This text is part of:
1 Ante, p. 98.
2 Birney disclaimed the compliment. ‘Our country was asleep, whilst slavery was preparing to pour its “leprous distilment” into her ears. So deep was becoming her sleep that nothing but a rude and almost ruffianlike shake could rouse her to a contemplation of her danger. If she is saved, it is because she has been thus treated’ (Lib. 7.2). But Channing took the professional clerical view of the matter, as was shown two years later by an eminent Congregational clergyman, the Rev. Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, in a discourse on slavery. ‘The first movement here at the North,’ said he, ‘was a rank onset and explosion. . . . The first sin of this organization was a sin of ill-manners. They did not go to work like Christian gentlemen. . . . The great convention which met at Philadelphia, drew up a declaration of their sentiments . . . by which they wilfully and boorishly cast off the whole South from them’ (Lib. 9.29).
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.