NEW ENGLAND ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.--UNIVERSALIST PROTEST.
"What concord hath Christ with Belial."--2 COR. vi. 15.
The New England Anti-Slavery Society was one of the most vigorous and
persistent bodies that ever appeared on these western shores as a
reformatory institution. Its chief leader was the indomitable
Garrison, who had vowed that on the vexed question of American slavery
"he would be heard," and whose "Liberator" was making its journeys
from a Boston press throughout the land; hailed and patronized by a
goodly company in the North, denounced as incendiary at the South,
where a large sum was offered for the head of its editor. He had
sympathetic companions of a persistency equal to his own: Wendell
Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Samuel E. Sewell, N. P. Rogers, Stephen C.
Foster, John Pierpont, Theodore Parker, Parker Pillsbury, Frederick
Douglass, and C. L. Remond, among the men of New England, and the
Tappans of New York, and representatives at the annual gatherings from
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelley
(afterwards Mrs. Foster) were among the women expounders of this
gospel of freedom, and "Anniversary Week" in Boston was made
especially notable by their gatherings at Marlboro Chapel and Faneuil
Hall. No matter what other meetings on that week were dull, there was
always an exuberance of liveliness at the Anti-Slavery Convention.
"Eloquence is dog-cheap at Marlboro Chapel," said Ralph Waldo Emerson;
and it was. No better could be heard on the continent. The hardest and
boldest resolutions were usually up for consideration, denouncing
slaveholders and all their abettors, political, ecclesiastical, of
whatever standing or profession. Church and state alike were subjects
of their maledictions. Their defiance of all opposition had a clarion
ring in it. Nothing pleased them more than to have their positions
questioned or assailed. The adventurous wight who was willing to
appear as a condemner of their doctrines was the very one for whom
they were looking, and for whose presence and opposition they were
profoundly thankful. Their meetings were electrifying. Such debates
and orations, such questionings and rejoinders! Such hymns and
spiritual songs, too, sung often by the Hutchinsons to the old tunes
of "Amherst," "Lenox," and "New Jerusalem!" We hear them now; they
brought the shouts and tears.
We remember a scene in Marlboro Chapel one afternoon during
Anniversary Week. There came up for debate the question: "Does the
Constitution of the United States justify slavery?" Rev. John Pierpont
took the negative, and very logically maintained it for more than an
hour. He appeared in the greatness of his strength, and at the close
of his argument proposed to those of his auditors who wished, to
question his statements. And never was seen a hungrier company of
interrogators than then and there came upon him. But he was unmoved as
a sea-rock in the midst of the breakers. His side of the question was
not popular with most of the speakers and their sympathizers there,
and he was subjected to a most searching cross-questioning. But he
came out triumphantly (as it seemed) through it all. When three or
four would speak at once, he would say: "One at a time, friends; the
miller's rule holds,--first come, first served. I desire to hear you
all." The afternoon sunshine suddenly blazing in from one of the
windows upon his face, he aptly remarked: "Some subjects are involved
in impenetrable darkness; but here we seem to have a super-abundance
of light!" When the last inquirer had been answered, the speaker
asked: "Are you all through?" And no other one questioning, he said:
"And now, after the fashion of the good old divines, I come to the
'Improvement';" under which head he carefully and briefly reviewed the
substance of the debate. It was a masterly plea.
But the end was not yet. There was an evening meeting. Again the hall
was filled, to listen to a reply to Mr. Pierpont by Wendell Phillips.
The orator was in his best mood, and his silvery speech kept the
audience spell-bound. It was a complete refutation of the arguments
adduced in the afternoon. A clergyman sitting near to Mr. Pierpont
said to him: "How can his arguments be answered?" to which the latter
replied: "I should like to see the man who could tell me!" So Greek
met Greek in those stirring and stormy days.
It was an up-hill movement, this anti-slavery agitation. It called out
spirits of more colors than those mentioned in "Macbeth." The
opposition was intense. Garrison's life was in peril in the streets of
Boston in 1835, and a little company of his sympathizers, including
the poet Whittier and George Thompson, the English philanthropist,
were closely followed in the streets of Concord, N. H., one evening,
that they might be seized by certain mobocratic ones, and subjected to
an immersion in some liquid coloring of transient, if not indelible,
black; but the hounded ones escaped, preserving white men's
complexions. They were not to be put down by mobs nor frightened by
any human opposition. They had the spirit of Luther as he went to the
Diet at Worms. Though the pro-slavery "devils were thick as the tiles
on the houses," they proposed to fight them in the name of God and
humanity.
Politicians could do nothing with them, and the churches generally
discarded them. There was no love lost, however, between them and the
churches. The churches did not give them credit for the good they were
seeking to do, and they had no words of approval for the humanity of
the churches. Even the National Constitution was denounced as "a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and the churches were
accused as upholders of this covenant. So they reasoned, not always,
however, in that charity which the New Testament commends. There were
those in the churches as strongly opposed to slavery as
themselves,--but they were slow to recognize action against it outside
of their own organizations,--who could say, as did Dr. Gannett of the
Unitarian Church:--
"In principle I am with you. But there are those with whom you are
connected, persons who seem to me so to distrust the goodness of all
others who differ from them, and to look down upon all such with so
great a consciousness of moral superiority, that I feel myself when
in their presence to be in a situation not unlike that of a criminal
before his accuser and judge."[29]
At one time they held an Anti-Sabbath Convention for a few days, in
Boston, during which they said many hard things against the sanctity
of this seventh-day worship-time, evidently because they could thus
castigate the churches for refusing to discuss freely on this day the
crying sin of American slavery. It seemed a pity to hear such harsh
denunciations by the speakers who were advocating a righteous cause,
against an institution that had done so much towards the world's true
civilization. But this was one of their methods of carrying on the
reform.
A leading spirit in this movement in the "Granite State" was Nathaniel
P. Rogers, for a few years the editor of the "Herald of Freedom,"
issued at Concord, N. H. He was a lawyer of Plymouth, Grafton County,
and a member of the Orthodox Church in that town, and was a descendant
of him who was burned at Smithfield, and had the martyr spirit of his
noted ancestor. He was a scholarly, witty, and affable man, and
wielded as facile a pen as any editor in New England. In many of his
descriptive sketches he gave to the scenery of New Hampshire a
fascination equal to that with which Sir Walter Scott invests the
lochs and hills of Scotland. His plea with Mr. Webster, the great
Senator from Massachusetts, to let "his lion voice in one Numidian
roar" be heard from his place in Congress on the abomination of
American slavery and the claims of American freedom, once read, could
never be forgotten. When his "Herald of Freedom" was first issued,
some of the stage-drivers from Concord refused to carry it out to the
subscribers; but this hostility, through the personal influence of the
editor, soon ceased. Its columns were opened to all sorts of radical
sayings against the churches because of their presumed hostility to
human freedom; but as the columns of the paper were free, there were
sometimes sound and strong answers to them. Mr. Rogers, worn out with
mental toiling and anxiety, was called from the earthly life in the
midst of his years.
And so this work of the anti-slavery reformers went steadily forward
with increasing momentum, till a more general awakening took place all
over the land. The churches were becoming more and more alive to it,
and the politicians could in no wise evade it. The seed of
"Free-Soilism" sown, "Know-nothingism" sprang up, and one of the two
leading political parties became the party of Freedom--of "free soil,
free speech, free men." The passage and attempted enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Act, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, had
served to bring about this result. Hence the election of Mr. Lincoln
to the Presidency, secession, war, the downfall of slavery. These
first agitators lived to see the end they had striven for attained.
They had _been heard_, and a stronger than they had heard, and
had answered them, and an imploring and struggling nation, "in the day
of his power!" Now could one of the first of our poets sing:--
"Ring and swing
Bells of joy! On morning's wing
Send the song of praise abroad!
With a sound of broken chains
Tell the nations that he reigns
Who alone is Lord and God!"
Of course the Universalist churches could not evade this controversy
between freedom and slavery. Their very faith invited and encouraged
it. The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man are doctrines
which forever stand in opposition to the presumption that man can own
property in his fellow man. Of all the Christian sects, Universalists
were the last who could countenance in the light of their beneficent
faith the abomination of American slavery. If other theologies gave
cause for the aspersion that "God was the greatest slaveholder in the
universe," because it was his intention to keep in spiritual bondage
and sufferings great numbers of his offspring world without end,
Universalism affirmed that this whole human creation now groaning and
travailing in pain shall be delivered from its bondage of corruption
into the glorious liberty of the children of God.[30] Could this
church, bearing its own significant name, be silent, then, when the
test time came? Nay, it was a golden opportunity for her to speak and
act. She uttered her voice, firmly, freely, faithfully. True, there
were conservatives at first in this church as in others, who dreaded
the consequences of the agitation of this subject, who deemed it a
political question rather than a religious one, and feared not only
discord and division in the churches because of it, but a disruption
of the national union. This timidity wore off in due time, and this
manifesto went forth from the Universalists of Massachusetts and other
States in 1845. It is a "protest against American slavery," and is
signed by three hundred and four Universalist clergymen. The reasons
stated as the basis of the protest are these:--
"1. Because slavery denies the eternal distinction between a man and
property, ranking a human being with a material thing. 2. Because it
does not award to the laborer the fruits of his toil in any higher
sense than to the cattle. 3. Because it trammels the intellectual
powers and prevents their expansion. 4. Because it checks the
development of the moral nature of the slave; denies him rights and
therefore responsibility. 5. Because it involves a practical denial
of the religious nature of the slave. 6. Because it presents an
insurmountable barrier to the propagation of the great truth of the
Universal Brotherhood and thereby most effectually prevents the
progress of true Christianity. 7. Because the essential nature of
slavery cannot be altered by any kindness, how great so ever,
practised toward the slave. 8. Because the long continuance of a
system of wrong cannot palliate it, but on the other hand augments
the demand for its abolition. 9. Because we would in all charity
remember that peculiarities of situation may affect the judgment and
moral sense; still, we must not forget that no peculiarity of
situation can excuse a perpetual denial of universal principles and
obligations."
[29] Memoir of Dr. Gannett, by his son, p. 294.
[30] Heb. viii. 21, 22.