directions to give notice of a meeting to be held in the evening at the log meeting house in the woods, on the edge of the plantation. Mrs. P—— and her daughters, happy in having the privilege of doing something for the missionary who had sacrificed so much in so good a cause, commenced making the aforesaid shirts, of which he was in sore need. When the hour for services to commence arrived, the house was filled with the planters and their families from all the country around. The missionary had not mentioned his morning’s adventure—he felt troubled, and had a ship been there going to “Tarshish” he might possibly have been tempted to take a voyage in that direction, as did the prophet of old, but he was not the man to shirk responsibility. His text was Isaiah, Chapter 58, 6th verse: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” There were no shorthand reporters there, and no copy of the sermon is preserved, but he was not the man to “daub with untempered mortar,” and the reader is left to judge what kind of a discourse such a man would preach from such a text, having just witnessed a slave auction, and its effect on a slaveholding audience.
Twenty years later the preacher would have been lynched, but at that time the ideas that prevailed in 1776 were still held, even in the slave States—that slavery would be abolished gradually by all the States, therefore some of the slaveholders were pleased with the chastisement they had received, thinking it might do good, among whom was brother P—— himself; but his wife and daughters saw it in another light. They were terribly indignant; they would put up with no such meddling with their affairs, and gave notice that not another stitch would they take on those shirts. All this
