Slavery and the American Churches: A Speech Delivered in Bristol, England, on September 2, 1846
SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN CHURCHES: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BRISTOL, ENGLAND, ON 2 SEPTEMBER 1846
Bristol Mercury and Western Counties Advertiser, 5 September 1846. Other texts in Bristol Mirror, 5 September 1846; Bristol Times, 5 September 1846; London Inquirer 12 September 1846.
The series of meetings that Douglass and Garrison inaugurated in Bristol on 25 August 1846 attracted between 2000 and 3000 spectators. John Bishop Estlin, Josiah Hunt, Joseph Reynolds, the Rev. T. E. Thoresby, and American reformer Elihu Burritt were among those present when -Douglass returned to the city to speak at the third and final meeting of the series in the Broadmead Public Rooms on 2 September 1846. The chairman of the meeting, Quaker abolitionist George Thomas, sensed that Douglass's criticism of English and American churches would not go unchallenged. Thomas urged moderation and expressed his hope that the debate "would be carried on with calmness, and with a determination to give everyone a fair hearing so as to be better able to come to a sound judgment at last." Local abolitionists quickly dispensed with the business of the meeting and Thomas opened the floor to general discussion. Charles H. Greenly came forward to argue that Wesleyan Methodists had been unduly criticized. Conceding that the Wesleyan Conference had not "done all that it should do in refusing to hold intercourse with members of slaveholding churches," Greenly nevertheless reminded the audience that the Methodists had been "among the first movers in the cause of emancipation." In support of Greenly's views, Mr. William Phillips pointed out that Wesleyan Methodists had sent remonstrances against slavery to the United States, had dispatched Dr. Robert Newton to the United States to speak against slavery in 1839, and that the Leeds Methodist Conference had refused to admit a minister from Virginia because of his proslavery connections in 1845. Phillips thought it "impossible for the Wesleyan Conference to express themselves in stronger terms" against slavery. The Inquirer found Douglass's two-hour reply "marked by pathos, humour, seriousness, sarcasm and unanswerable logic."
Mr. F. Douglass was called upon by the chairman to reply, and, on presenting himself, he was received with the most vehement cheering.
He said he never rose to address an audience with a deeper sense of responsibility than he felt at that moment. He was there as the representative of three millions of people, who were held in the most abject slavery in the United States of America. He was there, also, in part as the representative of a people who, for three hundred years, had been the common prey of the Christian world. He might say that he represented Africa—deeply wronged Africa—Africa, who had been plundered of her children for three hundred years, in the name of the Bible (hear, hear)—Africa which, for three centuries, had been the very hunting ground of the Christian nations. If he should speak warmly on the subject no man would dare to rise up in that assembly and say he had not the cause to speak warmly (cheers).
Evidently a deep feeling had been stirred up in the hearts of the community; that vast gathering implied no mean interest in the great question to be considered. He felt the more deeply the responsibility resting upon him. Called upon to do justice to his brethren in bonds, he was endeavouring, as far as he could, to remember them as bound with them (hear, hear). To know their thoughts, to have their feelings, and to speak their words, for it was with the injured that Christ would have them identify themselves—with the slaves, not with the slaveholdersremembering not " those who bind as binding with them, " but "those in bonds as bound with them" (cheers).1Douglass paraphrases Heb. 13 : 3. Having said thus much, he would come immediately to the subject in debate.
It seemed to him that a simple statement from him at the commencement of the meeting might have been sufficient to render unnecessary many of the remarks which had been made. He had said nothing about the Methodists of this country which could justify the remarks either of Mr. Greenly or of the friend on his left (Mr. Phillips). What he said of them was true, and he said it still.2No copy of Douglass's speech in Bristol on 26 August 1846 has been located. Charles H. Greenly is listed in the Bristol directory as a surgeon; William Phillips, who lived in Clifton, was Secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. Bristol Mercury and Western Counties Advertiser, 5 September 1846; Mathew's Annual Bristol Directory and Almanack, 1844, 119. They were now in fellowship with the Methodist church in the United States, which church hugged to its communion men bloody with the guilt of slavery. He said not this as charging the Methodists of England particularly; he had merely stated it as a fact, in order that the Methodists of England, when possessed of aknowledge of the facts, might act according to the light of that knowledge.
He was not desirous of criminating any body of Christians; the truth he was bound to declare. It was not necessary to tell him nor the meeting what had been done by the Methodists for the removal of slavery from the West Indies; he had never accused that church of any want of effort in that cause. What he had said was, that they were in fellowship with the Episcopal Methodist church in America3*Actually the Methodist Episcopal Church.—that he said now, and it was not answered by the fact that the Leeds conference had rejected a minister from Virginia. That did not settle the question at issue, and he would tell them why it did not. Neither was the question stated that which was asked. It was not, " Are you a slave-holder yourself, or connected with slave-holding? " but " Did you go off to the south? " He appealed to the friend on his left whether the question was not, "Are you with the church of the north or the south? " and on his answering "With the church of the south," he was refused communion, not so much for being in favour of slavery as for being a schismatic from the church.
He had no desire to place the Methodists prominently before the meeting, they must thank themselves if he gave them a short history of their proceedings. In 1784 the Methodist church in the United States was openly and unequivocally an anti-slavery church. It preached emancipation as the right of the slave and the duty of the master; it made it incumbent on those applying for fellowship and communion to emancipate their slaves; and, in the annual and general conference, it appointed committees to draw up petitions to the several legislatures [,] in whose states slavery existed [,] for emancipation. This mode of action, however, soon perished; it was seen that if they pursued this course they must leave the slaveholding states; that they must either take slaveholders into communion, or array against themselves a prejudice which they could not easily oppose. They admitted slaveholders; they had ministers [who were] slaveholders; they became a pro-slavery church.
In the year 1836 they came to this resolution—"Resolved, that we wholly disapprove of abolition, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere with the relation of master and slave as it at present exists in the slave states" (cries of " shame"). That they had no right, no wish, no intention, to do what? No right, wish, or intention to give freedom to three millions in bondage. Those three millions were on their knees, imploring them, as ministers of the most High God, to lift up their voices like trumpets against the daring iniquity which held them in
bondage; imploring them to tell the slaveholder that it was his duty to set them free; and the answer which they received was—" We have no right, wish or intention, to interfere with the relation of master and slave as it at present exists."
To leave 1836, and come to a later period: in 1840 the general conference, which met once in four years, assembled in the city of Boston. During that conference the case of Silas Comfort, one of the ministers of the west, came before them. He was a minister on a circuit in Missouri, and he had a difficulty in his church, in which a coloured man's testimony was necessary to convict of criminality a white man of his church. He admitted that testimony; the white man was convicted, and Silas Comfort, as an honest man, excommunicated him. The man appealed to the general conference, which came to this resolution—"Resolved, that it is inexpedient and unjustifiable for any minister of a church to admit a coloured man's testimony against a white person (hisses) in those states where they are denied that privilege by law" (hear, and shame).4A native of Dutchess County, New York, Silas Comfort (1803-68) served as a circuit rider in his home state before being transferred in 1835 to the Missouri Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1839 a divorced woman informed him that a white parishioner of his church had proposed an illicit liaison. The governing board of Comfort's St. Louis Church censured the white man for "ungentlemanly and unchristian conduct," mainly on the strength of the testimony from a black parishioner who had carried messages from the accused to the offended woman. Arguing that he had been "convicted in a church court on testimony inadmissible in a civil court of law, " the defendant appealed his conviction to the Missouri Conference, which sustained the appeal and reprimanded Comfort for "maladministration." It was the decision of the Missouri Conference, not the decision of Comfort's church, that was appealed to the 1840 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which met in Baltimore, not Boston, from 1 May through 3 June. When northern delegates passed a resolution refusing to endorse the Missouri Conference's censure of Comfort, Ignatius A. Few, a Georgia clergyman, and other southern delegates secured passage of the resolution which Douglass closely paraphrases. Few's resolution reads: "Resolved, That it is inexpedient and unjustifiable for any preacher among us to permit coloured persons to give testimony against white persons, in any state where they are denied that privilege in trials at law." Northern delegates next tried to expunge from the record both the subject of Comfort's reprimand and the question of black testimony in church courts. Instead, the convention only retraced its steps on the matter of Comfort's censure by voting not to entertain his appeal. It let Few's resolution stand. A semblance of sectional harmony was achieved on the day before the conference adjourned. Bishop Joshua Soule introduced, and the conference passed, three resolutions which acknowledged the South's right to exclude black testimony, the North's right to admit it, and the black man's right to expect the continued "regard of the General Conference." The General Conference of 1844 rescinded Few's resolution. In 1842 Comfort transferred to the Oneida Conference in New York, where he lived out the remainder of his ministry and served for sixteen years as a presiding elder. Though without formal education, he was awarded a doctorate from Ohio Wesleyan University. "Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in the City of Baltimore, 1840," Methodist Episcopal Conference Journals, 2 : 57, 60, 81-82, 86 - 88 , 109; "General Conference, New York, 1844," 123; Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of Conferences, 1868, 105; Birney, American Churches, 23 - 30; Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 200 - 04. What was—what must be the effect of that resolu-
tion? Any member of a Christian church having a white skin—any deacon, or elder, or doctor of divinity—might go into the house where a coloured member, of whom there were 8000, lived5Estimates of the number of black members of the Methodist Episcopal church during the period that the Few resolution was in effect ranged from 93,587 in 1840 to 145,409 in 1844. Douglass probably said that there were 80,000 black Methodists, a figure appearing in a petition against the Few resolution from the Asbury Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore to the 1840 General Conference: "The adoption of such a resolution by our highest ecclesiastical judicatory . . . has inflicted, we fear, an irreparable injury upon eighty thousand souls for whom Christ died." The petition is quoted in Birney, American Churches, 25. See also Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of Conferences, 1840, 63; idem, Minutes of Conferences, 1844, 477.—might go into the house of a black brother in the church and in Christ Jesus—might trample on him, wrong him, insult his wife, violate all the rules of decency in his presence, and yet that injured brother, because of the colour of his skin, might not testify the truth against the white wrongdoer (hear).
But let him come to the last general conference in 1844. He happened to be at New York, and at several of its sessions. He saw the Rev. Dr. Smith, the slaveholder of Virginia, stand upon the floor, and plead for slavery by the hour;6William Andrew Smith (1802-70) was one of the most outspoken defenders of slavery within the Methodist Episcopal Church, though there is no evidence that Smith was ever a slaveowner. Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, ordained by the Virginia Conference in 1827, and sent to every General Conference from 1832 to 1844, this colonizationist and one-time editor of the Virginia Conference Sentinel was active in the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Smith served as president of Randolph-Macon College from 1846 to 1866, where he was also professor of moral and intellectual philosophy. In 1856 he published a series of proslavery lectures whose influence in the South was considerable. He took charge of a pastorate in St. Louis, Missouri in 1866 and two years later assumed the presidency of Central College in Fayette, Missouri. He died in Richmond, Virginia. At the 1844 General Conference Smith drew on scripture and moral philosophy to prove that while slavery "is a great evil, it is not necessarily a sin." West, "Debates in the General Conference, 1844," 26, 137; William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery . . . , ed. Thomas O. Summers (Nashville, Tenn., 1856); Lewis M. Purifoy, Jr., "The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Slavery, 1844 - 1865 " (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1965), 28 - 30; Norwood, Schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 33, 61 - 62, 93; Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 141, 178 , 202 - 03, 251-54, 260 - 62 , 279; Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought, 111, 221, 229; ACAB, 5 : 595; DAB, 17 : 361-62. he saw sixty ministers, all slaveholders; he saw Bishop Andrew there, a slaveholder.7Douglass presumably refers to the southern delegates to the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. There were fifty of them, not including the bishops and officers of the conference, and only one, Bishop James O. Andrew, was known to own slaves. "General Conference, New York, 1844," 5 - 6. To come, now, to the division which had been spoken of. Something had been hinted about it,
but his friend on his left was not very clear concerning it (a laugh).8William Phillips. He said this, not sneeringly: it was not to be expected that those whose eyes were not fixed upon the matter should understand it; but then, they should hesitate and hear long before they rose up in a congregation to dispute what they heard (hear). They should hear long before they denied, for a little more investigation might teach them prudence.
In the northern states, since the abolition movement arose, several local bodies of Congregationalists, Methodists, and others had dissolved all connexion with slavery; and in 1837 a number of honest men felt that they could no longer brook the rule of that church and seceded; but mark! the British conference never joined in fellowship with that body. Those men left all, gave up their book and superannuation funds, and everything for the sake of Christ and humanity. They did nobly: never had he spoken a word but in their praise, and whenever any other body pursued the same inflexible Christian course, as loud would he be found in its praise as he was in that of the " True Wesleyans."9Douglass refers to the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, formed at Utica, New York, on 31 May 1843, when 80 abolitionist ministers representing 6000 parishioners left the Methodist Episcopal Church in order to be free "from Episcopacy and Slavery." The Connection united the small number of abolitionists who had gradually been seceding from the Methodist Episcopal Church since 1837 and a larger body of abolitionists who had withdrawn in 1842 and 1843, after the secession of such prominent antislavery Methodists as Orange Scott, LaRoy Sunderland, Jotham Horton, Luther Lee, and Lucius C. Matlack. These various abolitionist secessions had been brought on in part by the proslavery resolutions passed by the General Conferences of 1836 and 1844, by the goading of Garrisonian "come-outers," and by the arbitrary and proscriptive manner in which the bishops and presiding elders had exercised their considerable power to suppress antislavery agitation for the sake of church unity. The new denomination not only prohibited slaveholding and the use of liquor, but also democratized church government. The body's official newspaper was the True Wesleyan, a journal which Orange Scott had established in 1842. The secession of 1842 and 1843, also called the Scottite secession, paved the way for the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844. The exodus convinced conservative Methodist leaders in the North that only a shift toward antislavery could forestall further abolitionist defections. Northern Methodists hitherto distinguished for their antiabolitionism went to the 1844 General Conference determined to placate the southern wing of their church no longer. The stage was set for the bitter debates over whether or not to remove the slaveholding Bishop James O. Andrew from office. Matlack, American Slavery and Methodism; Norwood, Schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 23 - 57; Ira F. McLeister, History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America (Syracuse, N. Y., 1934), 10-39; Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 212 - 45. They sounded the alarm in the northern states, and they called upon the Methodists of the north to come out of the old Methodist church, because she said she had no right, wish, or intention, to give the Bible to three millions of people—to give the marriage institution to them—or to release them
from bondage (applause). Because she said that 8000 of her members, having coloured skins and having been received by baptism into the church of God, should not be allowed the privilege of testifying the truth against their fellows.
They called upon them to come out of her, because, as long as they were in her, they formed so many bricks in the great wall which kept in bondage three millions of human beings. Such was their cry; but, moreover, they said, come out of her also because the sin of slavery is gaining supremacy in every part of the church—because the blood of slavery is everywhere in the church—because not only members but classleaders and deacons and bishops are the holders of slaves (applause).
What followed? The northern churches felt that if they did not do something to look like anti-slavery the whole of the members in the north would leave their communion; and, accordingly, they went down and attacked Bishop Andrew (hear), who had got 15 slaves by his marriage,10 and who, although he had the power to emancipate them, said he would not do so. They passed this resolution, "Whereas Bishop Andrew has connected himself with slavery, and has thereby injured his itinerancy as a bishop"—mark that! not invested himself with the sin and guilt of slavery, but injured his itinerancy; for they knew if he came to the north with the blood of 15 slaves on his garment, that there would have been " a noise," as they called it in America (hear). "Resolved, therefore, that Bishop Andrew be, and he is hereby requested"—not suspended or excluded, but—"requested to suspend his labours as bishop until he can get rid of his impediment" (laughter and applause).
In America they had a way of coining a great many soft names to hide the real character of slavery—they called it "our social system," "our domestic institution," "our patriarchal institution," "our peculiar institution" (laughter), but it was left for the Wesleyan Methodists to find a new name, and it was now no longer either of those, but "the im-
pediment" (renewed laughter). One might almost think that they meant the good bishop's wife—for he got his slaves by marriage (shouts of laughter). This resolution was discussed —how long did they think? —three weeks.11 The 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church actually debated from 22 May to 1 June the resolution to suspend Bishop James O. Andrew from his office. The debates on all slavery-related subjects lasted about three weeks. A man who had stolen a sheep they would have cut off in five minutes. It was only after three weeks, and after a series of prayer-meetings, love-feasts, and fastings that they could come to the solemn conclusion that Bishop Andrew should be requested to suspend his labours as bishop until he could get rid of "the impediment" (laughter). The conference adopted the resolution, and the day after the southern ministers declared they could have nothing to do with the north, and, by way of undoing all that had been done, several questions were put to the conference by Bishop Waugh. He (Mr. Douglass) knew him well—he used to pray with his mistress when he was a slave.
They could see that he knew something of his Methodist brethren (laughter). He meant no imputation upon the Methodists of England—he was speaking of the Methodist church in the United States. There was a great stir among the bishops, and Bishop Waugh asked—Shall Bishop Andrew's name remain among the other bishops in the minutes of conference, book of discipline, and hymn book? The answer was—"Resolved, that Bishop Andrew's name shall be retained." The second question was—Shall Bishop Andrew do any work during the recess of conference, and if any, what work shall Bishop Andrew do? It was answered that Bishop Andrew was left to decide for himself whether he should do any work, and what. He had only "injured his itinerancy" in the northern states, and a door by this answer was left open to him to labour in the southern states. The next question was—Shall Bishop Andrew have any support and, if any, how shall he be supplied during the coming four years? The answer was—that Bishop Andrew be supplied out of the funds of the church, as the other bishops.12The son of a substantial farmer from Fairfax County, Virginia, Beverly Waugh (1789-1858) clerked in a government office in Washington, D.C. and managed a grocery store in Middleburg, Virginia, before becoming a traveling preacher for the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1809. Ordained a deacon in 1811 and an elder in 1813, Waugh served his early itinerancy in the Washington-Baltimore area. Douglass probably first met Waugh in 1827, when the minister was the Presiding Elder of the East Baltimore Station, which included the Wilk Street Church which the Hugh Auld family attended. Douglass remembered Waugh's visits to the Auld household to "exhort and pray" with his mistress Sophia. From 1828 to 1836 Waugh was book agent for the Methodist Book Concern in New York City, in 1836 he was elected a bishop by the General Conference, and in 1852 he became the senior bishop of the church. Early in his career he flirted with a movement to democratize church government, but Waugh was committed to preserving church unity above all else. Thus, although he was "in sentiment and in habit antislavery" and felt that "slavery is a bitter pill and a great evil," he feared "the blighting effect of abolitionism" and used his episcopal power to try to suppress it. As the presiding bishop at the New England Annual Conference of 1837 he refused to allow abolitionist delegates to introduce antislavery petitions into the official proceedings. At the General Conference of 1844 he joined with other bishops in an effort to have the discussion of Bishop James O. Andrew's episcopacy postponed until the next General Conference. It was also at this meeting that Waugh, in an attempt to pacify the southern delegates, introduced the three resolutions which Douglass paraphrases. When the church divided, Waugh stayed with the parent body, as did the Baltimore Conference with which he had been associated. Methodist Episcopal Church, Minutes of Conferences, 1858, i - vi ; H. B. Ridgaway, "Beverly Waugh," in Lives of Methodist Bishops, ed. Theodore L. Flood and John W. Hamilton (New York, 1882), 225 - 62; Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, 168; Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 108, 153; Norwood, Schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 35 - 36; DAB, 19 : 558.
After commenting on the resolutions, the speaker went on to observe that he had felt called upon to let the British churches know the truth. They had heard of ultra measures being taken by the abolitionists, but they at first found the whole country dead upon the subject of slavery except the Covenanters,13The Reformed Presbyterian Church. and the Quakers—he would speak of them by and by. Those bodies had been nearly clear for the last century of slavery, and the Covenanters had refused to swear allegiance to the constitution, and had thereby disfranchised themselves, because the oath bound them to take up arms against slaves trying to emancipate themselves (hear, hear).
The principal churches were the Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. In 1845 the Methodists numbered 250,000 slaves; the Baptists, 125,000; the Presbyterians, 80,000; and the Episcopalians, 80,000 to 90,000. Finding the churches interwoven with slavery, the abolitionists took up the strong ground of Christianity, and had laboured the last 15 years to show that slavery was a sin, and ought not to be upheld by Christians. It had been said that the abolitionists wished to set up a new test of eligibility for Christian communion—they did not: they only asked the churches to consistently carry out the tests they had set up themselves, and not only to exclude the man who picked pockets, but those who stole men, pockets and all (cheers). After denouncing, in terms of eloquent indignation, the slaveholders as menstealers, and arguing that no human laws could violate the laws of God and give a right of property in man—he contended that
Christians were bound to emancipate the slaves, and if they could not do so in one state, they were called upon to do so in another.
If a slaveholder wished to emancipate his slaves, he could readily do so. He had only to call them out in the night, beneath the star-spangled canopy of heaven, and, selecting one from among them all, to say, " That is the north star, beneath its twinkling light there is a free country, the country of Victoria (cheers). Steer by its course, and be cheered by its silvery light—sleep in the day—fly in the night—hide in the lofty pines when you shall hear the horn of the driver calling into the field the long lines of your enslaved brethren—follow the course of yonder star, and ere three weeks have passed over your heads your chains shall be broken asunder, and you shall stand before m a n free, emancipated, disenthralled" (loud cheers). There was no difficulty, the slaveholders might emancipate their slaves if they would, and that at once (cheers).
A good deal had been said about deputations. He wished he was better acquainted with the deputations to the United States, but, unfortunately, Brother Hall14The reference to Thomas Auld should read "Brother Auld." held him too long in slavery for him to be thoroughly acquainted with their history. He had, however, read a little, and what he had read he tried to remember. The speaker here recalled that the morrow (Thursday) was the anniversary of his emancipation, and detailed, in eloquent language, the hopes, fears, and anxieties by which he was beset on the eve of the memorable day which was to decide his destiny and give him life and liberty or unending slavery (hear, hear). He returned to his subject. An extract had been read from the speech of Dr. Mattheson,15Douglass refers to Congregational minister James Matheson (1793-1846), who was born in Duddingston near Edinburgh, Scotland, educated at Hoxton Academy, and ordained in 1821 at Durham, England. In 1834 the Congregational Union of England and Wales sent Matheson and the Reverend Andrew Reed on a fraternal visit to the churches of North America. The official report of their mission contributed to the formation of the Colonial Missionary Society. Matheson and Reed also wrote a two-volume account of their American visit in which they condemned the domestic slave trade, dismissed the American Colonization Society as ineffective, and praised the "immediatism" of the American Anti-Slavery Society though they deplored the excesses of some of its members. Matheson was later pastor of the Queen Street Church in London and corresponding secretary of the Home Missionary Society. Earlier in the meeting the Reverend T. E. Thoresby read from Matheson's speech before the Congregational Union in Bristol, England, on 8 October 1840. Matheson was replying to charges leveled by Jamaican-born Charles Stuart, Garrison, and other abolitionists that he and Reed had not fully exposed the proslavery bias of American churches. In the extract that Thoresby read Matheson claimed he had often advised American ministers that "they had been criminal in not using the power they possessed against slavery" and asserted that George Thompson had found no fault with his conduct in America. This rejoinder did not appease those abolitionists angered because English Congregationalists had not barred "persistent slaveholders" from Christian communion. Bristol Mercury and Western Counties Advertiser, 5 September 1846; Congregational Yearbook, 1846, 170; Congregational Magazine, 23 : 886-91 (December 1840), 24 : 36 - 38 (January 1841);BFASR, ser. 1 , 1 : 270 - 71, 318 - 19 (21 October, 16 December 1840), ser. 1, 2 : 7 (13 January 1841); Lib., 28 August 1840; Andrew Reed and James Matheson, A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches by the Deputation from the Congregational Union of England and Wales, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), 2 : 168 - 88; Abel and Klingberg, Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 81n. and he would wish to tread lightly on
the memory of Dr. Mattheson: he was gone to his reward, and let hisdeeds pass; but he would speak the truth of living deputations.
He would begin with the Free-Church deputation (hear). There had yet to be any religious deputation from this country to America which had ever made themselves odious to the slave states—there had not been one (hear). While 5000 dollars were offered for the head of William Lloyd Garrison, because of his unceasing opposition to slavery,16A resolution introduced in the Georgia Senate on 30 November 1831 and signed into law on 24 December 1831 offered $5000 to "any person or persons who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, the editor or publisher of a certain paper called the Liberator, published in the town of Boston and State of Massachusetts; or who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, any other person or persons who shall utter, publish or circulate within the limits of this State said paper called the Liberator, or any other paper, circular, pamphlet, letter or address of a seditious character." Because the original draft of the resolution did not specify the amount of the reward, Garrison inserted the sum "$999888777,666555444,333222111" when he reprinted the resolution in the Liberator. Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 1 : 247 - 48; Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 53 - 55. the religious deputation from England passed through the south—were taken by the hands in the very heart of slavery—welcomed to the pulpits of the slave churches—were paid money, and came out without the smell of fire upon their garments. When George Thompson, with eloquence never surpassed, pleaded, on the shores of America, the cause of the oppressed slave, he was threatened with assassination; violent mobs clamoured against him; and the slaveholders were full of bloody determination to take his life. But the reverend deputation— Dr. Cox17Baptist minister Francis Augustus Cox (1783-1853) was born at Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, England, and studied at Bristol College and the University of Edinburgh. He was ordained at Clipstone in Northamptonshire, England, in 1804 and served as pastor of churches in Cambridge and Hackney. Cox used his inherited wealth to sponsor various religious and educational projects. He helped to found London University and to launch The Baptist Magazine and was an officer of the Universal Abolition Society, the Baptist Missionary Society, and the Baptist Society for Promoting the Gospel in Ireland. In 1835 Cox and the Reverend James Hoby were the Baptist Union's delegates to the American Baptist Triennial Convention, which met at Richmond, Virginia, during April and May. Although they left England with instructions "to promote most zealously . . . the sacred cause of Negro Emancipation," Cox and Hoby did not raise the issue of slavery at the Richmond Convention. Instead they expressed their antislavery sentiments to a large "private party of influential brethren" at Richmond. During the remainder of his six-month tour, Cox declined an invitation to join George Thompson on the platform of the 1835 anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City and also turned down invitations to address the American Colonization Society and an abolitionist gathering in Massachusetts, though he did deliver an antislavery address in New Hampshire before a meeting of Free Will Baptists. British and American abolitionists censured Cox and Hoby for their silence on slavery while in the United States. The Baptist Union deplored the behavior of its delegates and in 1836, 1837, and 1838 sent antislavery remonstrances to Baptists in the United States. Baptist Magazine, 26 : 344, 476 - 77 (1834), 28 : 493 (1836), 45 : 610 - 14 (1853); Lib., 27 August 1836; F. A. Cox and James Hoby, The Baptists in America: A Narrative of the Deputation from the Baptist Union in England . . . (New York, 1836), 47 - 80, 100-24; Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 493-95; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 1 : 480 - 81 , 2 : 83, 3 : 163, 256; Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 230 - 32; Temperley, British Antislavery, 196; Rice, "Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson," 16, 20, 24-25. and the
rest of the tribe— were received as brethren, and now came home to England to tell how they hated slavery. That was the fact, and he could prove that it was not because slaveholders ever compromised their principles.
The speaker quoted largely from American publications, to show the violent hatred to abolitionists entertained in the slave states; he also referred to the murder of Lovejoy, who was shot for opposing slavery;18Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-37) was killed at Alton, Illinois, on 7 November 1837 while defending his press from an antiabolitionist mob. Son of a Presbyterian minister from Albion, Maine, and a graduate of Waterville (now Colby) College, Lovejoy moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1827 to teach school and edit a Whig newspaper. Five years later he returned east to study at Princeton Theological Seminary. Licensed to preach by the Philadelphia presbytery in 1833, Lovejoy went back to Missouri to edit the St. Louis Observer, a Presbyterian weekly, and to champion gradual emancipation, temperance, and anti-Catholicism. In 1836 his outspokenness in the Mcintosh case angered many Missourians and he moved to Alton, Illinois, where prominent citizens welcomed him as "a pious religious editor." By March 1837, Lovejoy had converted to "immediatism," joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, and announced his intention to organize local and state abolitionist societies. Already troubled by a recent decline in the local economy, many of Alton's leading men were frankly alarmed at the prospect of their town becoming a center of an organized antislavery movement. Agitated by fears of miscegenation, many prominent citizens organized mob violence to silence Lovejoy and his press, the Alton Observer, which was twice dismantled and thrown into the river. When Lovejoy and his supporters replaced the press for a third time, they resolved to protect it by armed force. Lovejoy was mortally wounded by rifle fire when he and another man rushed out of the stone warehouse in which the press was being safeguarded to shoot a rioter attempting to set fire to the roof. Abolitionists enshrined Lovejoy as a martyr at the same time that they began to debate among themselves how to reconcile self-defense and nonresistance. Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 100-11; Mabee, Black Freedom, 38-50; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 75; Gill, Tide Without Turning; Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy; DAB, 11 : 434 - 36. to the persecution of Amos Dresser, who was whipped by elders of the Presbyterian church;19Born in Peru, New York, in the heart of the "burned-over district," where he attended Oneida Institute, Amos Dresser (1812-1914) was one of the fifty-three students who in 1834 withdrew from Lane Seminary in Cincinnati after the trustees ordered their antislavery society to disband. Transferring to Oberlin College, Dresser spent the summer of 1835 selling Bibles in Kentucky and Tennessee in order to "raise funds sufficient to enable me to complete my education." He also distributed antislavery newspapers and pamphlets in those states but not to "any person of color, bond or free" since the slave states were aroused by the discovery earlier in the summer of large quantities of abolitionist material in the southern mails. On 18 August 1835 the mayor of Nashville had Dresser arrested and brought to trial before the "Committee of Vigilance and Safety" for having allegedly posted handbills in the city "inviting an insurrection of the slaves." The Vigilance Committee—which was composed of "a great portion of the respectability of Nashville," including "most of the elders of the Presbyterian Church"—found him guilty of belonging to an Ohio abolitionist society and of distributing antislavery literature. It sentenced Dresser to receive twenty lashes on the back and ordered him to leave the state within twenty-four hours. Dresser later served as one of Theodore Dwight Weld's agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society, worked as a missionary among the freedmen in Jamaica, taught school in Michigan, lectured in Ohio for the pacifist League of Brotherhood, and toured Europe in the 1850s in behalf of peace, temperance, and abolition. Upon his return he served as a pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Farmington, Ohio. He died in Lawrence, Kansas. The Narrative of Amos Dresser . . . (New York, 1836), 3 - 15; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2 : 202n. to the persecutions of Charles T. Torrey and
John L. Brown, for befriending the slaves; and continued— The whole south was hot with bloody determination against abolitionists, and did they believe—he put it to their common sense—that men could do what these reverend deputations had done, and be faithful? (No, and applause.)
He came next to the Quaker deputation, and he would not speak the less freely of them because their worthy chairman was of that body, nor would he if the whole meeting belong[ed] to it. He came to speak the truth of that deputation. In the early days of anti-slavery in America the Friends, seeing the struggle going on for emancipation, flocked around the abolition standard. Their influence was great. John G. Whittier, one of the noblest of the earth, stood forward in behalf of the slave, and he and others subjected themselves to the violence of the pro-slavery populace. Violent mobs arose; their lives were threatened; Pennsylvania-hall was burnt, because it was a place for holding abolition meetings;20Erected to house the offices of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and to host reform lectures, Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia was gutted in a fire set by an antiabolitionist mob on 17 May 1838, three days after its official opening, while 15,000 spectators looked on. The mob—which was led by "well-dressed" gentlemen, some of them allegedly southern slaveowners in town for a visit—went on to fire a black orphan's home and damage a black church. An association of abolitionists and reformers, including many antislavery Friends, had built the hall at an expense of $40,000. Its destruction made conservative Quakers more fearful of "the [American] Anti-Slavery Society and all its works." In 1839 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends (Orthodox) urged its members to work for antislavery exclusively from within the ranks of the Society of Friends. Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 156-57; [Samuel Webb], History of Pennsylvania Hall . . .(Philadelphia, 1838), 136 - 43; An Address to the Quarterly, Monthly and Preparative Meetings, and the Members thereof, Composing the Yearly Meeting of Friends, Held in Philadelphia, By the Committee Appointed at the late Yearly Meeting to have charge of the Subject of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1839), 8; Garrison to Sara T. Benson, 19 May 1838, in Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 2 : 362-63.
property was destroyed; mobocracy prevailed, and Lynch law was uppermost, and the question arose—"Can the Society of Friends bear it?" They at once issued an address counselling the members to abstain from all abolition movement out of the society, and they advised that their meeting-houses should not be opened for abolition meetings; and while they said one word against slavery they aimed two at the abolitionists.
When James Canning Fuller came to Lyme for the purpose of saying a few words to his brethren of the society against slavery, he was refused,21Apparently born in Ireland, James Canning Fuller (1793-1847) was a wealthy Quaker who settled in Skaneateles, New York, in 1834. In England and the United States he championed the cause of temperance, peace, and antislavery. He joined the American Anti-Slavery Society soon after his arrival in the United States. Antiabolitionists mobbed him four times in Skaneateles and once in Utica, New York, in 1842, in the company of Abby Kelley. He was also a delegate to the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention and the 1843 General Anti-Slavery Convention, both of which met in London. Fuller strongly censured the American Society of Friends for restricting the antislavery activities of its members and closing meetinghouses to non-Quaker abolitionists. In 1843 he helped the abolitionist Friends who had been purged from the Indiana Yearly Meeting secure a favorable hearing with English antislavery Quakers. He was a close friend of Gerrit Smith, for whom he traveled to Mississippi in 1841 to purchase and escort to freedom a slave family who had once been owned by Smith's wife and brother-in-law. In 1840 Fuller joined Hiram Wilson and Josiah Henson in establishing the British-American Institute, a manual labor school for fugitive slaves in Canada West. He held a post described as "General Agent for Fugitive Slaves, North America" in 1843. No documentation of Fuller's reception by Quakers in Lyme has been located. William H. Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, Wis., 1963), 64, 68; Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London, 1842), 113-16, c-cxii; Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 281, 344; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 3 : 44, 71n.; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 47n; Riach, "Campaign Against American Slavery," 264 - 65; BFASR, ser. 1, 1 : 134 (17 June 1840), ser. 1, 2 : 243 - 46, 266 (17 November, 15 December 1841), ser. 1 , 4 : 102 (14 June 1843); British Friend, 5 : 331 (December 1847); NASS, 17 December 1847; Lib., 10 December 1847; James C. Fuller to Joseph Orchard, 15 July 1840, in BFASR, ser. 1, 1 : 198-99 (12 August 1840); J. C. Fuller to Editors, 19 April 1843, British Friend, 1 : 58 - 60 (April 1843); B. Stanton et al. to J. C. Fuller, 3 March 1843, ibid., 1 : 71-72 (May 1843); James C. Fuller, A Letter From James Canning Fuller . . . to Joseph Gurney (Dublin, 1843). and they would not allow one of their own brethren to speak of the evils of slavery in one of their own meeting-houses (hear). Very well—Joseph Sturge came out, endorsed by British Friends. No one could doubt his sincerity as a Quaker any more than they could his truthfulness as an abolitionist. He went to the United States to speak to his brother Friends on the subject of slavery, and what did they do? They shut their doors against him.22Joseph Sturge visited the United States in 1841 and urged the American Yearly Meeting to cooperate with non-Quaker abolitionists. He did not come to America as an official agent of ei ther the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (on whose behalf he delivered an antislavery remonstrance to President John Tyler) or of the English Society of Friends, though he did bring with him letters of endorsement from his monthly meeting and from prominent members of the London Yearly Meeting. Traveling with John Greenleaf Whittier, he attended the Yearly Meetings of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and New England, and there is no evidence that he was excluded from any of them. He wrote a public letter to the "Members of the Religious Society of Friends in the United States of America" disapproving their practices of suppressing abolitionism within the Society and closing meetinghouses to non-Quaker abolitionists. He also criticized the colonizationist sympathies of some Friends and encouraged American Quakers to join non-Quaker antislavery societies. Nevertheless, American Yearly Meetings, particularly that of Indiana, adopted even more repressive measures for silencing their abolitionist members. Sturge, Visit to the United States, 16, 30, 57, 84 - 89, 96 - 99, 119-26; Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 281-83; Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 163-64; Rice, "Scottish Factor," 257-58. They had done more than that.
They went to the extent of setting members aside, silencing elders, and proscribing officers, for no other offence than because those parties had interfered against slavery (hear). The consequence was, that about 600 members separated, determined to endure the tyranny of the general body no longer.
They sent an epistle to London, and he was told it was not received. Things went on till the deputation was sent out, whose consistency of character he would admit was, up to the time of the deputation, irreproachable. He was not going to arraign their motives, but to tell the truth. Instead of treating both parties as equal, they treated those who had seceded as schismatics, and called upon them to come back.*Douglass refers to the secession in 1843 of approximately 2000 antislavery Quakers from the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends. That same year the seceders established the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends and sent an episde via Arnold Buffum to the London Yearly Meeting praying for recognition on the grounds that they were simply obeying English admonitions to American Friends over the years not to relax their antislavery efforts. London Quakers ignored this letter and a second letter sent in 1844. Responding to a letter sent in 1845, the London Yearly Meeting of 1845 entreated the seceders to return to their parent body and appointed a delegation to carry the message to Indiana and mediate between the rival factions. The deputation, which consisted of William Forster, Josiah Forster, George Stacey, and John Allen, in the winter of 1845-46 visited almost every settlement of antislavery seceders in a vain attempt to persuade them to "return to meet with those from whom they had withdrawn." In their report of 1846, the deputants endorsed the decision of the London Yearly Meeting to recognize the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends and not its antislavery rival. Only a few British Quakers, such as the abolitionists Richard Webb, Joseph Sturge, and William and Robert Smeal, supported the claims of the Indiana seceders. Benjamin Seebohm, ed., Memoirs of William Forster, 2 vols. (London, 1865), 2 : 193-206; Walter Edgerton, A History of the Separation in Indiana Yearly Meeting . . . (Cincinnati, 1856), 92 - 99, 208 - 16, 304 - 26, 337-52; Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 164 - 65, 167-68; Rice, "Scottish Factor," 252-72.23 Come back to where? To where they found the slave excluded from the meeting-house; to the place where Joseph Sturge was not allowed to speak; where Henry Clay, the duellist, the slaveholder, the robber of the rights of sixty of his fellow-creatures, was to be found.24Antislavery Friends in Indiana were sorely distressed when Henry Clay was invited to the Indiana Yearly Meeting of 1842 in Richmond, Indiana, seated in "one of the most conspicuous places in the house," and given "the strongest evidence" by conservative Quaker leaders of "the high estimation in which they held him." Shortly after this meeting at Richmond, antislavery Quakers separated from the Indiana Yearly Meeting. Edgerton, Separation in Indiana, 84 - 85; Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 164; Daniel Mallory, ed., The Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay, 2 vols. (New York, 1844), 2 : 595 - 600. They did not
come back (cheers); and though discountenanced by the deputation, and discountenanced by the body of Friends, they were worthy of all honour (cheers). The speaker went on in justice to state that the body of Friends in general were known in the United States as the friends of the negro, and that if a slave escaped there was no house in which he could find so much safety as in that of the straight coat and broad brim.
Having illustrated this fact by an interesting anecdote, he proceeded to state that the Episcopalian Church was mixed up with slavery in an infamous degree, and quoted from a sermon by Bishop Mead, of Virginia,25The son of one of George Washington's military aides, William Meade (1789-1862) was well known among abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic for the slave sermons which he edited and published. Born in Clarke County, Virginia, and educated at the College of New Jersey, Meade was ordained a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1814 and served as bishop of the Virginia Diocese from 1841 until his death. Although he believed slavery was divinely sanctioned, he felt and hoped that it would in time disappear. Early in life he manumitted his slaves but later concluded that manumission was a mistake (advising a friend that "if he could not retain his servants himself, he should provide them with good masters"), and hoped to effect emancipation through the agency of the American Colonization Society, for which he was a zealous worker. He also labored to bring the gospel to the slaves, holding services on neighboring plantations one day a week, engaging other ministers to do the same, erecting chapels for the slaves, and "preparing short sermons, catechisms, and tracts" for their religious instruction. In 1861 he became the presiding bishop of the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States, notwithstanding his former opposition to secession. John Johns, A Memoir of the Life of the Right Rev. William Meade, D.D. (Baltimore, 1867), 76 - 77, 1 20 - 24, 476-77; Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought, 15n., 214n.; Philip Slaughter, Memoir of the Life of the Rt. Rev. William Meade, D.D. (Cambridge, Mass., 1885); DAB, 12 : 480 - 81. in which he laid down some most unscriptural doctrines— that slaves were bound to yield the same service to their masters as to God, and that faults against their masters and mistresses were against God himself. That if they were punished for an offence they had not committed they must bear it patiently, as God had sent it for some other offence, and their masters and mistresses were God's overseers on earth. The text, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you do you even so unto them,"26This is a close paraphrase of Matt. 7 : 12. he interpreted to mean," Do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were in their place and they in yours;" or, said Mr. Douglass, as you, if you were a robber, would like another man to give his purse to you, so being the robbed, deliver yours over to him.27Douglass quotes and paraphrases from Meade, Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants, 104, 116, where the phrases "your masters and mistresses are God's overseers" and "do by all mankind just as you would desire they should do by you, if you were in their place and they in yours" appear. In attributing to Meade what Thomas Bacon actually wrote, Douglass apparently followed Samuel Brooke's Slavery and the Slaveholder's Religion As Opposed to Christianity (Cincinnati, 1846), 2 8 - 3 5 . Brooke employs the same robber analogy as Douglass and attributes to Meade the lengthy extracts that he reprints from Meade's edition of Bacon's manual. Meade's own manual, published in 1836 as Sermons, Dialogues, and Narratives for Servants, is based on Bacon's sermons.
The speaker then referred to the deputation from the Free Church of Scotland, which he had to charge with turning a deaf ear to the groans of the slaves, and preaching such doctrines as were palatable in a slave state. They had received the blood money of the slaves—they saw the slave trampled on, and were dumb, and uttered not a word against the atrocities they saw surrounding them. The Free Church must give back that money (hear). The Baptists, also, except that portion of them which he had referred to as having dissolved from slavery, were also mixed up with slavery. All consistent Christians, if they excluded the sheepstealer from their communion, were bound to exclude the manstealer (hear, hear, and cheers). He said nothing of the Unitarians; he believed they did not exclude sheepstealers (laughter). He said this not in derision; he believed that they did not take upon themselves, as a body, to determine who should be excluded, and while they admitted any other thief, there was no reason why they should not admit a manstealer to communion. While they did not think they had a right to refuse any one who presented himself, they could exclude no one. Other communities should be [so] consistent.
He implored the meeting to exert itself in behalf of three millions of enslaved human beings, who, as they were sitting in that meeting, were being driven before the whip of the driver to the rice swamps, low and dank. He had four sisters and one brother groaning beneath the chains of slavery. He had, too, an aged grandmother, who, if she yet lived, was all alone and desolate. Her children had been all snatched from her to serve the southern plantations, which ever cried, "give, give," and, like the grave, never ceased crying. A generation of slaves in seven years died off in the rice swamps of Alabama; and if his aged grandmother lived she had to pine alone and grope about in her darkness for her humble meal and draught of water. Her lot was the lot of others, and he implored them in her name—in the name of millions like her—in the name of their common humanity and common Christianity, to do what they could do—and it was much—to put an end to slavery (hear, hear, and cheers).
It was the prerogative of Britons to demand the right to give the
Bible to every human being in the southern plantations of America, and while they demanded the right to preach the gospel beneath the very shadow of St. Peter's , and to send the blessed tidings of salvation to the Chinese and the Hindoo, would they not send it to their fellow-creatures within fourteen days' sail of their own green island? (Cheers.) If they had whispered truth too long, let them whisper it no longer; let their voices swell like the voice of the tempest, sterner and louder, till America herself should know that while the plague-spot existed she could not be numbered among the Christian nations—that while the clank of the slave-chains were heard on her shore she should, in humility, pull down her star-spangled banner, and tear it in strips to bin up the wounds of her victims. Let them tell her of her flag in the language of Campbell—
United States! Your banner wears
Two emblems— one of fame;
Alas, the other that it bears,
Reminds us of your shame.
The white man's liberty in types,
Stands blazoned by your stars;
But what's the meaning of your stripes?
They mean your negroes' scars.