I find that thou wilt not allow of the comparison often drawn between the effects of christianity on the hearts of those who obstinately rejected it, and those of abolitionism on the hearts of people of the present day. Thou sayest, ‘Christianity is a system of persuasion, tending by kind and gentle influences to make men willing to leave their sins.’ Dost thou suppose the Pharisees and Sadducees deemed it was very kind and gentle in its influences, when our holy Redeemer called them ‘a generation of vipers,’ or when he preached that sermon ‘full of harshness, uncharitableness, rebuke and denunciation,’ recorded in the xxiii. chapter of Matthew? But I shall be told that Christ knew the hearts of all men, and therefore it was right for him to use terms which mere human beings never ought to employ. Read, then, the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others, and also the Epistles of the New Testament. They employed the most offensive terms on many occasions, and the sharpest rebukes, knowing full well that there are some sinners who can be reached by nothing but death-thrusts at their consciences. An anecdote of John Richardson, who was remarkable for his urbanity of manners, occurs to me. He one day preached a sermon in a country town, in which he made use of some hard language; a friend reproved him after meeting, and inquired whether he did not know that hard wood was split by soft knocks. Yes, said Richardson, but I also know that there is some wood so rotten at the heart, that nothing but tremendously hard blows will ever split it open. Ah! John, replied the elder, I see thou understandest how to do thy master’s work. Now, I believe this nation is rotten at the heart, and that nothing but the most tremendous blows with the sledge-hammer of abolition truth, could ever have broken the false rest which we had taken up for ourselves on the very brink of ruin.
‘Abolitionism, on the contrary, is a system of coercion by public opinion.’ By this assertion, I presume thou ‘hast not been correctly informed’ as to the reasons which have induced abolitionists to put forth all their energies to rectify public opinion. It is not because we wish to wield this public opinion like a rod of iron over the heads of slaveholders, to coerce them into an abandonment of the system of slavery; not at all. We are striving to purify public opinion, first, because as long as the North is so much involved in the guilt of slavery, by its political, commercial, religious, and social connexion with the South, her own citizens need to be converted. Second, because we know that when public opinion is rectified at the North, it will throw a flood of light from its million of reflecting surfaces upon the heart and soul of the South. The South sees full well at what we are aiming, and she is so unguarded as to acknowledge that ‘if she does not resist the danger in its inception, it will soon become irresistible.’ She exclaims in terror, ‘the truth is, the moral power of the world is against us; it is idle to disguise it.’ The fact is, that the slaveholders of the South, and their northern apologists, have been overtaken by the storm of free discussion, and are something like those who go down to the sea and do business in the great waters: ‘they reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.’
Our view of the doctrine of expediency, thou art pleased to pronounce ‘wrong and very pernicious in its tendency.’ Expediency is emphatically the doctrine by which the children of this world are wont to guide their steps, whilst the rejection of it as a rule of action exactly accords with the divine injunction, to ‘walk by faith, not by sight.’ Thy doctrine that ‘the wisdom and rectitude of a given course depend entirely on the probabilities of success,’ is not the doctrine of the Bible. According to this principle, how absurd was the conduct of Moses! What probability of success was there that he could move the heart of Pharaoh? None at all; and thus did he reason when he said, ‘Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?’ And again, ‘Behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice.’ The success of Moses’s mission in persuading the king of Egypt to ‘let the people go,’ was not involved in the duty of obedience to the divine command. Neither was the success of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others of the prophets who were singularly unsuccessful in their mission to the Jews. All who see the path of duty plain before them, are bound to walk in that path, end where it may. They then can realize the meaning of the Apostle, when he exhorts Christians to cast all their burden on the Lord, with the promise that He would sustain them. This is walking by faith, not by sight. In the work in which abolitionists are engaged, they are compelled to ‘walk by faith;’ they feel called upon to preach the truth in season and out of season, to lift up their voices like a trumpet, to show the people their transgressions and the house of Jacob their sins. The success of this mission, they have no more to do with, than had Moses and Aaron, Jeremiah or Isaiah, with that of theirs. Whether the South will be saved by Anti-Slavery efforts, is not a question for us to settle—and in some of our hearts, the hope of its salvation has utterly gone out. All nations have been punished for oppression, and why should ours escape? Our light, and high professions, and the age in which we live, convict us not only of enormous oppression, but of the vilest hypocrisy. It may be that the rejection of the truth which we are now pouring in upon the South, may be the final filling up of their iniquities, just previous to the bursting of God’s exterminating thunders over the Sodoms and Gomorrahs, the Admahs and Zeboims of America. The result of our labors is hidden from our eyes; whether the preaching of Anti-Slavery truth is to be a savor of life unto life, or of death unto death to this nation, we know not; and we have no more to do with it, than had the Apostle Paul, when he preached Christ to the people of his day.
If American Slavery goes down in blood, it will but verify the declarations of those who uphold it. A committee of the North Carolina Legislature acknowledged this to an English Friend ten years ago. Jefferson more than once uttered his gloomy forebodings; and the Legislators of Virginia, in 1832, declared that if the opportunity of escape, through the means of emancipation, were rejected, ‘though they might save themselves, they would rear their posterity to the business of the dagger and the torch.’ I have myself known several families to leave the South, solely from a fear of insurrection; and this twelve and fourteen years ago, long before any Anti-Slavery efforts were made in this country. And yet, I presume, if through the cold-hearted apathy and obstinate opposition of the North, the South should become strengthened in her desperate determination to hold on to her outraged victims, until they are goaded to despair, and if the Lord in his wrath pours out the vials of his vengeance upon the slave States, why then, Abolitionists will have to bear all the blame. Thou hast drawn a frightful picture of the final issue of Anti-Slavery efforts, as thou art pleased to call it; but none of these things move me, for with just as much truth mayest thou point to the land of Egypt, blackened by God’s avenging fires, and exclaim, ‘Behold the issue of Moses’s mission.’ Nay, verily! See in that smoking, and blood-drenched house of bondage, the consequences of oppression, disobedience, and an obstinate rejection of truth, and light, and love. What had Moses to do with those judgment plagues, except to lift his rod? And if the South soon finds her winding sheet in garments rolled in blood, it will not be because of what the North has told her, but because, like impenitent Egypt, she hardened her heart against it, whilst the voices of some of her own children were crying in agony, ‘O! that thou hadst known, even thou, in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace; but now they are hid from thine eyes.’
Thy friend,
A. E. GRIMKÉ.