Belfast, 5 College Street, June 9th, 1852.
Dear Sir:—In the appendix of the recently published 4th Volume of the Memoirs of the late Rev. Dr. Chalmers, his celebrated letter of apology for slaveholders, is again brought before the public. On its first appearance, it was hailed with delight by that class; published in the newspapers of the Southern States of the American Union alongside of advertisements for runaway slaves, &c., &c., and certainly proved an ample recompense for the money contributed to the Free Church of Scotland, and it probably will be appealed to, as an authority by the slaveholders, while a slave remains in the United States. His biographer styles it (as Dr. C.) "matured oppression of his sentiments" on slavery, &c. Thus they were matured in favor of the slaveholder.
It certainly seems unfortunate that the distinguished leader of the Free Church should have produced such a document unfortunate for the cause of those that are in bonds, whose miseries it tends to perpetrate; so that after so many years (its date being May, 1845) it perhaps might have been better to have omitted it. It appears, by the 2d and 5th sections of the letter, that Dr. Chalmers differed entirely in principle from all true abolitionists, as he thought that man could have property in man, and that the abolitionists went too far to effect slaveholders, to do violence to their "proprietory feelings," to relinquish their unrighteous grasp of their degraded and unhappy victims.
Although Dr. Chalmers thought that the Free Church did right in receiving from the slaveholders the prices of the "bodies and the souls of men," I am not aware of a single Protestant denomination on this side of the Atlantic that concurred in that opinion.
By this mail, I forward to you a copy of the letter above referred to, published by the "Belfast Anti-Slavery Society," in 1846, with these remarks on it; and as truth never suffers by discussion, it might assist as an antidote on the evil document again appearing, if you would be good enough to give a place to both, in the columns of your valuable paper. You being so near the head-quarters of the "sum and substance of all villiany," the remarks would thus be seen in several states of the Union, I also send to you a copy of the address of above Society, "to the Christian Churches of the United States," which it quotes in the remarks on the letter.
Admiring your persevering efforts in behalf of the oppressed, and wishing you every success,
I remain, dear sir, yours sincerely,
F. A. Calder.