The hearing of Mr. Garrison’s lectures was a great epoch in my own life. The impression which they made upon my soul has never been effaced; indeed, they moulded it anew. They gave a new direction to my thoughts, a new purpose to my ministry. I had become a convert to the doctrine of “immediate, unconditional emancipation,—liberation from slavery without expatriation.”
I was engaged to preach on the following Sunday for Brother Young, in Summer Street Church. Of course I could not again speak to a congregation, as a Christian minister, and be silent respecting the great iniquity of our nation. The only sermon I had brought from my home in Connecticut, that could be made to bear on the subject, was one on Prejudice,—the sermon about to be published as one of the Tracts of the American Unitarian Association. So I touched it up as well as I could, interlining here and there words and sentences which pointed in the new direction to which my thoughts and feelings so strongly tended, and writing at its close what used to be called an improvement. Thus: “The subject of my discourse bears most pertinently upon a matter of the greatest national as well as personal importance. There are more than two millions of our fellow-beings, children of the Heavenly Father, who are held in our country in the most abject slavery,—regarded and treated like domesticated animals, their rights as men trampled under foot, their conjugal, parental, fraternal relations and affections utterly set at naught. It is our prejudice against the color of these poor people that makes us consent to the tremendous wrongs they are suffering. If they were white,—ay, if only two thousand or two hundred white men, women, and children in the Southern States were treated as these millions of colored ones are, we of the North should make such a stir of indignation, we should so agitate the country, with our appeals and remonstrances, that the oppressors would be compelled to set their bondmen free. But will our prejudice be accepted by the Almighty, the impartial Judge of all, as a valid excuse for our indifference to the wrongs and outrages inflicted upon these millions of our countrymen? O no! O no! He will say, “Inasmuch as ye did not what ye could for the relief of these, the least of the brethren, ye did it not to me.” Tell me not that we are forbidden by the Constitution of our country to interfere in behalf of the enslaved. No compact our fathers may have made for us, no agreement we could ourselves make, would annul our obligations to suffering fellow-men. “Yes, yes,” I said, with an emphasis that seemed to startle everybody in the house, “if need be, the very foundations of our Republic must be broken up; and if this stone of stumbling, this rock of offence, cannot be removed from under it, the proud superstructure must fall. It cannot stand, it ought not to stand, it will not stand, on the necks of millions of men.” For “God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.” I then offered such a prayer as my kindled spirit moved me to, and gave out the hymn commencing,
“Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve;
And press with vigor on.”
When I rose to pronounce the benediction I said: “Every one present must be conscious that the closing remarks of my sermon have caused an unusual emotion throughout the church. I am glad. Would to God that a deeper emotion could be sent throughout our land, until all the people thereof shall be roused from their wicked insensibility to the most tremendous sin of which any nation was ever guilty, and be impelled to do that righteousness which alone can avert the just displeasure of God. I have been prompted to speak thus by the words I have heard during the past week from a young man hitherto unknown, but who is, I believe, called of God to do a greater work for the good of our country than has been done by any one since the Revolution. I mean William Lloyd Garrison. He is going to repeat his lectures the coming week. I advise, I exhort, I entreat—would that I could compel!—you to go and hear him.”
On turning to Brother Young after the benediction I found that he was very much displeased. He sharply reproved me, and gave me to understand that I should never have an opportunity so to violate the propriety of his pulpit again. And never since then have I lifted up my voice within that beautiful church, which has lately been taken down.
The excited audience gathered in clusters, evidently talking about what had happened. I found the porch full of persons conversing in very earnest tones. Presently a lady of fine person, her countenance suffused with emotion, tears coursing down her cheeks, pressed through the crowd, seized my hand, and said audibly, with deep feeling: “Mr. May, I thank you. What a shame it is that I, who have been a constant attendant from my childhood in this or some other Christian church, am obliged to confess that to-day, for the first time, I have heard from the pulpit a plea for the oppressed, the enslaved millions in our land!” All within hearing of her voice were evidently moved in sympathy with her, or were awed by her emotion. For myself I could only acknowledge in a word my gratitude for her generous testimony.
The next day I perceived, on his return from his place of business in State Street, that my revered father was much disturbed by the reports he had heard of my preaching. Some of the “gentlemen of property and standing” who had been my auditors said it was fanatical, others that it was incendiary, others that it was treasonable, and begged him to “arrest me in my mad career.” The only one, as he soon afterwards informed me, who had spoken in any other than terms of censure was the great and good Dr. Bowditch, who said, “Depend upon it, the young man is more than half right.” My father tried to dissuade me from engaging in the attempt to overthrow the system of slavery which Mr. Garrison proposed. He had come, with most others, to regard it as an unavoidable evil, one that the fathers of our Republic had not ventured to suppress, but had rather given to its protection something like a guaranty. He thought, with most others at that day, that slavery must be left to be gradually removed by the progress of civilization, the growth of higher ideas of human nature, and the manifest superiority and hotter economy of free labor. He admonished me that, in assailing the institution of American slavery, I should only be “kicking against the pricks,” that I should lose my standing in the ministry and my usefulness in the church. I need not add that he failed to convince me that “the foolishness of preaching” would not yet be “mighty to the pulling down of the stronghold of Satan.” In less than ten years he was reconciled to my course.
A few days afterwards I gave my sermon on Prejudice to my most excellent friend, Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., who was then the purveyor of tracts for the American Unitarian Association. He accepted the discourse as originally written, but insisted that the interlineations and the additions respecting slavery should be omitted. He would not have done this, nor should I have consented to it, a few years later. But we were all in bondage then. Unconsciously to ourselves, the hand of the slaveholding power lay heavily upon the mind and heart of the people in our Northern as well as Southern States.
What a pity that my words in that sermon, respecting slavery, were not published in the tract! They might have helped a little to commit our Unitarian denomination much earlier to the cause of impartial liberty, in earnest protest against the great oppression, the unparalleled iniquity of our land. Of whom should opposition to slavery of every kind have been expected so soon as from Unitarian Christians?
The insensibility of the people of our country to the wrongs, the outrages, we were directly and indirectly inflicting upon our colored brethren, when Mr. Garrison commenced the antislavery reform,—the insensibility of the Northern people, scarcely less than that of the Southern,—of New England as well as of the Carolinas and Georgia, of the professing Christians, almost as much as of the political partisans,—that insensibility, not yet wholly overpast, even in Massachusetts, is a moral phenomenon. A more glaring inconsistency does not appear in the whole history of mankind.