Читать книгу Fifty Notable Years - Adams John Greenleaf - Страница 10

"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."28

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: —

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.29 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."