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by the latter, but carefully avoided the gathering of the abolitionists.
Dr. Hoby, it is true, protested from the gallery, in answer to Thompson's indignant rebuke of them, that they did not wish to compromise the ‘spiritual and sacred’ objects of their journey; and Dr. Cox by letter urged political objections to foreigners sharing in the anti-slavery agitation.
In short, they remained silent in New York, as they had been eloquently dumb in Richmond, where their Southern brethren received them with perfect cordiality and the Convention audaciously resolved, that slave-owners ought to awake to the importance of giving religious instruction (not Bibles) to their slaves.1
The hostility of the churches and the timidity of publichall owners now began to be a most serious embarrassment to the abolitionists in their oral propaganda.
In Philadelphia the resolve was formed to build an 2 Anti-Slavery Hall, and in Boston the need was even greater.
The New England Convention, at its May session, was3 shut out of seven churches, of the Masonic Temple, and of every hall in the city but two—including Faneuil Hall itself, by the questionably legal action of the city authorities.
Thereupon, on June 22, a meeting was held at Julien4 Hall to take measures for the erection of a Free Church5 building ‘in which all the great moral questions of the day may be discussed without let or hindrance.’
Francis Jackson presided, and Mr. Garrison was among
1 See the apology of Drs. Cox and Hoby in “The Baptists in America: A Narrative of the Deputation from the Baptist Union in England,” etc., N. Y., 1836, Chap. 5; and Mr. Thompson's public review of the whole matter in London (Lib. 6.133, 137, and also 146, 194, 198). Dr. Cox was afterwards present at the Faneuil Hall meeting in Boston (Chap. 11; Lib. 6.138; and below, p. 497), where Mr. Thompson was no longer the accuser, but the murderously accused.
3 Lib. 5.87, 89; 4th Ann. Report Mass. A. S. Soc., p. 16.
5 A congregation had already been formed with this designation, and had with difficulty obtained recognition from an Orthodox council, owing to the following rule of covenant: ‘All persons who use or traffic in ardent spirits as a drink, all adhering masons, and all slaveholders, or those who are concerned in the buying and selling of slaves, shall be excluded from the communion-table and the pulpit.’ See the whole story and its sequel in “Right and wrong in Boston” for 1837.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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