or road without the sad procession of manacled outcasts, whose chains and mournful countenances tell they are exiled by force from all that heart holds dear; Christian professors rending the mother from her child, to sell her into returnless exile."
This was the language of the Kentucky Synod fourteen years before; and those scenes had been going on ever since, and are going on now, as the advertisements of every Southern paper show; and yet the church of Christ since 1818 had done nothing but express regret, and hold grave metaphysical discussions as to whether slavery was an "evil per se" and censure the rash action of men who, in utter despair of stopping the evil any other way, tried to stop it by excluding slave-holders from the church. As if it were not better that one slave-holder in a hundred should stay out of the church, if he be peculiarly circumstanced, than that all this horrible agony and iniquity should continually receive the sanction of the church's example! Should not a generous Christian man say, "If church excision will stop this terrible evil, let it come, though it does bear hardly upon me! Better that I suffer a little injustice than that this horrible injustice be still credited to the account of Christ's church. Shall I embarrass the whole church with my embarrassments? What if I am careful and humane in my treatment of my slaves,—what if, in my heart, I have repudiated the wicked doctrine that they are my property, and am treating them as my brethren,—what am I then doing? All the credit of my example goes to give force to the system. The church ought to reprove this fearful injustice, and reprovers ought to have clean hands; and if I cannot really get clear of this, I had better keep out of the church till I can."
Let us consider, also, the awful intrenchments and strength of the evil against which this very moderate resolution was discharged. "A money power of two thousand millions of dollars, held by a small body of able and desperate men; that body raised into a political aristocracy by special constitutional provisions; cotton, the product of slave-labor, forming the basis of our whole foreign commerce, and the commercial class thus subsidized; the press bought up; the Southern pulpit reduced to vassalage; the heart of the common people chilled by a bitter prejudice against the black race; and our leading men bribed by ambition either to silence or open hostility."[1] And now, in this condition of things, the whole weight of these churches goes in support of slavery, from the fact of their containing slave-holders. No matter if they did not participate in the abuses of the system; nobody wants them to do that. The slave-power does not wish professors of religion to separate families, or over-work their slaves, or do any disreputable thing,—that is not their part. The slave power wants pious, tender-hearted, generous and humune masters, and must have them, to hold up the system against the rising moral sense of the world; and the more pious and generous the better. Slavery could not stand an hour without these men. What then? These men uphold the system, and that great anti-slavery body of ministers uphold these men. That is the final upshot of the matter.
Paul says that we must remember those that are in bonds, as bound with them. Suppose that this General Assembly had been made up of men who had been fugitives. Suppose one of them had had his daughters sent to the New Orleans slave-market, like Emily and Mary Edmondson; that another's daughter had died on the overland passage in a slave-coffle, with no nurse but a slave-driver, like poor Emily Russell; another's wife died broken-hearted, when her children were sold out of her bosom; and another had a half-crazed mother, whose hair had been turned prematurely white with agony. Suppose these scenes of agonizing partings, with shrieks and groans, which the Kentucky Synod says have been witnessed so long among the slaves, had been seen in these ministers' families, and that they had come up to this discussion, with their hearts as scarred and seared as the heart of poor old Paul Edmondson, when he came to New York to beg for his daughters. Suppose that they saw that the horrid system by which all this had been done was extending every hour; that professed Christians in every denomination at the South declared it to be an appointed institution of God; that all the wealth, and all the rank, and all the fashion, in the country, were committed in its favor; and that they, like Aaron, were sent to stand between the living and the dead, that the plague might be stayed.
Most humbly, most earnestly, let it be
- ↑ Speech of W. Phillips, Boston.
