They had no friendly feeling for the Church, South, and gladly and freely employed every means to disaffect and disintegrate the Southern organization, especially in obscure neighborhoods. Nor did they scruple at the grossest misrepresentations of the facts concerning the division of the Church.
Their preachers traversed the State and visited every family that was suspected of being in sympathy with them; and wherever two or three could be gathered together of kindred sympathy they were organized into a society, regularly visited, and made a nucleus around which to gather the disaffected and disappointed of the M. E. Church, South.
The preachers engaged in this work were not of the class and style of men whose ministrations would reach and affect the intelligent and cultivated portions of the people. They were, for the most part, rough, uncultivated and illiterate, and hence their social and intellectual affinities were found among the lower classes and the ignorant. They were the kind of men to be doggedly pertinacious, and to know nothing amongst men outside of one idea, one purpose, one cause. They looked upon everything that did not favor them and their cause as wrong per se, and considered their mission unfulfilled until it was righted or removed.
They had more patience than charity. They could bide their time, but could not tolerate opposition. They could proscribe, and even persecute, others for opinion’s sake, but could not endure with fortitude the reflex influence of their own bigotry.
Public opinion and jesuitical policy required them to be discreet as ministers of the gospel in their public performances, but as partisans they were strangely indiscreet. They were sent into Missouri by the authorities of their Church distinctly and thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that the success of the Church whose credentials they bore was in the success of the anti-slavery party; hence they were secret and earnest partisans out of the pulpit. They associated with abolitionists, and warmly espoused every measure for the abolition of slavery. Whether right or wrong, slavery existed then by the authority of the Constitution of the State and under the protection of her laws; and, like all other men, slaveholders could not surrender tamely their constitutional and legal rights to that species of property in which they had invested their money, much less could they look with indifference upon the presence and movements of men who were seeking by clandestine, “under-ground” methods to render insecure their property by means neither open nor honorable.
No class of men were more favorably circumstanced for the prosecution of such a work than these Northern Methodist preachers, and they were considered by the abolition party as indispensable to final success.
It was in the character of partisans, and not ministers, that they were put under the ban of public sentiment. The fact that they were ministers of the gospel, and that they used the privileges of their profession to further the objects of a party that sought by unlawful and disingenuous means the extirpation of slavery, made their presence, character and work the more offensive to the people of the State. The common opinion among men who cared less for the institutions of Christianity than for the institutions of the State was that the Northern Methodist preachers in this State were wolves in sheep’s clothing. Only by an unseemly torture of facts could they make it appear that they were opposed and persecuted because they were ministers of the gospel.
When ministers of the gospel become political partisans, and expect their high calling to protect them in a sinister attempt to abolish the institutions and laws under which the rights of property are protected, they should not complain if honorable men detect and denounce the hypocrisy.
The spirit of reckless insubordination that animated these fanatical preachers has often, of late, found emphatic utterance through their Church papers. This is its language: “We must teach people to make better laws, or trample upon such as are made, if we expect to meet God in peace.”
But in those days the utterance was in the signs and symbols of secret societies, and the execution was in the by-ways, around the corners, in “Uncle Tom’s cabin,” in occasional doses of poison and midnight arson, with the aid of butcher-knives, axes and “under-ground railroads.” For such work true ministers of the gospel are never held responsible; but when it is incited and aided by those calling themselves such, the verdict of double guilt can not be escaped.