The import of all this is unmistakable; and this "about-face" of religious organizations on the question of the morality of slavery has no parallel in all the history of Christian churches. Its significance cannot be overstated. It took place North and South. It meant opposition to a movement that was outside the church and with which religion could have no concern, except in so far as it was a vital assault upon the State, and the peace of the State. To make their opposition effective the Christians of that day did this remarkable thing. They reversed their religious views on slavery, which the Abolitionists were now assailing, and which they themselves had previously opposed. They re-examined their Bibles and found arguments that favored slavery. These arguments they used in an attempt to stem an agitation that, as they saw it, was arraying section against section and threatening the perpetuity of the Union.
United testimony from all these Christian bodies is more conclusive contemporaneous evidence against the agitators and their methods than even the proceedings of all conservative Boston at Faneuil Hall in August, 1835.
This new attitude of the church toward slavery meant perhaps also something further—it meant that slavery, as it actually existed, was not then as horrible to Northerners, who could go across the line and see it, which many of them did, as it is now to those whose ideas of it come chiefly from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
In view of this phenomenal movement of Northern Christians it is not strange that Southern churches adhered, throughout the deadly struggle that was now on, to the position into which they had been driven—that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible—nor is it matter of wonder that, as Professor Hart makes prominent on p. 137, "not a single Southern man of large reputation and influence failed to stand by slavery."
Historians of to-day usually narrate without comment that nearly all the American churches and divines at first opposed the Abolitionists. It illustrates the courage with which the Abolitionists stood, as Dr. Hart delights to point out, "for a despised cause." They assuredly did stand by their guns.
Later, another change came about in the attitude of the churches. In 1844 the Abolitionists were to achieve their first victory in the great religious world. The Methodist Church was then disrupted, "squarely on the question whether a bishop could own slaves, and all the Southern members withdrew and organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South." Professor Hart, p. 214, says of this: "Clearly, the impassioned agitation of the Abolitionists had made it impossible for a great number of Northern anti-slavery men to remain on terms of friendship with their Southern brethren."
That great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, was followed some weeks later by a lamentable anti-Garrison mob, which did not stand alone. In the years 1835, 1836, and 1837 a great wave of anti-Abolition excitement swept over the North. In New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton (Illinois), and many other places, there were anti-Abolition riots, sometimes resulting in arson and bloodshed.
The heart of the great, peace-loving, patriotic, and theretofore happy and contented North, was at that time stirred with the profoundest indignation against the Abolitionists. Northern opinion then was that the Abolitionists, by their unpatriotic course and their nefarious methods, were driving the South to desperation and endangering the Union. If the North at that time saw the situation as it really was, the historian of the present day should say so. If, on the other hand, the people of both the North and South were then laboring under delusions, as to the facts that were occurring among them, those of this generation, who are wiser than their ancestors, should give us the sources of their information. To know the lessons of history we must have the facts.[29]
In 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, the Abolitionists celebrated the Fourth of July thus: Their leader, William Lloyd Garrison, held up and burned to ashes, before the applauding multitude, one after another, copies of
1st. The fugitive slave law.