Baptists, Congregationalists, The Free Church, and Slavery: An Address Delivered in Belfast, Ireland, on 23 December 1845
BAPTISTS, CONGREGATIONALISTS, THE FREE CHURCH, AND SLAVERY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BELFAST, IRELAND, ON 23 DECEMBER 1845
Belfast News Letter, 26 December 1845 and Belfast Northern Whig, 25 December 1845. Other texts in Belfast Banner of Ulster, 26 December 1845; Anti-Slavery Bugle, 20 February 1846; Liberator, 20 March 1846.
On the evening of 23 December 1845 Douglass delivered the fifth in a series of seven lectures sponsored by the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society. The Independent Meetinghouse on Donegall Street was “crowded to excess” even though an admission fee was charged. Placards announcing Douglass's return from a two-week stay in England to resume his Belfast lectures had publicized the meeting in advance. The News Letter approvingly noted the presence on the platform of many local clergymen and "influential laity." James Standfield, a local merchant who served as secretary of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, introduced Douglass, who leveled a blistering attack against the Free Church of Scotland for having accepted money from American slaveholders. The controversy that greeted Douglass's strictures against the Free Church enmeshed the local newspapers that reported accounts of the meeting. Both the News Letter and the Banner of Ulster reported on 26 December that the meetings chairman, James Gibson, had publicly disassociated himself from Douglass’s criticism of the Free Church, the News Letter stating that Gibson felt compelled to "interrupt the order of proceeding lest the impression should go abroad that he concurred in the illustrations" Douglass used in condemning the Free Church. On the other hand, the Northern Whig simply stated that Gibson made a "few observations" after Douglass’s speech. On 6 January 1846 the Northern Whig published a letter from Douglass’s staunch Belfast supporter the Reverend Isaac Nelson, who charged the Banner editor with having "misrepresented and garbled" Douglass’s address: "[Y]ou represent James Gibson, Esq., as rebuking Frederick Douglass. Would your readers believe, that on the same night, and as Chairman of the same meeting, Mr. Gibson delivered one of the most animated and eloquent speeches he ever made in Belfast, expressing his hope in God and his earnest prayer, that the Free Church would give back the money and refuse fellowship to slaveholders." Mary Ireland, a Belfast abolitionist, confirmed more than a month later that while many who heard Douglass were "warm in the cause," others "who usually take the lead in . . . good works" were "offended" by Douglass’s "uncompromising tone . . . in regard to the Free Church of Scotland." Belfast Banner of Ulster, 19 December 1845; Belfast Northern Whig, 6 January 1846; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 42n.; Mary Ireland to Maria Weston Chapman, 24 January 1846, in Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 247.
Mr. Frederick Douglass then presented himself, and was received with loud plaudits. He spoke as follows—Ladies and gentlemen, one of the most painful duties I have been called on to perform in the advocacy of the Abolition of Slavery, has been to expose the corruption and sinful position of the American Churches with regard to that question. That was almost the only duty which, when I commenced the advocacy of this cause, I felt inclined to shrink from. Really, any attempt to expose the inconsistencies of the religious organisation of our land is the most painful undertaking. I have always looked upon these churches as possessing, in a superlative degree, the love of virtue and of justice—the love of humanity—the love of God. I had not supposed that they were capable of descending to the low and mean act of upholding and sustaining a system by which three millions of people have been divested of every right and privilege which they ought to enjoy. (Hear.)
But, in examining into the character of these churches, I was led to see, that unless the deeds of these ministers were made known—unless the light of truth should be permitted to shine into their dark recesses, there will for ever be a sink of iniquity in the midst of them. The only way of purifying our church from the deep damnation into which she was plunging, was to expose her deeds to the light. But, in exposing these deeds, I do not wish to place myself in the position of an enemy.
Let no man rank me among the enemies of the church, or of religion, because I dare to remove the mask from her face, and give the nations of the earth a peep at her enormities. It is for her salvation and purification I do it, and for the redemption and disenthralment of my race. (Hear.)
I was exceedingly pleased to hear, at the meeting before the last, that the minister who occupies the pulpit of this house, (Mr. Hodgens,)1James Hodgens, a Dublin-born abolitionist and Congregational minister, was pastor of the Donegall Street Church, Belfast, from 1842 to 1849. In late December 1845, Hodgens’s church sent a strong antislavery remonstrance to American Congregationalists, pledging to "hold no fellowship with any Independent Church, or member of that church, who holds slaves or apologizes for slavery." Hodgens served on the enlarged Committee of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society in 1846 and died in Belfast in 1851. James E. Archibald, A Century of Congregationalism: The Story of the Donegall Street Church, Belfast (Belfast, 1909), 22–29; Riach, "Campaign Against American Slavery," 531. welcomed me to this platform, within these walls—before these people, to expose the corruptions of the Congregational Church of America. It was a noble act, which must identify that rev. gentleman with the friends of truth. It displayed a conscientiousness of innocence on his part, or, at
least, an openness and a magnanimity that are ever associated with innocence—(hear, hear)—and a willingness for self-examination seldom displayed.
Innocence, you know, lives in the sunlight—it rushes out into the dayu—it asks to be examined, and searched, and tried. (Hear, hear, hear.) This is its language. You never hear it crying "Rocks, cover us; and, Mountains, on us fall, and hide us from the face of Truth and Justice!"2Douglass paraphrases Rev. 6 : 16: "And said to the mountains and rocks. Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb." This is the language of guilt—of those convinced of their own iniquity. Innocence never bolts and bars its meeting-house doors, to shut out the light, nor hides itself behind some "important engagement." (Hear, and laughter.) It never does any such thing as this. It rushes forth to be seen. Its element is the light. It opens its own eyes and is willing to have the eyes of the world opened on itself. It is glorious, and I love it. The nature of guilt was never set forth more clearly in a few words than by the Blessed Redeemer, when he said, that "it hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest its deeds be revealed."3Douglass paraphrases John 3 : 20: "For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved." Eighteen hundred years ago, as it is now, was the reason of this obvious—because God looks on sin with no degree of allowance; and truth will not hold that man guiltless who, in the light of the nineteenth century, upholds American Slavery, in any shape or form whatever. (Cheers)
Before entering on the subject of my discourse at large, I beg to say a few words as to my own position among you. One among the many means taken to destroy the influence of these lectures, has been that of circulating insidiously a suspicion, that I am not a really sincere person—that my character is not good. "He may be an impostor," has been the word. I am not an impostor. If those who insinuate that I am one can prove it, I shall be as ready as any one to give way. Besides, I would inform this audience that the story that I am here without credentials is absolutely false. I have any quantity of testimonials you may demand from the most distinguished Abolitionists of the day.4Offended by Douglass's attacks on their denomination, Methodists in Cork and Dublin wrote to fellow churchmen in Belfast to discredit his mission. Most opposition, however, probably came from local Presbyterians sensitive to Douglass's attacks on the Free Church. Belfast abolitionist Mary Ireland reported that "insinuations and ridicule" were more common than open attacks. "It was first whispered that Frederick Douglass was an imposter," she wrote in early 1846. The testimonial letters which Douglass brought with him to Belfast came from American abolitionists as well as from the Anti-Slavery Society of Cork, the Methodist Garrisonian from Dublin, William Shortt, and a celebrated railway engineer in Ireland, Sir John McNeill. Shortt had also gotten up a set of resolutions approving Douglass's course while in Ireland and rebuking those Wesleyan Methodists in his city who shut their meetinghouses to him. In 1846 the secretaries of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society returned the donation of Presbyterian minister James Morgan because he had allegedly circulated reports injurious to Douglass. Riach, "Campaign Against American Slavery," 297–301; Mary Ireland to Maria Weston Chapman, in Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 247–48 Douglass to [Richard D. Webb] 5, 6 December 1345, Anti-Slavery Collection, MB; "Address to Frederick Douglass from the Anti-Slavery Society of Cork," in Cork Southern Reporter, 6 November 1845; William Shortt to the Preachers, Stewards, and Leaders of the Wesleyan Methodist Society, 16 December 1845, in Cork Examiner, 12 January 1846. I have no
fears of being examined. I have been in Ireland four months, and have delivered upwards of fifty lectures in different parts of the country, and it was not until I reached Belfast, that I had been even asked for credentials. No enquiries were made of me in Dublin, for I had been known to the Abolitionists of that city for the last four years, through the American papers. They knew me, and understood me, and had heard all about me, and I had no need of showing to them even a letter of introduction. I had no need of one. But, what sensible people you are in Belfast! (Laughter.) How cautious lest they should make a mistake! How prudent they are, and how desirous of being placed on a sure footing, lest they should take into fellowship such characters as won’t bear examination—especially how they receive a fugitive slave. But when the Free Church of Scotland is—(hear, hear.)—Well, I won't say another word about them.
One of the prevalent apologies for the American slave-holders is, that the laws of the States, or at least of several of them, are such as to deprive the masters of the privilege of emancipating the slaves. This is the objection made by every apologiser for Christian union with the slave-holders. My motto is, "No union with the slave-holder." (Cheers) Because, I believe there can be no union between light and darkness. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Justice can have no fellowship with injustice. Liberty can have no fellowship with slavery. But those who go for uniting with slave-holders, must always have some strong cause for their conduct. Such as this—there are, it appears, a number of good Slave-holders in the States, whose breasts are overborne with sorrow on being placed in such an unhappy relation to their slaves—(hear)—and there are "circumstances over which they have no control," and so forth, and so forth. (Laughter at the droll manner in which the speaker intonated his words.) "Persons situated as these slave-holders are," and so forth—(laughter)—"cannot be held account-
ble for the evil, when they cannot help themselves," and so forth; "but they would very gladly get rid of it if the laws—," and so forth. (Continued laughter.)
I pronounce this apology to be a falsehood. There is not a slaveholder in any State, who may not, if he will, emancipate his slaves, by taking them across Mason's and Dixon's line, and all the apologies built upon this supposition—all the arguments founded upon it—must fall to the ground. When they presume to offer this excuse, tell them of Brisburn of South Carolina,5Actually William Henry Brisbane (c.1803–78), a slaveholding Baptist minister and religious editor from South Carolina. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, around 1839 and emancipated two of the three slaves he brought with him, the third having died. Brisbane later tried to buy back the slaves he had sold to his brother-in-law, having resolved to free them too. Brisbane enlisted in the abolitionist cause, constructing Biblical arguments against slavery, as he had earlier constructed Biblical defenses of slavery, some written for the Charleston Mercury. He also wrote a few novels. In 1855 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he became chief clerk of the state senate and pastor of the Baptist church. During the Civil War he was appointed one of the Direct Tax Commissioners for South Carolina. A Letter from William Henry Brisbane to the Baptist Denomination in South Carolina (Cincinnati, O., 1840); idem, Slaveholding Examined in the Light of the Holy Bible (Philadelphia, 1847); idem, Speech of the Rev. Wm. H. Brisbane, Lately A Slaveholder in South Carolina; Containing an Account of the Change in his Views on the Subject of Slavery (Hartford, Conn., 1840); ACAB. 1 : 378. who, when he became sensible of the guilt of holding slaves, took them to Ohio, and went to work with his own hands, like an honest man. (Cheers) If any other instances are required, take that of James G. Birney,6Antislavery leader James Gillespie Birney (1792–1857) was the son of a wealthy Kentucky slaveowner. A prominent lawyer, Birney attended Transylvania University and the College of New Jersey, studied law with Alexander J. Dallas in Philadelphia, and in 1816 served one term in the Kentucky legislature. In 1818 he moved to Alabama, where he helped shape the antislavery features of the state's new constitution and served one term in the legislature, later becoming mayor of Huntsville after selling his plantation and resuming his law practice. Between 1826 and 1833 Birney became interested in Negro colonization, serving as lecturer for the American Colonization Society and as vice-president of the Kentucky Colonization Society. An early advocate of gradual emancipation and abolition of the domestic slave trade, he broke with colonizationists in 1834 and came out in favor of immediate emancipation. Thereafter his career was closely linked with abolitionism. In Kentucky and Ohio he published an antislavery newspaper, The Philanthropist, was executive secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1830s, visited state legislatures on antislavery missions, helped establish over 600 antislavery auxiliaries, and wrote many antislavery tracts. He emancipated his six household slaves in 1834 and in 1839 he freed twenty-one slaves inherited from his father. Birney was the Liberty Party’s candidate for president in 1840 and in 1844. Near the end of his life, Bimey despaired of emancipation because of the persistence of racial prejudice and again advocated colonization. He died in Eagleswood, New Jersey, the utopian community founded by Theodore Dwight Weld, where Birney had settled in 1853. Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (New York, 1969), 82–83, 171; NCAB, 2 : 312–13; DAB, 2 : 291–94. who emancipated his slaves, and a hundred of others. But, besides this, there are, in fact, only two or three
States in which it is necessary to remove slaves which are emancipated. There are twelve States in which the master may emancipate his slaves on the spot. 7Although state laws regulating manumission were constantly being revised, such laws increasingly hindered manumission in the antebellum period, especially in the lower South. By the mid-1830s, most state codes required the slaveowner to obtain judicial or legislative permission to free his slaves and demanded that the manumitted slave leave the state. During the 1850s many states prohibited manumission altogether. There was a tendency to hold the owner responsible for the future good behavior, though not the "future maintenance," of his manumitted slaves. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 138–45; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), 232–36; Stroud, Laws Relating to Slavery, 146–53. Another system is, the slave-holder is responsible for the future maintenance of the emancipated slave. There is no such thing. It is not true; and they who tell you so ought to know better, for the facts are all on the other side. (Hear.)
They are always glad to receive emancipated slaves in New England, and even if the Northern States were not disposed to take them, thank God, the British lion asserts dominion in the Western hemisphere. (Cheers.) Canada is open to them, and, I am sure, will not charge brother Jonathan with the expense of their keeping. So much for the story that these men cannot get rid of their slaves. Oh, what a vast amount of reasoning it takes to uphold a bad cause.
Truth needs but little argument, and no long drawn metaphysical detail to establish a position. There is something in the heart which instantly responds to its voice. You feel differently when even the term slavery is mentioned, from the way you feel when the word freedom salutes your ears! Freedom! the word produces a thrill of joy even in the bosom of the slave-holder himself—in the absence of his slaves. Then the term is musical to his ear, but when it is mentioned in the slaves' presence, then is the slave-holder stung to the very quick, and he behaves more like a demon than a man. Oh, yes—our hearts leap up to the very name of freedom, while we recoil with horror at the sound of slavery. We feel, then, that the slave-holder is a wrong-doer, and we know that wrong-doers can have no fellowship with the meek and lowly Jesus.
It is said, we ought not to enter into peoples motives. I don’t want to do so. I only speak what I know. I may be told, "judge not, that ye be not judged?"8Matt. 7 : 1. I admit the truth of this part of Scripture, but those who read it to me, should read a little further, where it is said, "by their fruits ye shall know them."9Matt. 7 : 20. (Cheers) I do not judge you when you cut
me, if I cry out that you hurt me. (Hear.) It is not judging the state of your soul, when I tell you, that you have done me an injury. I know that, by injuring me, you are acting contrary to Christianity, and when you tell me that there are some Christian slave-holders in the States, I tell you, as well might you talk of sober-drunkards. (Laughter.) Just as if the lash in the hands of a Christian is not as injurious to my back as it would be in the hands of a wicked man. (Hear, hear.) As far as my experience goes, I would rather suffer under the hands of the latter; and, I tell you, as I have mentioned in my narrative, that next to being a slave, there is no greater calamity than being the slave of a Christian slave holder. (Hear.) I say this from my own experience, and it is further proved by theory. There is a reason for it. When the finest—the most excellent bodies are decomposed, they become the most corrupt and offensive. So, when the most excellent element is perverted to a base use, it becomes the basest and most hateful in itself—so the religious element raises up and stamps man with the image of God, when pure—but, when perverted, it makes him a fallen angel and sinks him among demons. A man becomes the more cruel the more the religious element is perverted in him. It was so with my master.
Some persons have taken offence at my saying that Slaveholders become worse after their conversion, and it was thought that I was thereby injuring the cause of religion; but I say this is the same principle upon which Christ denounced the Scribes and Pharisees, when he said that they would compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and after they had made him he was ten times the Child of Hell that he was before.10Douglass paraphrases Matt. 23 : 15: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves." They do make proselytes, and convert men to what they call religion, but their converts are still in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. Why is it, if this be not the case, that if they are women-whippers, cradle-plunderers, and man-stealers before their conversion, they are women-whippers, cradle-plunderers, and man-stealers after it—(hear)—and that "religion" is to them but an additional stimulant to re-enact these atrocious deeds? The "religious" slaveholder is a man from whom I have been myself happily delivered,11Douglass refers to his second owner, Thomas Auld, the Methodist class leader. Douglass, Narrative, 67–70. so that I am not to be told that it is a good thing to have a "religious" slaveholder for a master.
I beg now to introduce to your notice a little of the doings of one or two of the Churches of America, and I shall begin with the Baptist Church. (Hear) This Church is congregational in its organization and government, but its congregations are united by what is called a Triennial Convention, the object of which is to spread the Gospel among the heathen. At the last but one of these conventions, in the City of Baltimore, the Rev. Dr. Johnston, of South Carolina, presided, and he on this occasion asserted the doctrine that when any institution becomes established by law, a Christian man may innocently engage to uphold it.12Douglass's information concerning William B. Johnson apparently came from Stephen S. Foster's Brotherhood of Thieves, where Foster attributes to Johnson the maxim, "When, in any country, slavery has become a part of its settled policy, the inhabitants, even Christians, may hold slaves without crime." Stephen S. Foster, The Brotherhood of Thieves: or, A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy: A Letter to Nathaniel Barney of Nantucket (1843; Concord, N.H., 1884), 54. The President of the Baptist convention is a slaveholder himself. He is a man-stealer. (Hear.) The Secretary of the convention is another man-stealer, and most of the other office-bearers were manstealers—were thieves.13William B. Johnson was president of the Baptist Triennial Convention, meeting in Baltimore in 1841, and the secretary was James C. Crane of Virginia. Lib., 13 June 1841; Todd, "Slavery and Southern Baptist Convention," 196–99. During the progress of the business, there was one man in one of the committees, who was found to be an Abolitionist—Elon Galusha.14Born in Shaftsbury, Vermont, Elon Galusha (1790–1856) received M.A. degrees from the University of Vermont and Brown University and prepared for the law before his ordination as a Baptist minister. He held pastorates in upstate New York and founded Hamilton Theological Seminary in Hamilton, New York. He served as president of the first Anti-Slavery Baptist Convention in New York City in 1840 and attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London that same year. Galusha's abolitionist activities as well as the antislavery remonstrance that went out over his name to southern Baptists in 1840 raised a storm of protest in the slave states. He was among the abolitionist clergymen to be removed from the board of officers of the American Board of Foreign Missions by the Baltimore Triennial Convention in 1841. Sprague, AAP, 6 : 669n; Merrill and Rucharnes, Garrison Letters, 2 : 100n; Todd, "Slavery and Southern Baptist Convention", 152–83, 199. This man is now, I trust, in Heaven. He dared to say that a slave was a man, and that slavery ought to be abolished. For this, the members of his church cut him off—(hear)—though he was a man of talent and of unblemished character, and, as a minister of the gospel, unparalleled. Another great Baptist minister, the Rev. Lucius Bowles,15Actually Lucius Bolles (1779–1844), who, since 1826, had been the corresponding secretary of the Baptist’s American Board of Foreign Missions. The son of a Baptist minister from Ashford, Connecticut, Bolles graduated from Brown University, received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Union College, and served as pastor of the Baptist church in Salem, Massachusetts, for twenty-two years before joining the Board of Foreign Missions. Douglass paraphrases a statement made by Bolles in 1834: "There is a pleasing degree of union among the multiplying thousands of Baptists throughout the land. . . . Our Southern brethren are generally, both ministers and people, slaveholders." Birney, American Churches, 32; Foster, Brotherhood of Thieves, 53–54; Daniel Sharp, Christian Mourning: A Discourse Delivered at the Funeral of Rev. Lucius Bolles, D.D. (Boston, 1844); Sprague, AAP, 6 : 474–82.congratulated his brethren that there was “a pleasing degree
of unity among the Baptists through the land, for the southern brethren were all slave-holders."
Slave-holders! Oh, my friends, do not rank the slave-holder as a common criminal—as no worse than a sheep-stealer or a horse stealer. The slave-holder is not only a thiever of men, but he is a murderer; not a murderer of the body, but, what is infinitely worse, a murderer of the soul—(hear, hear, hear)—as far as a man can murder the soul of his fellow—creature, for he shuts out the light of salvation from his spirit. (Mr. Douglass then read an advertisement which appeared in the American papers, by the legal representatives of the Rev. Dr. Furman, another eminent Baptist minister, who, in his lifetime, had asserted that the Scriptures warranted the holding of slaves. The advertisement was to the effect, that, on a certain day, would be put up to auction the property of the late Dr. Furman, consisting of land to a certain extent, "together with twenty seven negroes—some of them very fine—a library chiefly theological—two mulesand an old waggon!" The reading of this advertisement created considerable merriment.) Mr. Douglass proceeded—Oh, my friends, instead of smiling and laughing at this, we should be sadly weeping to think that such a man ever lived as this Dr. Furman— this "Doctor of Divinity"—to think that Christianity should be so degraded by one of its professing ministers! Yet, that man was reckoned among the pious of the earth, and would have been received among the Baptists here as a good Christian minister. What a shame! but I must hasten.
We have here a specimen of the Baptist Church of America in one quarter. I have now to speak of them in the State of Virginia, where men regularly enter into the raising or breeding of slaves, as a business, (hear), just as cattle are raised for the Smithfield market; and where the marriage institution is set aside. In some cases it becomes the interest of the slave holder to separate two slaves (male and female) already married. When the question was proposed to the Baptist Society there, whether parties thus separated might marry again, the answer was, that
this separation being tantamount to the civil death of either of the parties, to forbid the second marriage in either case, would be to expose to Church censure those who did so for disobedience. (Great sensation.)16The Baptist society which delivered this opinion was in Georgia, not Virginia, and it was officially known as the Savannah River Baptist Association of Ministers. In 1835 the ministers were asked "Whether, in case of involuntary separation of such a character as to preclude all prospect of future intercourse, the parties ought to be allowed to marry again?" They answered: "That such separation among persons situated as our slaves are, is civilly a separation by death, and they believe that, in the sight of God, it would be so viewed. To forbid second marriages in such cases would be to expose the parties, not only to stronger hardships and strong temptations, but to church censure, for acting in obedience to their masters, who cannot be expected to acquiesce in a regulation at variance with justice to the slaves, and to the spirit of that command which regulates marriage among Christians. The slaves are not free agents, and a dissolution by death is not more entirely without their consent, and beyond their control, than by such separation." Douglass apparently relied on either Birney, American Churches, 31, of Foster, Brotherhood of Thieves, 56–57. Here we find a deliberate setting aside of the Marriage Institution, and the deliberate sanction of a wholesale system of adultery and concubinage; and, yet the persons who authorise and enforce such wickedness calling themselves Christians! (Hear, hear.) I might go on, giving fact after fact, relative to the doings of the Christian slaveholders in America; but, after what I have said, I wonder who will say in Belfast that a Christian can innocently associate with these men? (Hear)
The Rev. Doctor S—17Daniel Sharp (1783–1853) was a well-known Baptist minister from Boston. Born in Huddersfield, England, Sharp emigrated to New York City in 1805 as the agent of a British commercial house and shortly thereafter joined the Baptist ministry. His first pulpit was in Newark, New Jersey, though most of his active ministry was in the Third Church in Boston. He was an officer of the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Union, an associate editor of the American Baptist Magazine, and the first president of the American Baptist Missionary Union. Brown University made him a fellow in 1828; Harvard appointed him to its Board of Overseers in 1846. In 1841, as southern suspicions of northern Baptists mounted in the wake of the recent Anti-Slavery Baptist Convention. Sharp made public his distaste for slavery but censured abolitionists and frowned on their efforts to excommunicate slaveholders. Sprague, AAP,. 6: 565–78; Todd, "Slavery and Southern Baptist Convention," 191–92; ACAB, 5 : 482; DAB, 17 : 23. has been over here a few months. He is one of those who, like Dr. Chalmers, looks on slavery as an evil, that though wrong in itself, nevertheless, is not sufficiently important to exclude persons from Christian Union. He finds it necessary to keep communion with slaveholders, because he gets not a little of his support from them. These people “feel that they must live. George Bradburn 18Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, American abolitionist George Bradburn (1806–80), the son of a woolen manufacturer, trained for the Unitarian ministry at the Cambridge School of Divinity. He enthusiastically championed women’s rights, temperance, pacifism, and the abolition of capital punishment. A popular orator, from 1839 to 1842 Bradburn served as the Whig representative of Nantucket to the Massachusetts legislature, where he led the successful fight to repeal the state's antimiscegenation law. In 1839 he was an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in 1840 he was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and in 1843 he was one of Douglass's lecturing companions during the "One Hundred Conventions" campaign in the midwest. Bradburn was the editor of two Free Soil sheets—the Pioneer and Herald of Freedom and the True Democrat. In 1861 he was appointed to a position in the Boston Customs House, where he worked until 1875. Frances H. Bradburn, comp., A Memorial of George Bradburn (Boston, 1833). tells an excellent thing illustrative of his apology. Bradburn was very deaf, and one of these apologists said to him, “you seem to over—
look the fact that ministers must live." Said Mr. Bradburn, (Here the speaker imitated the nasal twang of the old man, in a style curiously characteristic of the negro passion for mimicry.) "I deny any such necessity—I dispute your premises. I deny that it is necessary for anyman to live, unless he can live honestly.” These slave-holders ever urge this overwhelming argument of necessity. But they are under a great mistake. What should render it necessary for a man to live by plunder? (Hear.) Why, the very watches in the pockets of these men—the very coats on their backs are the price of blood. (Hear) And they know this.
We understand their difficulty about getting rid of their slaves; it means that they are afraid of getting rid of their fat salaries. (Hear.) And yet, it is my belief, that a minister will be better paid, when there are no slaves. (Cheers.) It is curious, that the higher we go in ecclesiastical rank, in the churches, the colder we find the ministers in the cause of freedom. The most ardent friends of the slaveholders are in the highest grade of church office, while those in an inferior station, are invariably on the side of humanity and Christianity. . . .†Here the News Letter report reads: "Mr. Douglass continued to address the meeting, for nearly an hour further, on the subject of the Church of Scotland, in reference to American Slavery, but we are obliged to curtail our reporter’s notes of the remainder of his address, in order to make room for the important political news which appears elsewhere." (But he wanted to say a few words with regard to the Congregational denomination, or Independents, as they were called here. They were mostly to be found in the Northern States. But the way in which they were implicated in the crime of slavery was the same as that in which the Free Church of Scotlandwas implicated. A large number in the New England States had taken a good stand as to slavery; but the leading Ministers and the leading papers all took the side of slavery. And was it not a singular fact, that the farther they went up, the higher grades of ecclesiastical officers were almost invariably to be found the most ardent defenders of the slaveholder; while the brethren that were below them were on the side of humanity and Christianity?19Douglass’s description of the Congregationalist stance on slavery is essentially correct. Although its membership was confined largely to the Northeast, the church maintained formal ties with Presbyterian synods throughout the slave states. Radical antislavery sentiment among New England Congregationalists existed principally at the local level. During the 1830s and 1840s a number of individual churches and local ecclesiastical bodies withdrew fellowship from slaveholders. State associations were, however, far more conservative. Most acknowledged that slavery was sinful but none ever went so far as to withdraw fellowship from slaveholders or demand immediate emancipation. Robert C. Senior, "New England Congregationalists and the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830–1860" (PhD. diss., Yale University, 1954), 219ff.; William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres with a View of the Slavery Question in the United States (New York, 1853), 163–82; Austin Willey, The History of the Antislavery Cause in State and Nation (Portland, Maine, 1886), 117–18, 216, 278; Adelaide Avery Lyons, "Religious Defense of Slavery in the North," Historical Papers, Trinity College Historical Society, ser. 13" (Durham, N.C., 1919), 8–9; Clifton H. Johnson, "The American Missionary Association, 1846–1861: A Study of Christian Abolitionism" (PhD. diss., University of North Carolina, 1958), 23–24; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 666. It was so, even in the days of our Saviour.
They read of a man that fell among thieves, and was wounded, and left on the road-side, half dead; that a Priest, high in ecclesiastical distinction was journeying along the road where the man was lying; and that he passed by without noticing him; that a Levite came up after, who adopted a middle course. He went and looked on the wounded man,—and no doubt there was a struggle in his breast between humanity and office; the latter, however, prevailed, and he followed the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor,—and he (Mr. Douglass) was sorry it turned out that he was willing to follow the Priest, rather than to interfere in the cause of humanity. But they read of another who was journeying the same way, not of the school of the Priesthood, but rather a worshipper in what they believed in a wrong place—a Samaritan; and, when he heard the groans of the poor man, he had compassion upon him, bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, set him on his own beast, and took him to an inn; gave the host two pence, and told him to take care of him, and that whatever he spent more, when he returned he would repay him. 20The parable is told in Luke 10 : 30–35. So it was even in Belfast; the people were on the side of the slave,—there would be no difficulty in getting from them an expression of their feelings in favour of the slave—(hear)—it was only in the higher or upper classes—the class [of] "Civis"—(alluding to a writer in The Banner) that such a difficulty would arise.
The leading Doctors of Divinity in America, and the Professors in the Colleges, were in favour of slavery. There was Professor Stewart,21Moses Stuart (1789–1852), the father of American Biblical scholarship, was born in Wilton, Connecticut, and educated at Yale. He trained for the law before returning to Yale to study theology under Timothy Dwight. Stuart was ordained a Congregational minister in 1806 and served as pastor of the First Church of Christ in New Haven for the next four years. He spent most of his career as professor of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary. His textbook on Hebrew grammar was the foundation for early Hebrew studies in the United States. His translations of German theology introduced American theologians to new currents of Biblical criticism, while his own exegetical works helped popularize the historical approach to Bible studies. Escoriating abolitionist for their intemperate zeal, Stuart nevertheless abhorred slavery and prayed for gradual emancipation but maintained that slaveholders were not sinners. His interpretation of Paul's position on bondage was rather blunt: "If you are a slave, do not make a fuss about it." Moses Stuart, Conscience and the Constitution, with Remarks on the Speech of Webster on Slavery (Boston, 1850), 51; Lyons, "Defense of Slavery in the North," 20–24; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 396, 610; ACAB, 5 : 731–32; NCAB, 6 : 244–45; DAB, 18: 174–75.
of the Andover seminary, one of the first Biblical schools in New England—that gentleman had committed to him the instruction of the Ministers of a large portion of the congregational denominations, and he was an advocate for slavery. The Rev. Dr. Fisk,22Wilbur Fisk (1792–1839), Methodist theologian, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont. After graduating from the University of Vermont and from Brown University, he studied law and taught in Maryland. He joined the Methodist ministry in 1818 and became the Presiding Elder of the Vermont District of the New England Conference in 1824. Fisk was the first president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, a temperance crusader, and a stout defender of the American Colonization Society. Although Fisk thought slavery "a great evil," he frowned on "the adoption of any rash measures for its removal." When Fisk visited England in 1836, Joseph Sturge and other abolitionists tried unsuccessfully to have him ostracized at the British Wesleyan Conference held in Birmingham. Fisk wrote Moses Smart in 1837 to ask for Stuart's views on slavery. Smart replied that the New Testament "beyond all question" recognized "the existence of slavery" and advised doubters to "take the case of Paul's sending Onesimus back to Philemon, with an apology for his running away, and sending him back to be his servant for life." Foster, Brotherhood of Thieves, 47; Wilbur Fisk, Travels on the Continent of Europe (New York, 1838), 531–82, 620–30; Joseph Holdieh, The Life of Wilbur Fisk, D.D., First President of the Wesleyan University (New York, 1842) 274, 324–26, 399–406; Sprague, AAP, 7 : 576–87; George Prentice, Wilbur Fisk (Boston, 1890), 194–221; DAB, 6 : 415–16. who some time ago, was welcomed by the Methodist Church, in Dublin, though they had shut him (Mr. Douglass) out,—this Doctor Fisk became uneasy, when he heard it said that slavery was a sin, and, not willing to commit himself on the question, wished to have the opinion of Doctor Stewart on the subject. This man, who would have said that sheep-stealing was a sin, and would have decided so at once, had to consult a learned Doctor as to whether man-stealing was a sin—(hear, hear)—but, then, they knew that it was necessary that he should live, and he could not do so, independent of his Congregation. (Laughter.) Doctor Stewart sent him a reply, in which he referred to the case of Onesimus, whom he stated Paul had sent back to Philemon for life.
He (Mr. Douglass) would be glad to know where Dr. Stewart learned that Onesimus was sent back into slavery for life; was it, he would ask, from the law? If it was, he (Mr. Douglass) would tell him,
that Jewish slavery was not for life; there was no such thing known among the Jews as slavery for life, except it was desired on the part of the servant himself.23Patriarchal and Mosaic law sharply distinguished between foreign and Hebrew slaves. Both legal traditions sanctioned perpetual servitude for foreign slaves. A Hebrew who sold himself to a Hebrew master to escape poverty also served for life under Patriarchal law, although most Hebrew slaves were defaulting debtors whose period of service was only six years. Mosaic law later provided (Lev. 25 : 10–13) that Hebrew slaves who had hitherto served for life be freed each Jubilee year. J. D. Douglas et al., eds., The New Bible Dictionary (Grand Rapids, Mich, 1973), 1195–99; Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (New York, 1949), 85–87, 90, 122–23; William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955), 150, 153; Davis, Slavery in Age of Revolution, 523–56; George Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, ed. John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond (Philadelphia, 1969), 175–79; Theodore Dwight Weld, The Bible Against Slavery (New York, 1838), 17, 74–75, 89–90; Caroline L. Shanks, The Biblical Anti-Slavery Argument of the Decade, 1830–1840, JNH, 16: 132–57 (April 1931). What did the Apostle say himself? He said, he sent back Onesimus greater than a servant; and told Philemon to receive him as he would receive him, Paul; not as a slave who could be sold in the market, but as a brother beloved.24The story is told in Philem. 10–19.
After alluding to the case of a Mr. Jonathan Walker 25Jonathan Walker (1799–1878) was a northern abolitionist honored in antislavery circles for his efforts to aid slaves in Florida to escape. By turns a seaman, carpenter, and mechanic, Walker grew up on Cape Cod, converted to abolitionism sometime in the 1830s, and lived with his family in Pensacola, Florida, for five or six years before returning to Massachusetts. While on a business trip to Pensacola in the summer of 1844, he agreed to use his boat to transport some slaves to the Bahamas. The party was intercepted on the Florida Gulf Coast by two southern dredging boats. Walker was returned to Pensacola, where he was convicted of slave stealing, fined about $165, and branded on the palm of his right hand with the initials "SS" (Slave Stealer). He spent eleven months in jail before northern abolitionists secured his release by paying his fines and court and jail costs, shortly before Douglass sailed to England. Walker died in Muskegon, Michigan. Jonathan Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker . . . (Boston, 1845); Filler, Crusade Against Slavery, 164; ACAB, 6 : 329. and a Mr. Tory, 26Douglass actually refers to Charles Turner Torrey (1813–46), born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale, who became an abolitionist while a student at Andover Theological Seminary, where he organized an antislavery society. A Congregational minister, Torrey was one of the leaders of the anti-Garrisonian faction in Massachusetts and served as the agent of the Massachusetts Abolitionist. Torrey left the paper in 1841 to go to Washington, DC. as a freelance reporter. In Annapolis, Maryland, the following year he was arrested as an abolitionist while reporting a "Convention of Slaveholders" and was acquitted after a brief trial. Returning north for a short while to edit the Albany Patriot, Torrey moved to Baltimore around 1843 to engage in business and to carry out his scheme for transporting fugitive slaves to the free states along a prearranged route. It is said that in two years he helped about 400 slaves from Maryland and Virginia to escape. Arrested for this activity in 1844 and defended by Reverdy Johnson, Torrey was convicted and sentenced to six years hard labor. He died of tuberculosis in a Baltimore prison. J. C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined For Showing Mercy To the Poor (Boston, 1847); Filler, Crusade Against Slavery, 163–64; DAB, 18 : 595–96. who were branded and cast into prison, for aiding some slaves
to escape; and to the case of John L. Brown,27 A white native of the Fairfield District of South Carolina, John L. Brown was convicted in a local court in November 1843 of the crime of aiding in the escape of a young female slave rumored by the abolitionists to be his wife or sister, but said by John B. O‘Neall, the judge who tried him, to be his "mulatto mistress." The following month, after the South Carolina Court of Appeals ruled against his motion "in arrest of judgment, and for a new trial," Brown was sentenced to die by hanging on 26 April 1846. But upon the recommendation of Judge O‘Neall, Gov. James H. Hammond commuted the death penalty to thirty-nine lashes a few days after Brown’s original sentence was handed down, on the grounds that the offender was youthful and the slave had been retrieved. In March 1844 Gov. Hammond pardoned Brown altogether, after receiving petitions from the convicted man’s neighbors in Fairfield "stating facts not brought before the jury" and satisfying Hammond "that Brown had no criminal design in what he did." News of these developments in the case of John L. Brown apparently did not reach the outside world until much later. Shortly after the pardon in March, petitions and remonstrances protesting Brown's death sentence poured into South Carolina from American and British abolitionists. Members of the House of Lords denounced the judgment; British antislavery groups passed resolutions of shock and dismay. Abolitionist ministers sent a memorial signed by over 1300 English clergymen to condemn the decision. Daniel O'Connell and Thomas Clarkson added their voices to the chorus of indignation. The protests goaded Gov. Hammond to write his famous letters to Clarkson in defense of southern slavery. In the meanwhile, the Liberator urged the pardoned prisoner to make an antislavery tour of the free states. But after his release Brown returned to obscurity almost as suddenly as he had been dragged from it. John B. O’Neall to Lloyd Fairman, 27 March 1844, O’Neall to Bailie Hastie, 1 May 1843 [1844], in Charleston (S.C.) Mercury, 30 April, 7 August 1844; Lib.. 2 April 1844; Letter of His Excellency Governor Hammond, to the Free Church of Glasgow, on the Subject of Slavery (Columbia, S.C. , 1844); Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Thirteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1845), 23–25; Chancellor Harper, et al., The Pro-Slavery Argument (Philadelphia, 1853), 140; The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, 4 vols. (Boston, 1892), 3 : 89–90; Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 187–88; Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Cooperation (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 295–96; Elizabeth Merritt, James Henry Hammond, 1807–1864 (Baltimore, 1923), 72–73; Robert C. Tucker, "James Henry Hammond: South Carolinian" (PhD. diss., University of North Carolina, 1958), 430–33. who was sentenced to be executed for a similar offence against American law, but which sentence the voice of Great Britain prevented from being carried into effect, he observed, with regard to Brown it was said, there stood Brown, and there stood the law; and did not Brown know that he was violating the law? He (Mr. Douglass would answer, that Daniel knew he was breaking the law, when he would not worship as he was desired28Dan. 6: 12–23.—(hear, hear)—and so did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, when they refused to worship the golden image which the King had set up.29Dan. 3 : 12–30. He was sometimes led to think, that if some of the Clergymen of the present day had been their advisers, they would have advised them to bow down, but not to worship the image; they would have told them that they had to live; that they should be very cautious, being the only Ministers among the heathen; that if they lost their lives there would be no Minis-
ter of the Lord among them, and that then they would be left in the dark, to grope their own way. (Hear.) Such was the kind of wisdom they saw displayed by the Free Church of Scotland; but God was confounding the wisdom of the crafty, he was exposing the sophism of the worldly.
He hoped the unanimous cry of the people of Belfast, to the Free Church of Scotland, and all the other Churches, would be, "Have no communion with the American slaveholders;" and that the next thing the Free Church should do would be to send back the blood-stained money which they had received. That was the only safe course. They should tell the Americans that they saw the slave at their feet, they saw him dying, and divested of every religious opportunity; and that, therefore, they could not fellowship with them; that they would gladly do so, but that the blood of the slaves forbade them to do so. If they would do this, they would give slavery a blow that it would stagger under, among a large class of religionists in America. Mr. Douglass then resumed his seat, loudly cheered.30From Belfast Northern Whig, 25 December 1845.