Hear, too, the reason assigned by James Smylie, a Presbyterian minister of the Amite Presbytery, Mississippi, for writing a book in 1836, to prove that slavery is a divine institution.
‘From his intercourse with religious societies of all denominations in Mississippi and Louisiana, he was aware that the Abolition maxim, viz: that Slavery is in itself sinful, had gained on and entwined itself among the religious and conscientious scruples of many in the community, so far as to render them unhappy. The eye of the mind, resting on Slavery itself as a corrupt fountain, from which, of necessity, nothing but corrupt streams could flow, was incessantly employed in search of some plan by which, with safety, the fountain could, in some future time, be entirely dried up.’ An illustration of this important acknowledgement, will be found in the following fact, extracted from the Herald of Freedom: ‘A young gentleman who has been residing in South Carolina, says our movements (Abolitionists) are producing the best effects upon the South, rousing the consciences of Slaveholders, while the slaves seem to be impressed as a body with the idea, that help is coming—that an interest is felt for them, and plans devising for their relief somewhere—which keeps them quiet. He says it is not uncommon for ministers and good people to make confession like this. One, riding with him, broke forth, ‘O, I fear that the groans and wails from our slaves enter into the ear of the Lord of Sabaoth. I am distressed on this subject: my conscience will let me have no peace. I go to bed, but not to sleep. I walk my room in agony, and resolve that I will never hold slaves another day; but in the morning, my heart, like Pharaoh’s, is hardened.’
In the autumn of 1835, an influential minister in one of the most southern States, (who only one year before had stoutly defended slavery, and vehemently insisted that northern abolitionists were producing unmixed and irremediable evil at the South,) wrote to the Corresponding Secretary of one of our State Anti-Slavery Societies who had furnished him with Anti-Slavery publications, avowing his conversion to Abolition sentiments, and praying that Anti-Slavery Societies might persevere in their efforts, and increase them. Among other expressions of strong feeling the letter contained the following:
‘I am greatly surprised that I should in any form have been the apologist of a system so full of deadly poison to all holiness and benevolence as slavery, the concocted essence of fraud, selfishness, and cold-hearted tyranny, and the fruitful parent of unnumbered evils, both to the oppressor and the oppressed, THE ONE THOUSANDTH PART OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN BROUGHT TO LIGHT.
‘Do you ask why this change, after residing in a slave country for twenty years? You remember the lines of Pope, beginning:
‘Vice is a monster, of so frightful mien
As to be hated, needs but to be seen,
But seen too oft, familiar with her face;
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.’
‘I had become so familiar with the loathsome features of slavery, that they ceased to offend—besides, I had become a southern man in all my feelings, and it is a part of our creed to defend slavery.’