CHAPTER VI. PLATFORM VERSUS PULPIT
DURING the nineteenth century the authority of preachers and pastors has diminished plainly; and this is largely due to a fact of which Emerson spoke thus: "We should not forgive the clergy for taking on every issue the immoral side." This was true in England, where the great reforms were achieved for the benefit of the masses, and against the interest of the class to which most clergymen belonged. The American pastor seldom differed from his parishioners, unless he was more philanthropic. He was usually in favour of the agitation against drunkenness; and he had a right to say that the disunionism of Phillips and Garrison, together with their systematically repelling sympathy in the South, went far to offset their claim for his support. It was difficult, during many years, to see what ought to be done in the North. When a practical issue was made by the attack on Kansas, the clergy took the side of freedom almost unanimously in New England, and quite generally in rural districts throughout the free States. The indifference of the ministers to abolitionism, before 1854, was partly due, however, to their almost universal opposition to a kindred reform, which they might easily have helped.
I. It was before Garrison began his agitation that Frances Wright denounced the clergy for hindering the intellectual emancipation of her sex; and her first ally was not The Liberator, but The Investigatory though both began almost simultaneously. She pleaded powerfully for the rights of slaves, as well as of married women, before large audiences in the middle States as early as 1836, when these reforms were also advocated by Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, a liberal Jewess. These ladies spoke to men as well as women; and so next summer did Miss Angelina Grimké, whose zeal against slavery had lost her her home in South Carolina. Her first public lecture was in Massachusetts; and the Congregationalist ministers of that State promptly issued a declaration that they had a right to say who should speak to their parishioners, and that the New Testament forbade any woman to become a "public reformer." Their action called out the spirited poem in which Whittier said:
"What marvel if the people learn
To claim the right of free opinion?
What marvel if at times they spurn
The ancient yoke of your dominion?"
Garrison now came out in favour of "the rights of women," and thus lost much of the support which he was receiving from the country clergy generally in New England. The final breach was in May, 1840, at the meeting of the National Association of Abolitionists in New York City. There came Garrison with more than five hundred followers from New England. They gained by a close vote a place on the business committee for that noble woman, Abby Kelley. Ministers and church members seceded and started a new anti-slavery society, which carried away most of the members and even the officers of the old one. The quarrel was embittered by the vote of censure, passed at this meeting upon those abolitionists who had dared to nominate a candidate of their own for the presidency without leave from Mr. Garrison; but the chief trouble came from the prejudice which, that same summer, caused most of the members of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, to refuse places to Harriet Martineau and other ladies as delegates. This exclusion was favoured by all the eight clergymen who spoke, and by no other speakers so earnestly. Among the rejected delegates were Mrs. Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and they resolved, that night, to hold a convention for the benefit of their sex in America.
The volume of essays which Emerson published in 1844 praised "the new chivalry in behalf of woman's rights"; and the other Transcendentalists in America came, one after another, to the same position. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott called their convention in that year of revolutions, 1848, on July 19th. The place was the Methodist church at Seneca Falls, in central New York. The reformers found the door locked against them; and a little boy had to climb in at the window. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, furnished a model for a protest against the exclusion of girls from high schools and colleges, the closing of almost every remunerative employment against the sex, and the laws forbidding a married woman to own any property, whether earned or inherited by her, even her own clothing. This declaration was adopted unanimously; but a demand for the suffrage had only a small majority. Not a single minister is known to have been present; but there were two at a second convention, that August, in Rochester, where the Unitarian church was full of men and women.
There were more than twenty-five thousand ministers in the United States; but only three are mentioned among the members of the national convention, held at Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, 1850, by delegates from eleven States. As Phillips was returning from this meeting, Theodore Parker said to him, "Wendell, why do you make a fool of yourself?" The great preacher came out a few years later in behalf of the rights of women; but it was long before a single religious newspaper caught up with The Investigator.
How the clergy generally felt was shown in 1851, at Akron, in northern Ohio. There Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Universalist ministers appealed to the Bible in justification of the subjugation of women. There was no reply until they began to boast of the intellectual superiority of their own sex. Then an illiterate old woman who had been a slave arose and said: "What 's dat got to do with women's rights, or niggers' rights either? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, would n't ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?" The convention was with her; but the Bible argument was not to be disposed of easily. The general tone of both Testaments is in harmony with the familiar texts attributed to Paul and Peter. These latter passages were written, in all probability, when the position of women was changing for the better throughout the Roman Empire: and the original words, asserting the authority of husbands, are the same as are used in regard to the power of masters over slaves. Such language had all the more weight, because the ministers had been brought up as members of the ruling sex. They may have also been biassed by the fact that their profession depends, more than any other, for success upon the unpaid services in many ways of devoted women. Emancipation was by no means likely to promote work for the Church. There was an audience of two thousand at Syracuse, in 1852, when what was called the "Bloomer Convention," on account of the short dresses worn by some members, took up a resolution, declaring that the Bible recognises the rights of women. Mrs. Rose said that the reform had merits enough of its own, and needed no justification by any book. A letter was read from Mrs. Stanton, saying that "among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position." The accuracy of this statement was readily admitted, after a reverend gentleman had denounced the infidelity of the movement, in a speech described as "indecent" and "coarsely offensive" in the New York Herald; and the resolution was lost.
The lady who offered it was ordained soon after for the Congregationalist ministry; but she was obliged to confess, at the Woman's Rights' Convention, in 1853, that "the Church has so far cast me off, that to a great extent I have been obliged to go to just such infidels as those around me for aid to preach my Christian views." It was at this meeting that a doctor of divinity, and pastor of a prominent society, denounced the reform so violently that Mr. Garrison called him a blackguard and a rowdy, with the result of having his nose pulled by the champion of the Church militant. There were many such unseemly manifestations of clerical wrath. The History of Woman Suffrage, which was edited by Mrs. Stanton and other leading reformers, said, in 1881: "The deadliest opponents to the recognition of the equal rights of women have ever been among the orthodox clergy." The Unitarians were more friendly; but I do not think that the reform was openly favoured, even as late as 1860, by one clergyman in a thousand out of the whole number in the United States. The proportion was even smaller in Europe.