REV. JOHN RANKIN AND REV. JOHN D. PAXTON.
The former was a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, where, in 1825, having heard that his brother, Mr. Thomas Rankin, of Virginia, had become a slaveholder, he addressed to him a series of very earnest and impressive letters in remonstrance. They were published first in a periodical called the Castigator, and afterwards went through several editions in pamphlet form. He denounced “slavery as a never-failing fountain of the grossest immoralities, and one of the deepest sources of human misery.” He insisted that “the safety of our government and the happiness of its subjects depended upon the extermination of this evil.” We New England Abolitionists, in the early days of our warfare, made great use of Mr. Rankin’s volume as a depository of well-attested facts, justifying the strongest condemnation, we could utter, of the system of oppression that had become established in our country and sanctioned by our government.
Mr. Paxton was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Cumberland, Virginia. He was a member of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which in 1818 denounced “the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature,—utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” Believing what that grave body had declared, he set about endeavoring to convince the church to which he ministered of the exceeding sinfulness of slaveholding; and that “they ought to set their bondmen free so soon as it could be done with advantage to them.” His preaching to this effect gave offence to many of his parishioners, and led to his dismission. In justice to himself, and to the cause of humanity, for espousing which he had been persecuted, Mr. Paxton also published a volume of letters, which were of great service to us. In these letters he faithfully exposed the abject, debased, suffering condition of our American slaves,—incomparably worse than that which was permitted under the Mosaic dispensation,—and pretty effectually demolished the Bible argument in support of the abomination. However, the labors of these good men, and of those whom they roused, were erelong diverted into the seductive channel of the Colonization scheme.
But there was another of the early antislavery reformers, of whom I may write much more fully in accordance with my plan, which is to give, for the most part, only my personal recollections of the prominent actors, and the most significant incidents, in our conflict with the giant wrong of our nation and age.