in the Free Trade Hall.” According to the Manchester Examiner, Free Trade Hall, a building with enough space to seat from seven to eight thousand people, “was about half full at the commencement of the proceedings . . . , but in a short time after it was pretty well filled in the lower part, and the side galleries were fully occupied. A great number of members of the Society of Friends were present. The audience was a very respectable one, and consisted in part of females.” The Manchester Times estimated that the hall “was about three-fourths filled,” while the Manchester and Salford Advertiser and Chronicle placed the number at “about 4,000.” Councillor William Shuttleworth occupied the chair when the meeting started at 7 P.M., but he declared that by doing so he “did not mean to pledge himself to be an Antislavery League man.” George Thompson followed him with a speech criticizing the Evangelical Alliance for sentiments expressed-at their meeting which were “at variance with anti-slavery principles.” Then Henry C. Wright upbraided the Alliance for denouncing “slavery as a system and condition into which man might happen to fall. . . whilst at the same time hugging the slave-holders to their bosoms. ” At this point Archibald Prentice rose to say “he thought that on this occasion there [was] too much aspersion” of the Alliance. Thompson replied that the Alliance “was not entitled to the pity of Mr. Prentice or any other man.” For, he continued, when a proposal to deny slaveholders membership in the Alliance was put forward, they did not adopt the measure. Much of the meeting revolved around Thompson’s stormy accusations and Prentice's moderate rebuttals. Garrison railed against the Free Church and the Alliance for more than an hour. At the conclusion of Garrison’s speech, Thompson returned to the podium and, after praising Douglass’s Narrative, proposed a resolution that the Alliance was “at variance with the uncompromising spirit of Christian truth.” Prentice again protested, calling instead for the substitution of an amendment “condemning the system of slaveholding. ” Thompson countered with the observation that the “time for such a course was gone by” and asked Prentice if he had “the courage to join in . . . denunciation.” According to the Manchester Examiner “PRENTICE here came in front of the platform, and at the same
time Mr. Douglas[s] rose, upon which considerable disorder ensued, the majority of those present calling loudly for Mr. Douglas[s] to be heard, whilst others as vehemently shouted for Mr. Prentice. ” Douglass yielded the floor. Prentice called again for an amendment to Thompson’s resolution. His suggestion elicited “cheers, mingled with hissing and loud marks of disapprobation” from the audience. Douglass then returned to the podium. After Douglass, Thomas Wilson, described by the Manchester and Salford Advertiser and Chronicle as “a native of Africa,” came forward “with a large whip in his hand. ” Speaking in “broken English” which the Chronicle reporter found “scarcely intelligible,” Wilson nevertheless impressed the audience with “his earnestness and genuine simplicity.” Wilson asked the meeting to show themselves “Christians, in loving your black brothers.” When the chairman asked for a second of Prentice ’s amendment, no reply was given. The original resolution was put and passed. The three-hour meeting adjourned after a vote of thanks to the chairman. Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, 12 October 1846, Garrison to Lib., 20 October 1846, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 435–39.
Mr. Frederick Douglas[s] came forward, and was received with great applause. He said he was decidedly in favour of the amendment of Mr. Prentice,1Archibald Prentice (1792–1857), founder of the Anti-Com Law League and longtime editor of the radical Manchester Times, was also active in educational reform, temperance, and antislavery. Descended from a family of Scottish Covenanters, Prentice sympathized with American abolitionists but objected to Garrisonian attacks on the church and clergy. While touring America in 1847, Prentice reiterated his opposition to antislavery criticism of established religion. In Boston he noted with “deep regret" that the “timidity or cowardice of a number of ministers” caused abolitionists to “doubt the power of religious principle in the repression of cruelty and injustice. ” Prentice condemned proslavery ministers but warned antislavery men against “charging upon religion itself the faults or errors of its professors. ” Brian Harrison, Dictionary of British Temperance Biography, Society for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin Supplement, Aids to Research, no. 1 (Warwick, Eng, 1973) 99; J. T. Slugg, Reminiscences of Manchester Fifty Years Ago (Manchester, 1881), 287–90; Archibald Prentice, A Tour of the United States, 5th ed. (London, 1849), 162–63;DNB, 16 : 301–03. and he hoped it would be passed; but he saw no reason for refusing to pass the other resolution. He thought it followed as a necessary consequence.
What did Mr. Prentice say, and what did the meeting say, by passing a resolution declaring slaveholding to be a sin under all circumstances? Why, the very passing of such a resolution was a brand of condemnation upon the Evangelical Alliance. They were not there as professors of religion, as ministers of the Gospel, as the missionaries of the gospel of peace and good will to men; but they were gathered
together from all classes of society to come to the unanimous conclusion that slaveholding under all circumstances is a sin; a conclusion which a God-appointed, God-ordained, heaven-commissioned body of ministers in London could not come to. He was inclined to think this censure would be almost severe enough, without the passage of Mr. Thompson’s resolution at all. (Hear, hear.) He believed no other body of men, in this or any country, could be found to pass by three millions of people in the condition of American slaves, without passing some censure upon those who held them in that condition.
When he left America for this country, he expected to find here but one opinion about slaveholding and slaveholders in this country among all denominations; but he was disappointed. He found that there were men calling themselves evangelical Christians, who still believed it was their duty to throw the garb of Christianity about the slaveholders of America. If, then, at any time, they might seem to be opposing religion, who had driven them to that seeming opposition? It was those men who, mantled in the garb of Christianity, came to prop up the infernal system of slavery.
He (Mr. Douglas[s]) was acquainted with evangelical man-stealers. He had felt the lash; he had four sisters and a brother now in slavery, and the man who claimed to own his body was not less than a class leader, a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America. (Hear, hear.) He had seen him tie up a young woman by the hands, cause her to stand there three or four hours, and with a bloody cow-skin beat her till the warm blood trickled at her feet, and then he would quote this passage of scripture: “He who knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, should be beaten with many stripes."2Douglass paraphrases Luke 12 : 47 (“Shame, shame”) That man was Thomas Hall,3Actually Thomas Auld. of St. Michaels.
As in this country, the abolitionists have to contend with the religious classes of the community; for slavery is defended on religious grounds. It was part and parcel of the religion of the land. Men were sold to build churches, women were sold to support missionaries, and babes were sold to buy Bibles for the heathen. Individuals dying bequeathed three-fourths of their slaves to be sold, that the Gospel might be sent to the heathen. (Hear, hear.) And they were denounced for being infidels to such a religion. (Applause) They had heard through Drs.
Cox, Patten, Emery,4Robert Emory (1814–48), son of Methodist bishop John Emory, graduated from Columbia College, New York, in 1831 and from 1834 to 1840 served as Professor of Languages at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where his father was president of the school’s Board of Trustees. While teaching at Dickinson, Emory decided to enter the ministry and was admitted on trial by the Baltimore Conference in 1839. After three years as a probationer he was received into membership and assigned to the Baltimore city station where he served briefly before returning to Dickinson as president pro tem during 1842–43. Resuming his Baltimore ministry in 1844, Emory served two local churches before leaving permanently in July 1845 to assume the presidency of Dickinson College on a regular basis. Although he retained the post until his death in 1848, ill health and foreign travel kept him absent from the school for extended periods. Appointed to represent the Baltimore Methodist Conference at the August 1846 Evangelical Alliance meeting in London, Emory attended the gathering despite his initial anger over the provision that slaveholders not be invited. During the Alliance debates over slavery Emory spoke three times, condemning slavery in strong terms. “So much did he hate slavery,” Emory declared, that “he would rather be the man to devise some plan for . . . [its] extinction . . . than [to] have been George Washington himself.” At the same time, however, Emory denied the argument that “under all circumstances, a man holding slaves must be a wicked man. ” There is no indication that Emory addressed himself specifically to the question of religious instruction among southern slaves. Shortly after returning to America Emory faced the slavery issue in a different form when a Dickinson College professor was indicted for allegedly participating in a June 1847 riot in defense of several fugitive slaves threatened with recapture. Perhaps because Dickinson College was at that time “only very mildly alive to evils of slavery" President Emory’s statements on the incident fell somewhat short of his ringing antislavery pronouncements delivered in London the previous year. It was the duty of Dickinson professors “not to be partizans or propagandists of any peculiar creed in politics or religion,” he asserted. The faculty member in question, Emory assured the Board of Trustees, was not an abolitionist and subscribed to none of the major doctrines commonly associated with the movement. Evangelical Alliance, Proceedings, 1846, 317–19; James Henry Morgan, Dickinson College, 1783–1933 (Carlisle, Pa., 1933), 273–82; Matthew Simpson, ed., Cyclopaedia of Methodism . . . (Philadelphia, 1882), 341; Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of Conferences, 1849, 308–09; Lib., 10, 24 September 1847. and the whole batch of evangelical man-stealers, that the slaves were religiously cared for.
But while the slaveholders took the ground that the Bible sustained slavery, they were very careful never to give a Bible to a single slave. However they proceeded to teach them that God intended them to be slaves. He had heard many a sermon preached from this text, “Servants obey your masters.”
“In the first place, you should obey your masters because God has commanded you to be obedient; in the second place, because your own happiness is dependent upon your obedience; in the third place, you should obey your master because of a sense of gratitude with which you should be inspired on account of the fact, that the Lord, in his mercy, brought you from Africa to this Christian country—(laughter and applause)—you should obey your master, in the fourth place, because of your adaptation to your condition as slaves. For instance, servants, you
have hard hands, strong fingers, robust constitutions, and black skins. Your masters and mistresses have soft hands, long and slender fingers, delicate constitutions, and white skins. Now, servants, whence this difference? It is the Lord’s doing: wonderful are his works, and marvellous in our eyes.” (Applause)
He would not preach any more, but read some extracts from two discourses recently published by the Rev. Bishop Meade, of Virginia. In these he told the slaves they ought to obey their masters and mistresses on earth as they would God himself.
“Poor creatures,” he says, “you little consider when you are idle and steal and waste any of their substance, when you are saucy and impudent, when you are telling them lies or deceiving them, or when you prove stubborn and sullen and will not do your work, you do not consider that whatever faults you do are faults against God himself.”5Douglass closely paraphrases Meade, Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants, 104 (Mr. THOMPSON: “And this clergyman wrote a letter to the Evangelical Alliance, which was read with great eulogium on his character, by the Rev. Dr. Bunting”)6Jabez Bunting (1779–1858), in his capacity as senior secretary of the Missionary Society, president of the Theological Institution, and president on several occasions of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, was the major figure in English Methodism during this general period. He is generally regarded as the second founder of the English Wesleyan Church, chiefly because it was he more than anyone else who consolidated and put in working order the sacerdotal form of Methodist Church government. Bunting, who was active at the 1846 Evangelical Alliance meeting in London, denied having read a letter from Bishop Meade to the conference, and he took strong exception to what he felt were “the untrue & injurious insinuations against myself, implied in Thompson's Speech.” Jabez Bunting to Editor, Manchester Guardian, 20 October 1846; Thomas P. Bunting, The Life of Jabez Banting, D.D. . . . (London, 1887), 692–96; N. R. Ward, Early Victorian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1830–1858 (New York, 1976), xiii–xxiii; DNB, 3 : 273–75.
He also wished the slaves to be flogged “evangelically,"—
“When corrected,” he says, “whether they deserved it or not, Almighty God required them to bear it patiently; for, if they did not deserve it, or if it was too severe, perhaps they had escaped a great many more, and were at last paid for all.”7 This is a close paraphrase of Meade, Sermons, Addressed to Masters and Servants, 132–33. (The drawling mawworm-like tone in which Mr. Douglas[s] successfully bit off the preachers of the Southern States, almost convulsed the meeting with laughter.) He continued—That was American slaveholding religion. It was the religion of the entire south; of fifteen states in the American union; and it was the religion of Drs. Cox, Olin, Emery, and the whole sixteen delegates
from America. With these men the Evangelical Alliance struck hands. (Shame.)
He believed there were no two opinions in this meeting of the character of the Evangelical Alliance, and that it would have a unanimous condemnation. This alliance, that would pass by slaveholders who enslaved the black man, would do the same if the white men were slaves. The menstealers did not steal men because they were black, and the man that could steal a black horse could steal a white one; so a man that would steal Frederick Douglas[s] would steal Mr. Prentice; and he who would not condemn the stealing of the one, would not condemn the stealing of the other. (Hear.)
He was glad, notwithstanding the pernicious influence exerted by the alliance, to see that England, Ireland, and Scotland were alive to this question. The Rev. Dr. Pringle,8The Reverend James Pringle (1781–1866), son of a wealthy Scottish farmer, rose to eminence in the Secession and later the United Presbyterian Church. After early tutoring at home by the Reverend John Smart of Erskine United PIesbyterian (Burgher) Church, Stirling, Pringle attended Edinburgh University but left before graduation to study for the Secession Church ministry at the General Associate (Anti-Burgher) Hall at Whitbum. Licensed by the General Associated Presbytery of Kelso in 1804, he was subsequently ordained and inducted First Minister in the pastoral succession of the Third Associated Congregation of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1817 Pringle became Moderator of the General Associated (Anti-Burgher) Synod and worked actively for the union of the Burgher and Anti-Burgher wings of the church which was partially effected in 1820. Chosen Moderator of the United Secession Synod in 1832, Pringle was elected to the same position in the Third English Synod of the United Presbyterian Church in 1865. At a meeting of the United Associate Synod on 8 May 1846, Pringle introduced a resolution condemning American slavery as a “sin of a peculiarly heinous and exaggerated character” and refusing to hold further Christian fellowship with any church which sanctioned the slave system. A few months later as a delegate to the Evangelical Alliance Pringle “felt it necessary to discharge his own conscience” regarding American slavery and the “Slave-rearing, the Slave-trading and driving, which prevailed in the Slaveholding States.” Forced to leave London before the Alliance had finished debating the slavery issue, Pringle strongly urged members to support John H. Hinton’s amendment banning slave-holders from Alliance membership. The precise date and circumstances of Pringle’s subsequent resignation from the Alliance have not been ascertained. Evangelical Alliance, Proceedings, 1846, 333–36; “Fasti of the United Presbyterian Church in England, 1847–1876,” United Reformed Church Historical Society Library, London; United Secession Magazine (June 1846), 273; Edinburgh Witness, 9 May 1846. of Newcastle, had sent in his resignation to the alliance, saying he would have no more to do with it. (Applause.) Slavery in the United States was no longer an American question; it was a question for Christendom, and one which was not to be settled by military or political power; but by moral and religious power. They wanted to make slaveholders feel that they were being shut out from the Christian world.
For two hundred years slavery, with its whips and chains, and gags and thumbscrews, had had its being in America. The slave auctionblock and the pulpit had stood near each other; and the blood of slaves had gone to support the pulpit, while the pulpit covered the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. They were to tear away this mask, and make slaveholders feel that British churches, British pulpits, and British Christians, would not be contaminated by contact with them. (Loud applause.) The Methodists of this country, in making up their estimates of the number of Methodists in the world, at their peril ought not to embrace the slaveholding Methodists of America. He would say to the Presbyterians of England, when they made up their estimate of the Presbyterians in the world, if they meant by that, pure Christianity, “Blot out from your records all the slaveholding portion of them, that portion which holds at this very moment 80,000 human beings in abject slavery.” (Hear, hear.) All denominations should do the same, and then we should not be much longer troubled with delegations from the United States. We had it in our power to deal a tremendous blow at American slavery; no people had it in their power to do so much. We might be told by Dr. Cox that the slaveholder could not emancipate his slaves; that if he did they would suffer martyrdom, and so on; but if the slaveholder desired to emancipate his slaves, he had only to send them over to Canada, where, in the name of the British Lion, they might find protection. (Applause.)
He wished to impress it upon the audience, that the American slave had no Bible; now he held it to be a prerogative of British Christians to see that the Bible was placed in the hands of all the human family. Three millions of people were denied by the law of the land the right to learn to read the name of God that made them. Here was an opportunity to test the Christian character of the slaveholders. He therefore proposed that at once the Christian people of this country should enter into a subscription for the purpose of enabling them to circulate Bibles among all the slave population of the United States, and that a suitable amount be raised for the purpose of sending missionaries to teach its contents to the heathen of Christian America. He knew what would be the result. The very first persons that would meet to drive back the ship, manned by a Christian captain and crew, the first to level their muskets at that company, would be the evangelical Christians of America, who had their property in slaves. (Hear, hear.)
As an example, he stated that when in Michigan he met with a
young man named Wilson, who proposed to establish a Sabbath school for the instruction of coloured children. This was done; but the second day, when they were getting on, as he said, swimmingly, and some old grey-headed men had come up to be instructed, several Methodist classleaders came up, with sticks, stones, whips, and cowskins, and drove them off, declaring that if they met again they would have “nine-and-thirty laid upon their bare backs.” These were the men with whom Dr. Olin was in full fellowship; Dr. Leifchild 9The Reverend J. Leifchild, a Congregational minister from London and a delegate to the Evangelical Alliance. Evangelical Alliance, Proceedings, 1846, lxxvii.again took hold of him, and then we had an “Evangelical Alliance.” An evangelical man-stealer at the beginning, an apologist for evangelical man-stealing in the middle, and an apologizer for the apologist at the end. (Great applause.)