Only think of a public “ clerical” admonition!
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not ready to unite with anti-slavery societies—an injustice to individuals and a great hindrance to our work, said the appellants.
Its effect was ‘to prevent many worthy men from appearing in favor of immediate emancipation.
We know this to be a fact. . . . They suppose that the great body of abolitionists approve of these things, because they suffer them in silence.’
Unless a change took place, some already in the cause would have to abandon it in despair, ‘and weep in secret places.’
Mr. Johnson promptly made a brief reply, in the1 course of which he quoted a notorious passage from the Southern clergyman's2 recent speech in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church: ‘My presbytery will never, no never, give up their right to hold slaves to this Assembly, nor to any other assembly than the “General Assembly of the first-born in heaven.”
’3 At far greater length, Amos A. Phelps, the new General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,4 reviewed the Appeal in the next number of the Liberator,5 his eight columns being preceded by as many from the pen of Mr. Garrison himself.
The latter wrote in great haste, from a house which had been like a hospital for a fortnight, and in which he was perhaps the most debilitated, from his old scrofulous trouble.
But his heart was light for the encounter:
‘What is in the wind now’ he writes to Knapp from6 Brooklyn.
2 The Rev. Elipha White, a native of Massachusetts (Lib. 7.147). For the Spectator's handling of this clerical ‘man-thief’ in its issue of July 26, 1837—just one week before it printed the Appeal—see Lib. 8.9.
3 Compare his action at the Charleston (S. C.) Union Presbytery in the spring of 1838 (Lib. 8: 74).
4 June 14, 1837, Mr. Garrison writes from Boston to G. W. Benson: ‘We have been very fortunate in securing the services of bro. Phelps as our General Agent. He is expected in Boston on Saturday [June 17], to commence his labors in good earnest’ (Ms.—Lib. 7.95; “Right and Wrong in Boston,” 1837, p. 25). Mr. Phelps's orthodoxy was regarded as an especial qualification, since the Unitarianism of Mr. May, lately the Corresponding Secretary of the Mass. A. S. Society, and of other leading Boston abolitionists (e. g., Mr. Sewall, Mr. Loring, Mr. Jackson, etc.), had been an unconcealed pretext for the hostility of the Orthodox hierarchy.
6 Ms. Aug. 9, 1837.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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