Beginning of the Great Battle—Five Great Eras—Compromise Measures of 1850—“Shall We Compromise”—The Fugitive Slave Law Denounced—Right of Free Speech Defended—Commercial Liberty—Fighting Caste—Liberty of the Pulpit Defended—Quickness of Retort—Sentiment of the Times—Reaction—Visit of Kossuth—Election of 1852—The Parker Controversy—Degraded into Liberty—John Mitchel—Garrison—Close of this Era.

Other things than opening the church building contributed to make 1850 an eventful year to Henry Ward Beecher.

In that year slavery came to the place of supreme interest in our national affairs which it never afterwards lost until it was swept away in the battle-storm of 1861-65.

The very month that Plymouth Church took possession of its new house, the first month of the last half of the nineteenth century, Henry Clay submitted a series of resolutions in the Senate of the United States as “compromise measures for a final and complete adjustment of the slavery question.” In the debate, passage, and enforcement of these measures, the utterly antagonistic nature of the two contending elements, liberty and slavery, which had been brought together under our Constitution, became so evident; slavery, from the very necessity of self-preservation, became so aggressive, advanced claims so comprehensive and so forced the fighting, that the very measures intended to compromise the whole difficulty made it clear that there could be no compromise. There could be no amicable adjustment of interests so diametrically opposed; one or the other, liberty or slavery, must take undivided and undisputed possession of the government. From debate of words the conflict passed rapidly to the argument of arms, first on the plains of Kansas and eventually over the whole southern half of our country, developing into the greatest civil war ever known in the world’s history—a war in comparison with which, in the numbers engaged on either side, in the breadth of the battle-field, in the agents of destruction employed and the important interests at stake, England’s Wars of the Roses, and even the strife of the rival claimants for the imperial purple of Rome, were insignificant and secondary contests.

The part of this great slavery conflict in which Mr. Beecher was actively engaged had five distinct eras, clearly marked by well-defined boundaries, each presenting peculiar difficulties of its own to be overcome, and each bringing forward peculiar and important questions for solution. The first began with the agitation of the Compromise measures of 1850, and ended in the passage of those measures and their enforcement, more or less complete, during the uneasy years of 1850 and 1853.

The second began with the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise measures and continued through what was known as “The Kansas Struggle,” until April 1, 1858, when the first substantial victory ever won by the free States was gained in Congress in the permission to give the actual residents of Kansas a fair vote upon the question of the acceptance or rejection of the infamous Lecompton Constitution.

The third began with the abandonment by the slave-power of its dependence upon legislative enactments, which its defeat in Kansas had proved to be futile, and the inauguration of an era of secession and violence, and ended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, which took effect January 1, 1863, and which legally destroyed slavery in all the States in rebellion, and substantially within the whole domain of the United States.

The fourth era began with the issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation; extended through two years and more of battle by which the proclamation was carried into effect, and slavery was destroyed de facto as it had already been de jure, and foreign intervention was prevented; and ended with raising the flag over Sumter, the sign of the restoration of our national authority over a free and undivided national domain.

The fifth includes the period of reconstruction, in which the difficult task of bringing the States, once in rebellion but now submissive, back into the Union was successfully accomplished. It covers the ground from the close of the war to the present time, or, more properly, from the death of President Lincoln, when the South lay prostrate at the feet of the victorious North, to the election of President Cleveland, when, as Mr. Beecher hoped and believed, sectional lines were obliterated and the South once more saw the candidate she favored raised to be the chief magistrate of our common country.

The Compromise measures of 1850 were conceived for the purpose of removing the serious and dangerous complications that had arisen, between the North and the South, in the attempt to organize the territory recently acquired from Mexico, and in admitting California as a free State with a constitution for ever prohibiting slavery within her borders. The South felt that such an addition to the free States would so disturb the balance of power between the sections that something must be given her as a compensation. Hence these Compromise measures, which provided for the admission of California as a free State, but gave the South, as an offset, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law and paid Texas ten millions of dollars for the adjustment of her State boundaries. Honestly intended, no doubt, and urged by the mover, Henry Clay, and accepted by many who disliked it, from patriotic motives, this Compromise was, nevertheless, wrong in principle and proved only mischievous in results. It rested on the false theory that the development of both liberty and slavery was equally the duty of the Republic, and that whatever gain was made by the former must be equalized to the latter by some new concession, and led to constantly increasing disturbance in both sections. While failing to satisfy the more radical men of the South, it was utterly abhorrent to a much larger body at the North. It seemed to the latter to be but another great step taken by the slave-power in its attempt to gain possession of the whole land. The first had been the Missouri Compromise, in which slavery, surrendering what it never owned—viz., the territory north of 36° 30', called Mason and Dixon’s line—gained Missouri and a quasi right to all territory south of that line. In this second great step now proposed they did not fail to note that the provision to prohibit slavery in the newly-acquired territories, called the “Wilmot Proviso,” had been defeated in Congress, nor fail to see that in these Compromise measures, should they be carried, the slave-power would secure the right to hunt and capture its fugitives in every city, town, and home of the free States, and to compel every Northern citizen to aid in the work, thus making, so far as fugitives were concerned, slave territory of the whole North. They saw in this measure a great advance towards nationalizing this institution and securing for it the right, aimed at by its advocates from the first, to go unquestioned and protected wherever the authority of the Constitution of the United States was recognized. If this were passed they felt it to be not at all improbable that the threat of Senator Toombs, of Georgia, to call the roll of his slaves from the steps of Bunker Hill Monument, would be executed, and they opposed it with an energy born both of conviction and abhorrence. In this opposition none were more strenuous than Mr. Beecher. Speaking of this period, he says:

“In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay’s Omnibus Bill, including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly roused, and in the pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the utmost earnestness the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then that I wrote that article, ‘Shall we Compromise?’ It was read to John C. Calhoun on his sick-bed by his clerk, and he raised himself up and said: ‘Read that article again.’ The article was read. ‘The man who says that is right. There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery.’ And then, when Webster made his fatal apostasy on March 7, 1850, I joined with all Northern men of any freedom-loving spirit in denouncing it and in denouncing him. Forthwith, after a paralysis of a few weeks, his friends determined to save him by getting all the old clergymen—such men as Dr. Spring, Dr. Lord of Dartmouth, and the Andover professors—to take his part. The effort was to get every great and influential man in the North to stand up for Webster; and then it was that I flamed. They failed utterly. Professor Woolsey of New Haven, Dr. Bacon, Dr. Hopkins, President of Williams College in Massachusetts, and various other most influential men, absolutely refused to sustain Webster.”

In the issue of the Independent of February 21, 1850, filling three columns, we have the famous article referred to above. We quote only enough to indicate its spirit and line of argument:^[5]

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise has been violently resisted by the South and but coldly looked upon by the North.

“It is not that both sides are infatuated and refuse a reasonable settlement; but the skill of Mr. Clay has evidently not touched the seat of the disease. He either has not perceived or else has not thought it expedient to meet the real issue now before the people of the United States. The struggle now going on is a struggle whose depths lie in the organization of society in the North and South respectively; whose causes are planted in the Constitution. There are two incompatible and mutually destructive principles wrought together in the government of this land.... These elements are slavery and liberty.... One or the other must die.

”... The South now demands room and right for extension. She asks the North to be a partner. For every free State she demands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy.

“... It is time for good men and true to gird up their loins and stand forth for God and humanity. No compromises can help us which dodge the question, certainly none which settle it for slavery....

“There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her duty openly, firmly, and for ever to refuse to slavery another inch of territory, and to see to it that it never gets it by fraud. It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where it now exists. It is her duty to declare that she will under no consideration be a party to any farther inhumanity and injustice....

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise resolutions demand better provision for the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a bill is now pending in the United States Senate for that purpose. On this matter our feelings are so strong that we confess a liability to intemperance of expression.

“If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. Not even the Constitution shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires confederated in my behalf that I should maintain that instrument, so I will to the utmost bound of right. But who, with power which even God denies to Himself, shall by compact fore-ordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice? I disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I have breath will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of recapturing a fellow-man for bondage; and may my foot palsy and my right hand forget her cunning if I ever become so untrue to mercy and to religion as not by all the means in my power to give aid and succor to every man whose courageous flight tells me he is worthy of liberty!

”... From those compromises, like Mr. Clay’s, which seek for peace rather than for humanity—from such compromises, guileless though they seem, and gilded till they shine like heaven, evermore may we be delivered.”

This battle in Congress resulted, like every battle since the adoption of the Constitution, in a victory for the slave party. In September of this year, 1850, the Compromise measures, which had passed both Houses of Congress, were signed by President Fillmore and became by a very decided majority the law of the land. Many things had contributed to this result. On the one hand, there was a strong party in the South, representing largely the sentiment of that whole section, who felt themselves aggrieved and deprived of their rights under the Constitution, since they could not carry their property with them into the common territory of the Union, and who saw in these Compromise measures a step in the direction of nationalizing their peculiar institution; on the other the commercial and manufacturing interests of the North demanded a cessation of strife, that they might enter into the prosperity opened to them by the discovery of the gold upon our Western coast; again, the fear of disruption, if the bitter discussion in Congress should continue, reconciled many to such measures as promised peace; also, the habit of compromise, which had been early formed, and stood apparently justified by years of prosperity and growth, made it easier to again adopt this course; and, perhaps more influential than any other, the leaders most beloved and trusted at the North were in favor of the measure. Henry Clay was its originator, and Daniel Webster, the great expounder of the Constitution, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, had justified the Compromise measures, spoke not a word in condemnation of the legal or moral crudities and enormities of the Fugitive Slave Law, and had reserved the lightning of his sarcasm and the thunder of his condemnation for the Abolitionists:

“Nothing can be plainer than that all parties in the state were drifting in the dark, without any comprehension of the elemental causes at work. Without prescience or sagacity, like ignorant physicians, they prescribed at random; they sewed on patches, new compromises on old garments, sought to conceal the real depth of the danger of the gathering torrent by crying peace! peace! to each other. In short, they were seeking to medicate volcanoes and stop earthquakes by administering political quinine. The wise statesmen were bewildered and politicians were juggling fools.”

If the anti-slavery men of the North hated the Compromise, and especially the Fugitive Slave clause in it, while it was being debated in Congress, their abhorrence was increased a thousand-fold now that all it had cost and all it threatened was in a measure comprehended. Looking at it calmly, they saw that safe-guards which from time immemorial had gathered around the individual to protect him in person and liberty had, for a very large class in the community, been suddenly destroyed.

Trial by jury was denied. Opportunity for the accused to summon witnesses in his own defence was not given, and “in no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitives be admitted to evidence.” He had no hearing before any competent judge, but before a commissioner appointed to take depositions, who, whatever his ability or lack of ability, was clothed by this infamous act with plenary power in the premises.

On the simple certificate of this man the unhappy victim was hurried off at once into slavery, and no stay of proceedings or liberty of appeal was granted. Dumb, undefended, his destiny at the mercy of any accuser, and of a commissioner possibly ignorant and possibly vicious, the accused was consigned to a state worse to many than death.

Aimed at a particular class, its injustice was seen to be indiscriminate enough to make an attack possible upon individuals of any class; and its provisions for the deprivation of a single right made necessary such a stringency in the exercise of other rights as could not be tolerated in a free community.

Atrocious in itself, it became still more offensive and dangerous by reason of the ease with which its provisions could be employed by villains for kidnapping negroes, or even white men, who had never been slaves. It was stated and believed that along the whole line between the slave and free States arresting fugitives at once became a regular business, with very little care in many instances as to the previous liberty or slavery of those arrested. Instances were continually being recorded of colored boys and girls being unexpectedly spirited away and hurried off into bondage. Great activity in this work of securing fugitives who had lived in the North for years prevailed, and fear and apprehension took possession of the whole negro population of that section, and a corresponding indignation grew hot in the hearts of multitudes of freemen.

Scenes and incidents were continually transpiring and published in the newspapers that stirred the one party to greater hatred of the institution of slavery, and the other party to greater hatred to the means, regular or irregular, that were employed to prevent the carrying out of its purpose.

As may well be supposed, Mr. Beecher speaks with no greater affection for this measure, now that it has become a law, than when it was being debated in Congress.

In a Star paper that appeared October 3, upon “The Fugitive Slave Bill at its Work,” he meets it with undisguised and open defiance. “With such solemn convictions no law impious to God and humanity shall have respect or observance at our hands. If in God’s providence fugitives ask bread or shelter, raiment or conveyance, from us, my own children shall lack bread before they; my own flesh shall sting with cold ere they shall lack raiment; I will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their flight, and while under my shelter or my convoy they shall be to me as my own flesh and blood; and whatsoever defence I would put forth for my own children, that shall these poor, despised, and persecuted creatures have in my house or upon the road.”

He follows with another very thoughtful and able article upon “Law and Conscience” in defence of his position, and for the instruction of those who were in doubt what course to take in the conflicting claims of the law of the land on one side and their feelings of humanity upon the other.

In the first place, he makes the duty of obedience to law very strong:

“Nothing could be more mischievous than the prevalence of the doctrine that a citizen may disobey an unjust or burdensome law. Should that liberty be granted, the bad, the selfish, the cruel and grasping, might disregard wholesome laws as easily as just men unjust laws. It would constitute every man a court in his own case; and a court, too, in which selfishness would preside. Society could not exist for a day.

“It is a question seriously asked by thousands: How can we as good citizens subscribe to such wholesome doctrine and yet openly resist the Fugitive Slave Law? Many reasons make it important that this question should be thoroughly answered. There are thousands who say that this law must be obeyed, and who, with the next breath, bravely and generously declare that nevertheless, should a distressed fugitive ask succor, shelter, and guidance at their hand, he should have them. But this is breaking the law. To keep this law you must not shelter a slave mother fleeing to her free husband in the North, nor a slave girl whose foot bounds at the sound of a pursuer, as if it were the knell of virtue. You must not give direction to a fugitive, though his head be white and his old limbs reveal half a century of unrequited toil; though a man say to you, in the awful agony of his soul, ‘Kill me, but for the love of God do not betray me!’ the law enjoins you to go with the officer, if he summon you, and help in his arrest! The minister of the Gospel, the humane philanthropist, peacefully walking to the Sabbath-sounding bell, must turn aside and help some scoundrel hireling to run down his slave, if the marshal command him, or break the law!”

He then lays down this general principle:

“Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his person, estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed; but no citizen is bound to obey a law which commands him to inflict injury upon another. We must endure but never commit wrong. We must be patient when sinned against, but must never sin against others. The law may heap injustice upon me, but no law can authorize me to pour injustice upon another. When the law commanded Daniel not to pray he disobeyed it; when it commanded him to be cast into the lions’ den he submitted.

“A law which enjoins upon a citizen the commission of a crime, and still more of an open, disgraceful, and flagitious crime, has violated the confidence of the citizen, and is dissolved in the court of God the moment it is enacted.

“Let no man stand uncommitted, dodging between daylight and dark, on this vital principle. Let every man firmly and openly take sides. This vibrating between humanity for the fugitive and conscience for the law, this clandestine humanity in spite of law, to which the lips only give a sullen and pouting obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and open-hearted integrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom conscience is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian’s creed: Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me: disobedience to every law that commands me to sin.”

His conviction of the origin of this whole trouble, his policy concerning it, and his confidence in the working out of natural causes are well set forth in an article at this period upon “The Cause and Cure of Agitation”:

“It ought primarily to be understood that our Constitution has invited this whole conflict which has raged about it. Had the framers been gifted with prescience they would, we cannot but think, have regarded the inevitable future mischief of that compromise by which slavery had its rights embedded in a constitution of liberty, as too great to be risked. They acted with the light which they had. They swaddled and laid in one cradle two infant forms. These were rocked together and grew up together; but one was a wolf’s cub and the other a lamb. Both were alike peaceful at birth—for a lion’s whelp when first dropped is as gentle as a doe. Growth brought forth separate natures. Then appeared hostility. Each acted to its nature.

“Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by Congressional enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution. We only ask that a line be drawn about it; that an insuperable bank be cast up; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must find no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must abide in its place, subject to all the legitimate changes which will be brought upon it by the spirit of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually into every profession thousands bred to justice and hating its reverse, by churches preaching a gospel that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which always thrive best when the masses are free and refined and therefore have their wants multiplied, by free agriculture and free commerce.

“When slavery begins, under such a treatment, to flag, we demand that she be denied political favoritism to regain her loss; we demand that no laws be enacted to give health to her paralysis and strength to her relaxing grasp. She boldly and honestly demanded a right to equality with the North, and prophetically spoke by Calhoun, that the North would preponderate and crush her. It is true. Time is her enemy. Liberty will, if let alone, always be a match for oppression. Now, it is because statesmen propose stepping in between slavery and the appointed bourne to which she goes, scourged by God and nature, that we resent these statesmen and refuse to follow them. If her wounds can be stanched, if she may have adventitious aid in new privileges, slavery will renew her strength and stave off the final day. But if it be forbidden one additional favor and be obliged to stand up by the side of free labor, free schools, free churches, free institutions; if it be obliged to live in a land of free books, free papers, and free Bibles, it will either die or else it ought to live.”

He ridicules those measures that had been adopted North and South to enforce the peace, and compares those who keep agitating against agitation to poor old “crazy Dinah” who used to sit on the pulpit stairs in Litchfield. “Once she began talking, but, startled at her want of manners, she said out loud: ‘Why I’m talking! I’m talking in meetin’! There, I spoke again. I ought not to speak. There, I spoke once more. Tut, tut! why, I keep a-speaking.’”

While advocating at this time, as ever afterwards, the utmost liberty of discussion, he stated his creed in these words: “There is nothing so safe in a free country as free discussion, nothing so dangerous as the suppression of it; peace and liberty of speech, violence and intolerance, respectively go together.”

He argued and advised in a lengthy paper against “the usual unfortunate concomitants of controversy, bitterness, railing, unfairness, and exaggerated prejudices.

“We have not the least objection to the most unbounded ardor of expression, to the most enthusiastic convictions, expressed in the most positive manner, so long as they relate to truths or principles. But when the propagandist comes to regard those who do not receive his views as devoid of all principle and necessarily dishonest, and becomes offensively personal, then controversy is morbid and mischievous. And as nothing gives such vigor to like or dislike as conscience, so they who profess to be conscientious are often conscientiously bitter. There is no revulsion against men or measures so violent as that of pure and honorable men. A man consciously right should watch against severe judgments of others. It is sad and curious to observe the progress of exaggerated impressions of personal character. Those who do not follow our conscience on the slavery question are often, nevertheless, on the whole, more conscientious men than we. Those whose reasonings we pronounce cold and inhuman are not cold or inhuman men. Those whose commercial interests reduce them, as it seems to us, to a policy on this particular question which outrages justice and rectitude, are in their private character most estimable for truth, and even for tender sympathy. Indeed, this is often shown in strange contrast; for the very men who give their counsel and zeal and money against the unseen slave of the South irresistibly pity the particular fugitive whom they may see running through the North. They give the Union Committee money to catch the slave, and give the slave money to escape from the Committee.”

All who were acquainted with Mr. Beecher know that the course he advised for others he persistently and conscientiously pursued himself. We doubt if any man ever lived who was engaged in so many severe battles and carried into them or brought from them so little bitterness.

Such a vigorous treatment of large and vital questions commanded a following; and it was not long before this young minister from the West was recognized as one of the great anti-slavery leaders and had a national reputation. Men at the South began to hate him; men at the North, conservatives whose business interests were wrapped up in the present state of things, whose goods and principles were equally for sale in Southern markets, were horrified and alarmed at his unwise sayings, his blasphemous use of the pulpit for political ends, and his fiery denunciations of the nation’s pet institution. But over against these there was another class, daily growing larger, whose consciences were set free by his clear discrimination of a citizen’s and a Christian’s duty, whose intelligence was broadened and enlarged by his lofty views, and whose hearts were set on fire by his mighty enthusiasm and abounding love. This body daily increased in numbers and came more and more to share the spirit of their leader. Whatever he wrote they read. Whenever he spoke the size of church or hall alone decided the number of hearers. Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest desire to do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and high as there was in the land. With cheek still ruddy with youth, with eyes from which the laughter never died out except when the tears of sympathy filled them or the deep things of God veiled them, with a heart that was in sympathy with all nature round him, and which nature and He who is above nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that could interpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a complete instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come from his sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he strikes.

In the progress of this discussion upon the Compromise measures, which had its centre in Congress, but in which every hamlet, almost every household, in the North had a share, other questions came to the front as parts of the great controversy.

Among the earliest of these was the right of free speech—a right utterly unknown where slavery was in power, and always bitterly attacked where it had influence. As may well be expected, it found in Mr. Beecher one of its most strenuous champions. Early in his career he urged all the claims of friendship, risked the safety of his new church building, and defied the New York and Brooklyn mob, then under the control of the notorious Captain Rynders, in its defence.

In a sermon preached in 1884 upon the death of Wendell Phillips he gives an account of his experience in this matter:

“It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth here that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it was moved up-town, William A. Hall, now dead—a fervent friend and Abolitionist—had secured the Graham Institute, on Washington Street, in Brooklyn, wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place I was visited by the committee of that Institute (excellent gentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt, because they are all now ashamed of it: they are in heaven), who said that, in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing. If there is anything on earth that I am sensitive to it is the withdrawing of the liberty of speech and thought. Henry C. Bowen said to me: ‘You can have Plymouth Church, if you want it.’ ‘How?’ ‘It is a rule of the church trustees that the church may be let by a majority vote when we are convened; but if we are not convened, then every trustee must give his consent in writing. If you choose to make it a personal matter and go to every trustee, you can have it.’ He meanwhile undertook, with Mr. Hall, to put new placards over the old ones, notifying men quietly that the meeting was to be held here, and distributing thousands and tens of thousands of hand-bills at the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the trustees man by man. The majority of them very cheerfully accorded the permission. One or two of them were disposed to decline and withhold it. I made it a matter of personal friendship: ‘You and I will break if you don’t give me this permission,’ and they signed. So the meeting glided from Graham Institute to this house. A great audience assembled. We had detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle the subject in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to molest us.”

Neither at this nor any other time was an attack actually made upon Plymouth Church, although many times in its history have angry men gathered in the immediate neighborhood, evidently bent on mischief, but were restrained from violence by the bold bearing of many in the audience who were known not to be Quakers, and by the presence of the police, who were kept well informed of their intentions.

Another of the secondary battles that were fought early in this year was one for commercial liberty.

The South, by the help, and perhaps by the instigation, of Northern co-operators, attempted nothing less than to boycott every commercial or manufacturing company that was opposed to them upon the great political questions of the day. A great “Union Saving Committee” was formed in New York, and met in Castle Garden and made out a black-list of the merchants that were anti-slavery, from whom the South were to withdraw their patronage. Mr. Beecher not only preached against the outrage, but visited from store to store to uphold the courage of the merchants.

He says: “Mr. Bowen was, of course, included in that blacklist, and threatened with the loss of all his Southern custom. He came to me and asked me if I would not write a card for him, and I undertook to do it; but, my head not running very clear, the only thing I got at, after making three or four attempts, was, ‘My goods are for sale, but not my principles,’ but I could not lick it into shape, and I gave the paper to him and said, ‘You must fix it yourself.’ He took it to Hiram Barney, and he drew up the card in the shape in which it appeared, including that sentence, which was the snap of the whole thing.”

“My goods are for sale, but not my principles” became a war-cry for the independent business men of the day, and had immense influence upon commercial action.

He fought the petty ostracism of the North, and apparently with success:

“I never preached on that subject. I never said to the people in this congregation, from the beginning to this day, ‘You ought to let colored folks sit in your pew.’ I preached the dignity of man as a child of God, and lifted up the sanctity of human life and nature before the people. They made the application, and they made it wisely and well.

“When I came here there was no place for colored men and women in the theatre except the negro pen; no place in the opera; no place in the church except the negro pew; no place in any lecture-hall; no place in the first-class car on the railways. The white omnibus of Fulton Ferry would not allow colored persons to ride in it. They were never allowed to sit even in the gentlemen’s cabin on the boats.

“I invited Fred Douglass, one day in those times, to come to church here. ‘I should be glad to, sir,’ said he; ‘but it would be so offensive to your congregation.’ ‘Mr. Douglass, will you come? And if any man objects to it, come up and sit on my platform by me. You will always be welcome there.”

“At the Fulton Ferry there are two lines of omnibuses, one white and the other blue. I had been accustomed to go in them indifferently; but one day I saw a little paper stuck upon one of them, saying: ‘Colored people not allowed to ride in this omnibus.’ I instantly got out. There are men who stand at the door of these omnibus lines, urging passengers into one or the other. I am very well known to all of them; and the next day, when I came to the place, the gentleman serving asked: ‘Won’t you ride, sir?’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I am too much of a negro to ride in that omnibus.’ I called the attention of every one I met to that fact, and said to them: ‘Don’t ride in that omnibus, which violates your principles, and my principles, and common decency at the same time.’ I do not know whether this had any influence, but I do know that after a fortnight’s time I had occasion to look in and the placard was gone.”

But perhaps the most important, at all events the hardest-fought, battle of this era was in behalf of the liberty of ministers of the Gospel to preach in their pulpits for the slave and against the atrocities of slavery.

It sprang from the publication, by an influential New York daily paper, of an article in which it was threatened that clergymen who spoke in their pulpits upon slavery “would have their coats rolled in the dirt.” Mr. Beecher at once took up the glove in his own defence and that of his brethren who thought it their duty to preach on this subject. He entered into an examination of the whole status of the slave with great thoroughness, and gathered his materials for defence and attack from Southern sources. A report made to the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia in 1833 says: “They have no Bible to read by their own firesides; they have no family altars; and when in affliction, sickness, or death, they have no minister to address to them the consolations of the Gospel.

“They are destitute of the privileges of the Gospel, and ever will be, under the present state of things. They may justly be considered the heathen of this country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any country in the world.”

“Says Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, in a case brought against defendant for shooting and wounding a woman who endeavored to run away from a whipping: ‘With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person and in his posterity to live without knowledge, and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that others may reap the fruits.’”

Aroused by such testimony from reports of religious bodies and the decisions of the courts, he exclaims, with hot indignation:

“Yet the pulpit, whose echoes roll over the heathenism of the globe, must be dumb!

“It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are church-members; does that save women from the lust of their owners? does it save their children from being sold? does it save parents from separation? In the shameless processions every week made from the Atlantic to the Gulf are to be found slaves ordained to preach the Gospel, members of churches, baptized children, Sunday-school scholars carefully catechised, full of Gospel texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him God-speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the cotton-plantations of Alabama?

“What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope? What motive is there to the slave to strive for Christian graces, when, if they make him a real man, they are threshed out of him; or, if they make him a more obedient and faithful man, raise his market price and only make him a more merchantable disciple of Christ? It is the religious phase of slave-life that reveals the darkest features of that all-perverting system.”

Ridiculing the idea that it takes distance to make a topic fit for the pulpit, and upbraiding the ministry, who are engaged in snatching here and there a child from the Ganges, and have no words for those children that, here at home, every year are snatched from the parents’ bosom and sold everywhither, he says:

“It requires distance, it seems, to make a topic right for the pulpit. Send it to Greenland or to Nootka Sound, and you may then practise at the far-away target. And the reason of such discrimination seems to be that preaching against foreign sins does not hurt the feelings nor disturb the quiet of your congregation; whereas, if the identical evils at home which we deplore upon the Indus or along the Burampootra are preached about, the Journal says that it will risk the minister’s place and bread and butter; and it plainly tells all Northern ministers that if they meddle with such politics they will have their coats rolled in the dirt. Will the Journal tell us how many leagues off a sin must be before it is prudent and safe for courageous ministers to preach against it?

“Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate virtue, and tens of thousands robbed of what they have never been taught to prize, and the Journal stands poised to cast its javelin at that meddlesome pulpit that dares speak of such boundless licentiousness, and send it to its more appropriate work of evangelizing the courtesans of Paris or the loose virtue of Italy! And it assures us that multitudes of clergymen are thanking it for such a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know. The platforms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices, urging Christianity to go abroad, stimulating the Church not to leave a corner of the globe unsearched nor an evil unredressed. But when the speech is ended they steal in behind the Journal to give it thanks for its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to say a word about home-heathen—about their horrible ignorance, bottomless licentiousness, and about the mercenary inhumanity which every week is selling their own Christian brethren, baptized as much as they, often preachers of the Gospel like themselves, eating from the same table of the Lord, praying to the same Saviour, listening to snatches of that same Bible (whose letters they have never been permitted to learn), out of which these reverend endorsers of the Journal preach!”

He shows that the slavery of New England never was the slavery of the South: “The slavery of the South in our day adopts the Roman civil law as the basis of its code.... Now, New England never held a slave on the basis of the Roman civil law, but under a law which was expressly enacted for the benefit of the slave and for the ultimate destruction of slavery—viz., the Hebrew law of slavery. No system of slavery, in this land, can be profitable which does not put the slave under a regimen which denies him the rights of manhood. The North, on the basis of the Hebrew slavery law, found it out; she refused to go further and sacrifice her religious scruples. The South, on the basis of the Roman civil law, imbibed its inhuman spirit, put on the screws, and forced the system into its present legal attitude, with a written code more infamous than the unwritten law of any pirate’s deck.”

He proves that the North never sold out her slaves, with a profit, to “her partners in the South, and so closed up the business,” by showing that in most of the Northern States the slaves were set free by the decisions of the courts upon the adoption of the State constitutions, and that in the meantime their masters were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to sell them South.

In New York gradual emancipation was enacted, and not only was the sale of slaves out of the borders forbidden, but masters travelling with their slaves in the South were required to give heavy bonds for the safe return of the same.

These words reveal his own spirit in the discussion:

“In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the shapes and motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual struggle how to calm the natural expressions of an honest soul into that measured phrase that may best suit the sated public ear. If one overhang this abyss until his spirit do drink in its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and his words glance like fire. Neither are these feelings the foul engenderings of fanaticism. They are the true feelings of a heart taught to hate injustice and degrading wrong, by that nature which God gave it; by the Bible which educated it; by the law under which it was made, and by the public sentiment in which it has been bred. It is with a sense of shame that we see strong words for oppression granted an unapologized liberty to walk up and down as they will; while he who speaks for freedom must rake up his ardor under the ashes of a tame propriety, and stand to answer for want of a Gospel spirit if indignation at double and treble wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt! Nevertheless, we hope; we trust; we pray; and hoping, trusting, and praying, we soothe ourselves in such thoughts as these: ‘From this shame, too, thou shalt go forth, O world! God, who, unwearied sitting on the circle of the earth, hath beheld and heard the groanings and travailings of pain until now, and caused Time to destroy them one by one, shall ere long destroy thee, thou abhorred and thrice damnable oppression cancerously eating the breasts of liberty.’”

He concludes by giving his views upon the position of the pulpit, and utters this solemn protest:

“Therefore, against every line of the Coward’s Ethics of the Journal we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its pattern fitter to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt to preach to old-world mummies than to be a living man of God among living men, loving them but never fearing them! God be thanked that in every age hitherto pulpits have been found, the allies of suffering virtue, the champions of the oppressed! And if in this day, after the notable examples of heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by insincere friends and insidious enemies, and learn to mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonorous and thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found conspiring with this league of iniquity; that so, when in that august day of retribution God shall deal punishment in flaming measures to all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom or thrice-polluted Gomorrah!”

Some idea of his mode of address and quickness in retort at that day will appear from extracts from his speech at the annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and two incidents that occurred at this meeting. Mr. Beecher answered the Scriptural argument for the return of fugitives, based on the return of Onesimus, in this manner: “There are two ways of sending fugitives back into slavery. One is the way Paul sent back the slave Onesimus. Now, if people will adopt that way I will not object. In the first place, he instructed him in Christianity and led him to become a Christian; then he wrote a letter and sent it by Onesimus himself. Now, I should like to see Marshal ——— or Marshal somebody else, of this city, send back a slave in this way. In the first place, the marshal would take him and teach him the catechism, and pray with him, and convert him, and then write a letter to his master telling him to receive him as a brother beloved; and then the slave goes of his own free will to his master, and walks into the house, and, with his broad, black, beaming face, says: ‘How d’ye do, my brother? and how d’ye do, my sister?’” The broad, beaming face which he himself wore as he described this scene and personated this character was irresistibly comical, and nothing more was heard in that quarter of Paul’s return of fugitives.

It was in this speech that, in describing the situation of the slave, he says:

“They are married and separated in the South until perhaps they have twenty wives.” [A voice: “There are men in New York City who have twenty wives.”] “I am sorry for them,” he answered at once. “I go for their immediate emancipation!”

He read extracts from the law as laid down by some of the able members of the Southern bench in South Carolina and Louisiana, to show that slaves are mere goods and chattels.

“The slave,” he exclaimed, “is made just good enough to be a good slave and no more. It is a penitentiary offence to teach him more.”

Here a person among a group in one corner of the gallery exclaimed: “It’s a lie!”

“Well, whether it’s a penitentiary offence or not, I shall not argue with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been there and ought to know.”

Such was the voice that began to attract attention throughout the whole land. It was as truthful and earnest as that of the old Abolitionists, but took in a broader range of subjects and was inspired by a higher spirit than theirs; it was as politic in its utterances as that of the prince of politicians, Martin Van Buren, but it was the policy of right and justice; it had in it the strength of Webster’s, but argued from truer premises than he; it was as popular as Henry Clay’s, but its sympathy was broader than his; it was the voice of Henry Ward Beecher as he stood in the early maturity of his powers, aflame with Christian love and patriotism, preaching the Gospel of the Son of God, the Deliverer and Saviour for slave and master, for North and South, for commerce and manufactures, for our whole land from shame and thraldom.

The need of such a voice will appear if we consider the state of things at this time, as he himself described it:

“‘An Abolitionist’ was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age it was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. I am speaking the words of truth and soberness. The Church was dumb in the North, but not in the West. A marked distinction exists between the history of the New School of Presbyterian churches in the West and the Congregational churches, the Episcopal churches, the Methodist and Baptist churches in the North and East. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the churches were absolutely dumb. Great controversies raged round about the doors of the Bible Society, of the Tract Society, and of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The managers of these societies resorted to every shift except that of sending the Gospel to the slaves. They would not send the Bible to the South; for, they said, ‘it is a punishable offence in most of the Southern States to teach a slave to read; and are we to go in the face of this State legislation and send the Bible South?’ The Tract Society said: ‘We are set up to preach the Gospel, not to meddle with political and industrial institutions.’ And so they went on printing tracts against tobacco and its uses, tracts against dancing and its abuses, and refusing to print a tract that had a shadow of criticism on slavery!

“One of the most disgraceful things took place under the jurisdiction of Bishop Doane, of New Jersey—I take it for granted, without his knowledge. I have the book. It was an edition of the Episcopal prayer-book. They had put into the front of it a steel engraving of Ary Scheffer’s ‘Christus Consolator’—Christ the Consoler. There was a semi-circle around about the beneficent and aerial figure of our Saviour—the poor, the old, the sick, the mother with her dead babe, bowed in grief; every known form of human sorrow belonged to the original design and picture, and among others a fettered slave, with his hands lifted to heaven, praying for liberty. But this was too much; and so they cut out the slave, and left the rest of the picture, and bound it into the Episcopal prayer-book of New Jersey. I have a copy of it, which I mean to leave to the Historical Society of Brooklyn when I am done using it.

“These things are important as showing the incredible condition of public sentiment at that time. If a man came to be known as an anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy in business.”

After the intense excitement, within and without Congress, upon the discussion and the passage of the Compromise measures of 1850, a reaction followed, and the year 1851 is, in many respects, a marked contrast to that immediately preceding. The people, in the main, tired of the discussion and the consequent turmoil, thankful for their escape, as they thought, from the threatened danger of the dissolution of the Union, were determined to preserve the peace that had been won, and frowned upon everything that endangered its continuance. Public meetings and conventions, held for the expression of free-State sentiments, were regarded with great disfavor and often broken up by mob violence.

Four millions of people in a Christian land were denied every right belonging to them, not only on the ground of Christianity but of humanity, and yet they must be dumb. The pulpit, which represented Him who came to set the captive free and preach the Gospel to the poor, on this great matter must utter no voice. Statesmanship must see consummated an utter perversion of the fundamental principles and policy of the nation, and yet offer no protest. A common humanity, outraged by the atrocities committed against a fellow human being, must be silent or join in the hue and cry for the capture of the unhappy victim.

This was the programme that conservatism, through the press, in the pulpit, by the ballot-box, through business patronage, social frowns or favors, and not unfrequently through mob violence, attempted to execute. It was as vain as to try to still the voice of Niagara or the noise of the breakers upon the coast.

One thing more powerful than any other contributed to prevent a complete reaction and consequent stagnation upon this subject—the activity of the South in availing itself of the advantages offered by the Fugitive Slave Bill for obtaining possession of the property that had escaped and was living on Northern soil. The year 1851 was emphatically a year of slave-hunting. And since these refugees from labor had, many of them, lived for years at the North, had become respectable citizens and reared families, their violent capture invariably occasioned, if not forceful resistance, at least deep and bitter indignation.

The quiet of 1851 was not perfect and it could not be made permanent. It was only the lull which weariness compels in every hard-fought battle.

In December of this year Kossuth visited this country at the invitation of the Senate, coming in a government steamer sent to Asia especially for his conveyance. Many things contributed to awaken immense enthusiasm for him. He had represented Hungary in the Austrian Diet; had championed the liberty of free press and free speech so fearlessly as to gain the honor of an Austrian dungeon; had been elected governor of Hungary, and for two years had waged successful war with Austria. Overcome by the immense military power of that great empire in alliance with Russia, he had been forced into exile with a price set upon his head. He represented, in that year of European revolutions, the struggles of the common people for liberty. These experiences, united with his personal appearance and marvellous eloquence, combined to secure for him a most enthusiastic reception by the people of this country. The Senate, on the other hand, were far more chary of their welcome. The Hungarian exile stood for universal liberty, and that was just what at that time the Senate of the United States were most interested in suppressing. However, though granted no reception, a banquet was given in his honor, at which most of our public men were present, and Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, delivered the principal address.

Quick to perceive the dilemma in which Congress found itself, and eager that the nation at large should appreciate it, Mr. Beecher writes a Star Paper in which, in his usual happy and effective style, he describes the incongruity in the action of our government in welcoming this fugitive from the oppression of the Old World while we are engaged in remanding to their oppressors fugitives in the New.

Invited by Mr. Beecher, Kossuth delivered an address in Plymouth Church in behalf of the cause of Hungarian liberty. So great was the eagerness of the people to hear him that some ten thousand dollars were realized from the sale of tickets.

So did the pastor of this church link himself with the cause of freedom all over the earth.

Fifty-two, being “election year,” saw efforts more persistent, if possible, than ever before to regard the Compromise measures as a finality and discourage all agitation of the subject of slavery. A public pledge was signed by more than fifty senators, among them the most influential from both the great parties, including Henry Clay, agreeing that they would thereafter support no candidate who did not approve and promise to abide by the provisions of that compact. Both the great parties of the day—the Whig and Democratic—put into their platforms resolutions declaring that the above Compromise was accepted as a final settlement of the questions at issue, and agreed to resist all attempts at renewing the agitation of the slavery question under any pretext whatsoever. In the election Franklin Pierce, who had but two qualifications for the office of chief magistrate—he was a gentleman and a radical pro-slavery man—was chosen by an overwhelming majority for President, for the reason that his party affiliations gave the best assurance that the pledges which all had alike made would in his case be fulfilled.

General Scott and the Whig party made just as profound an obeisance to the slave-power, and offered just as heavy a bid for its favors; but there was not the same confidence in their ability to perform the service demanded as in that of their Democratic rivals, and they were in consequence disastrously defeated. So did the popular vote upon its first opportunity endorse the action of Congress and declare that discussion on this great matter was closed. Yet, in spite of the verdict of the ballot-box, in spite of resolutions, compacts, and threats, agitation still went on. Mr. Beecher explains the phenomenon:

“Politicians inquire whence is the tenacity of life of the anti-slavery movement. It is not fanaticism that animates or controls it, it is the religious principle that is the secret of the strength of this cause; it is because Jesus Christ is alive, and there are Jesus Christ men who count this cause dearer than their lives.”

In the summer and autumn of 1852 Mr. Beecher was engaged in what was called “The Parker Controversy.”

We have no desire to open anew the bitterness of those old matters which have passed so long ago into history, and almost into forgetfulness, but no biography of the man would be complete without a reference to this trial, the severest which he had thus far endured, and which prepared him for other and greater ones to come. In our study of the character and disposition of Henry Ward Beecher we find him, as we believe, to have been pre-eminently a man of peace. In his history we see him almost continuously engaged in war. This anomaly is easily explained. It was not from desire or disposition, but a necessary consequence of the progress which he was making and the position which he occupied. The age was moving forward: wrongs must be overcome, new positions of advantage must be gained. By the habit of his mind, the intuitions of his genius, and the earnestness and simplicity of his purpose he found himself a leader in this progress.

While others stopped to discover the truth by laborious study in their libraries, he found it among the results of former researches, derived it intuitively from well-admitted principles, or gathered it from the people with whom he associated by the way. While others were carefully weighing the consequences of their actions, he, trusting in God, in the righteousness of his cause, in the forces of nature and in himself, stepped forward to the front. While others were laboriously forging their speeches his sprang like the fabled Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, alive, armed, and beautiful. He came into battle for the same reason that the head of a column advancing to seize a favorable position within the enemy’s lines is early brought under fire, or that a heavy field-battery, which is sending its shot with deadly effect into the ranks of the enemy, is attacked.

In his discussion with a New York daily, of which we have already spoken, he had come in conflict with the commercial spirit of the day which held its principles and its goods both for sale, and against it had defended the right of the pulpit to discuss the live topics of the hour. This had drawn fire. Men who had been scored as he scored them in a Star Paper of January 24, 1850, entitled “A Man in the Market”— “... They hang themselves up in the shambles of every Southern market; they trust the pliant good nature of the North, and are only fearful lest they should fail to be mean enough to please the South”—and who deserved the scoring, would not be likely to forget it soon or forgive it readily. The conflict in which he now became engaged was more painful than the former, for it was waged with Christian brethren. Beginning as a skirmish, it became a general battle, in which the conservatism of the Church, which had expurgated its religious tracts, curbed the religious press, and toned down the utterances of the pulpit, so as not to hurt the feelings of slave-holders, was engaged and brought to judgment.

It came about in this way: In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Mrs. Stowe had described the sale of a child taken from the arms of the mother, and of Tom’s feeling on the subject. “To him it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize and take in large views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade—a trade which is the vital support of an institution which some American divines tell us has no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”

In a note she refers to Dr. Joel Parker by name as the man who had given utterance to these sentiments, and as representing the class which entertained them. The words, “No evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life,” had been printed as his in a discussion which he had held in Philadelphia, had gone the rounds of the papers as his and had been printed and commented upon in England, and he had never denied that they rightfully belonged to him. But the quickened moral feeling which followed the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” made the authorship of such sentiments less pleasant than formerly, and Dr. Parker suddenly discovered that he had been wronged in having these words ascribed to him, and threatened Mrs. Stowe with a suit for libel. A friend of his lawyer visited her brother Henry, and suggested that this matter could be arranged without a law-suit. With a confidence that was born of sincerity and inexperience, the brother attempts that most difficult rÔle—that of peace-maker. He visits Dr. Parker, becomes satisfied that his language is capable of a less violent construction than had been put upon it, confers with Mrs. Stowe and finds her ready to take the most favorable view of the case possible, bears a letter from her to the doctor, writes and discusses with him the answer which he shall make, forwards Mrs. Stowe’s letter, which had been somewhat changed in the discussion, to her for approval—which being gained, he publishes both letters over the united signatures of the two parties, and goes off to Indiana on a lecturing trip, with the happy consciousness that he has done a good thing. Never was a man waked from a sweeter dream to a more bitter disappointment. Instead of making peace between them, he found, as a result of his labors, their differences increased and embittered, and himself charged with forgery both of letter and signature. Offended professional pride, newspaper rivalry, the hatred of men who had been lashed by his tongue and pen, the fears of conservatives and the bitter hatred of pro-slavery men, suddenly united their forces for his destruction. This young radical had left himself open to attack, and they all rushed to the onset or stood back and cheered others on, and were already beginning to rejoice in his downfall. The lead in the attack soon passed out of the doctor’s hands into those of more able and less scrupulous men, and aimed at nothing less than his annihilation. “The arrow was well shot,” he said; “had I been unshielded it would have done its work, for the point was poisoned.” But he was not unshielded! the overthrow was not accomplished, and he stood, at the end, fully vindicated from all the aspersions of his enemies.

In a long, carefully written article over his own name he gives the whole beginning, continuance, and end of this unhappy matter:

“For myself I profess that no event of my life, not the loss of my own children nor bereavements of friends most dear, have ever filled me with so deep a sorrow as that which I have in being made a party to a public dispute when three of the parties concerned are ministers of the Gospel, and when the fourth is a woman and the wife of a clergyman. At the very best it is a shame and a disgrace. To avert it I labored most honestly and with all my might.”

He closes with these words:

“I commit this narrative to the sober judgment of all good men, and myself I commit to the charge of Almighty God.”