“Resolved, That the Executive Committee be invited to send their agents into the State, and take any other measures they may deem best, to collect the amount due on the pledge made by this society, and to become due on the first of February, and to remit the whole to the treasury of the Massachusetts Society, under the promise that the same shall be immediately and wholly remitted to New York; and that in the collection of the same, they be authorised to receive the amount of pledges hitherto made to the Massachusetts Society.”
They hoped, by this, to open a way for the instant redemption of the pledge, through the means of the friendly co-operation of the New York Committee, and trusted that the rash, unbusiness-like and unbrotherly nullification of so necessary an arrangement, would be avoided.
To the surprise of the Massachusetts men, who then could perceive no sufficient motive for such a course, the New York Committee declined to accept these terms. Were they suffering for the money? Why then did they not take the readiest and the best way to get it?—through the Massachusetts Society,—not over it? Did they love peace and unity? Why then for one moment hesitate? They were invited to send in their agents, and take any other means they might deem best, under the arrangement of the preceding June. What more ought brethren and honest men to desire? What more could be accomplished by their plan, of going on as if the Massachusetts Society were not in existence? One thing more it could not fail to accomplish,—the destruction of the Massachusetts Society. Was it possible that the New York brethren had aimed at that? Were it so, they could not better have hit the mark than by coming at that painful moment, to envenom a financial embarrassment which, singly, could have been so easily met, by mingling it with the poisoned sources of difficulty that had just been laid bare. They came for money, at a moment when the state treasury was found empty—the state agents proved treacherous, the state energies bent upon working out a political demonstration in the eyes of the whole country. And because, under all these difficulties, a part of the money had not been paid when it became due, they refused to collect it, with permission, for the mere pleasure, it seemed, of collecting it without permission. If they were unwilling to acknowledge, even in form, the existence of the Massachusetts Society, what was the legitimate inference? Did the Committee really agree with the slaveholder, and his soul-guard from the truth,—the associations of the ministry, that the Massachusetts Society ought to be destroyed?
Massachusetts men deemed it a virtue to repel these thoughts, which the conduct of the New York Committee could not fail to suggest. They shrunk from the pain of beholding and weighing the evidence of a want of fraternal confidence, and devotion to the cause. They were doomed for this weakness, to feel soon, in their own persons, how much better it is to judge our fellows by their deeds, than by our own hopes or fears.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] For the terms of this contract and the occasion of its necessity, see pages 10 and 47.
CHAPTER V. THE DENOUEMENT.
What we would think, is not the question here.