[380] I have a consciousness that I have not done my duty in not sooner urging these considerations on the Convention. My excuse is, that I was unavoidably absent during the discussion of the subject.1The results of the World's Convention do not 2 immediately concern this biography. The discussion of the relations of the church to slavery and slave-owners (in3 which Birney, Colver, and Stanton, in particular, advocated the strongest measures of non-fellowship), and the resolutions adopted for communication to Christian bodies throughout the world—denouncing slavery as a sin, reprobating the culpable connivance of the American churches with it, and urging them, as an incumbent duty, to excommunicate the holders of slaves—could not fail to accelerate the divisions already growing apace in the great religious denominations of the United States. Similar remonstrances were subsequently despatched across the water by the Congregational Union of 4 Scotland, by the students attending the Theological Hall of5 the Relief Synod, at Paisley, and even by separate congregations. More exasperating to the South was the transmission of special resolutions of the Convention,6 signed by Clarkson, on the inter-State slave trade, to the Southern governors, who took notice of them either to the member of Congress who franked them,7 or to their
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1 The Quaker Richard Allen writes from Dublin on Sept. 1, 1840, to Mr. Garrison: ‘I, yesterday evening, paid an interesting visit to Theobald Mathew, the great apostle of Temperance, better known as “Father Mathew.” . . . He expressed much regret at the exclusion of the woman delegates at the Conference, and asked me, with much interest, had I been there’ (Ms., and Lib. 10: 155. Compare “Memorial of Geo Bradburn,” p. 125).
7 Hon. Seth M. Gates, a Representative from New York. The following letter, addressed by him to Mr. Garrison on the eve of the Paris World's Anti-Slavery Convention, possesses much interest. It bears date Warsaw, N. Y., April 23, 1867:
As you are soon to go to another World's Convention, allow me to send you, by way of reminder, a copy of the circular adopted by a like World's Anti-Slavery Convention held in London June 12th, 1840, addressed to the governors of the slaveholding States of the U. S. of America, and which produced such a sensation in the South because it was forwarded under the frank of a member of Congress. At the request of Mr. Lewis Tappan, I transmitted them through the mails free of postage under my frank, for which act of “treason to the Government,” as Gov. Polk was pleased to call it [Lib. 10.185], no less than five of these Southern governors either mentioned the outrage in messages to their respective legislatures, or published letters over their own signatures in the newspapers, complaining of this outrageous attack upon Southern institutions. Gov. Pennington, of New Jersey, of all to whom it was addressed, answered it respectfully, and concurred in the general sentiments of the address [Lib. 10.185]. Gov. McDonald, of Georgia, says: ‘This is a subject which, with the object intended to be accomplished by it, admits of no argument; and all who seek to agitate it and carry out the above purpose, either by courting foreign alliances or the use of other means, shall be regarded and treated as public enemies, outlaws and traitors’ (Ms.).The copy referred to by Mr. Gates was sent back to him by the Governor of the Territory of Florida, R. R. Reid, with this endorsement: ‘Returned with pity for the ignorance or fanaticism—perhaps both— and with horror at the unholy purposes, of the General Anti-Slavery Convention.’
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