Buying Church Furniture.
A runaway slave, in 1841, assigned the following as his reason
for not communing with the church to which he belonged at
the South. "The church," said he, "had silver furniture for
the administration of the Lord's Supper, to procure which,
they _sold my brother_! and I could not bear the feelings it
produced, to go forward and receive the sacrament from the
vessels which were the purchase of my brother's blood."
Supporting Churches by Slave Jobbing.
The Rev. J. Cable, of Indiana, May 20, 1846, in a letter to the
Mercer Luminary, says:--"I have lived eight years in a slave
State, (Va.)--received my Theological education at the Union
Theological Seminary, near Hampden Sydney College. Those who
know anything about slavery, know the worst kind is jobbing
slavery--that is, the hiring out of slaves from year to year,
while the master is not present to protect them. It is the
interest of the one who hires them, to get the worth of his
money of them, and the loss is the master's if they die. What
shocked me more than anything else, was the church engaged in
this jobbing of slaves. The college church which I attended,
and which was attended by all the students of Hampden Sydney
College and Union Theological Seminary, held slaves enough to
pay their pastor, Mr. Stanton, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS a year, of
which the church members did not pay a cent (so I understood
it). The slaves, who had been left to the church by some pious
mother in Israel, had increased so as to be a large and still
increasing fund. These were hired out on Christmas day of
each year, the day in which they celebrate the birth of our
blessed Savior, to the highest bidder. These worked hard the
whole year to pay the pastor his $1000 a year, and it was left
to the caprice of their employers whether they ever heard one
sermon for which they toiled hard the whole year to procure.
This was the church in which the professors of the seminary
and the college often officiated. Since the abolitionists have
made so much noise about the connection of the church with
slavery, the Rev. Elisha Balenter informed me the church had
sold this _property_ and put the money in _other stock_. There
were four churches near the college church, that were in the
same situation with this, when I was in that country, that
supported the pastor, in whole or in part, in the same way,
viz: Cumberland church, John Kirkpatrick, pastor; Briny church,
William Plummer, pastor, (since Dr. P. of Richmond;) Buffalo
church, Mr. Cochran, pastor; Pisga church, near the peaks of
Otter, J. Mitchell, pastor."
Selling Ministers as Slaves.
At the great Convention, at Cincinnati, in June 1845, Mr.
Needham of Louisville, Ky., said:--"Sir, in 1844, a Methodist
preacher, with regular license and certificate, was placed in
the Louisville jail, as a slave on sale. He preached in the
jail sermons which would have done credit to any white preacher
of the town. He kept a little memorandum in his pocket, in
which he marked the number of persons hopefully converted under
his preaching. I represented his case to leading Methodists in
Louisville, and showed them a copy of his papers which I had
taken. _Not one of them visited him in his prison._ He said he
forgave those who had imprisoned him and were about to sell
him. He was sold down the river, which was the last time I saw
him."
A Slaveholding D. D. whipping his "b--h" on Sabbath morning
preparatory to preaching.
March 28, 1843, in a public address at Cincinnati, the Rev.
Edward Smith, True Wesleyan, of Pittsburgh, stated that he
had lived in slave states thirty-two years; and, speaking
of a certain D. D. of his acquaintance, he adds:--"He was a
slaveholder, and a severe one, too, and often, with his own
hands, he applied the cowhide to the naked backs of his slaves.
On one occasion, a woman that served in the house, committed,
on Sabbath morning, an offence of too great magnitude to go
unpunished until Monday morning. The Dr. took his woman into
the cellar, and as is usual in such cases, stripped her from
her waist up, and then applied the lash. The woman writhed and
winced under each stroke, and cried, '_Oh Lord!_ OH LORD!!
OH LORD!!!' The Doctor stopped, and his hands fell to his
side as though struck with palsy, gazed on the woman with
astonishment, and thus addressed her, (the congregation must
pardon me for repeating his words), 'Hush, you b--h, will you
take the name of the Lord in vain on the Sabbath day?' When he
had stopped the woman from the gross profanity of crying to God
on the Sabbath day, he finished whipping her, and then went
and essayed to preach that gospel to his congregation, which
proclaims liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison
doors to them who are bound."
The Greatest Impediment.
"We are about to make an announcement," says the True American,
"which must sound very strange to those whose field of
observation is unlike our own: The greatest impediment to the
success of the Anti-Slavery movement in the slave States is,
the opposition to it of those men who profess to have been
commissioned by high Heaven to go abroad and use their efforts
for the mitigation of human misery and the extirpation of human
wrong! This assertion, which appears so monstrous, will not
surprise any one who lives among slaveholders. Our conviction
of its truth has been confirmed by extensive observation."