THE LIBERATOR Friday Morning April 17, 1840
Anxious as we are, at the present time, to find room for our own
lucubrations, we cheerfully give place to the following faithful
and seasonable Letter to William Ellery Channing from our brother
Edmund Quincy -- a Letter which is full of pungent truths plainly
and forcibly expressed, and which should cause the ears of the
Unitarian clergy to tingle, ay, and of the whole denomination.
There is one sentence in it that should furnish matter for grave
and serious reflection to the mind of Dr. Channing. Referring to
the bitter pro-slavery feelings of his church and congregation,
Mr. Quincy asks-- 'Is such a state of feeling and opinion the
harvest of your labors for nearly forty years in the vineyard of
the Lord?' But we have no room for comments, even if any were
needed.
Letter to William Ellery Channing Dedham, April 12, 1840
My Dear Sir: A recent passage in the history of the religious
society of which you are senior pastor, and of which I was once a
member suggested some thoughts to my mind, which I feel compelled
to communicate to you, and through you to the public, in this
manner. I am sure that the relation in which you stood towards
me from my early infancy for many years, and the friendly
interest which you have ever done me the honor to express in my
behalf, will induce you to lend a patient ear to the observations
I am about to make. I shall offer no apology for addressing this
letter to you; for the views of your character which I have
derived from my parents, and from my own experience, are indeed
erroneous, if you will not deem yourself happy in being made the
channel through which any opinions, believed by any honest
understanding to be important truths, may flow to the general
mind. The occurrence, which is the immediate cause of my
addressing you, together with some other considerations, which
will be obvious, from the sequel of this letter, points to you as
the person to whom it is proper that it should be addressed.
You have studied too deeply, sir, the philosophy of
History, not to know that events, which, considered simply by
themselves, seem to be of but little moment, assume a very
different aspect when viewed in the light of their causes and
consequences. Actions, either of individuals or of bodies of
men, insignificant in their own proper nature, often start up
into an unsuspected importance when viewed as indication of the
state of heart from which they spring. The bright spot upon the
forehead of the ancient Jew seemed but a little matter to the
careless spectator, but it was the sign that the plague of
leprosy was upon him. To this class of events, the one which
transpired in your society the last week, appears to me to
belong. The bare fact, that a church had been granted by the
committee who had it in charge, to a certain body of persons, for
a specified purpose, and that the grant was subsequently revoked,
would not, when simply stated, seem to be an occurrence much out
of the common course of events. It might have been inadvertently
granted to persons of vile and abandoned character, to be
perverted to base and profligate uses; and the subsequent
revocation of the accorded permission might be the natural and
proper consequence of a more perfect knowledge of the facts. A
full acquaintance with all the circumstances of the case is
necessary to enable us to form a just estimate of the character
of the action in question. They are, as I understand them,
briefly as follows.
The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, --the earliest
association in this country founded upon the principle that the
institution of slavery is, under all circumstances, a sin against
God, and there to be immediately and unconditionally abolished, -
-had numbered the late Charles Follen among its members almost
from the inception of their odious enterprise, and were favored
with his services as an active and efficient officer, at the time
of his death. The Society, at its annual meeting, held shortly
after the fatal accident which snatched him too early from the
hearts of his friends and the hopes of his race, as a slight
testimonial of the reverence and love they bore him, instructed
their Board of Managers to procure a Discourse to be pronounced
upon his life and character by such person, and at such time, as
they should deem best. In obedience to these instructions, the
Board, after due consideration, appointed Samuel J. May, of South
Scituate, to discharge this interesting though mournful duty;
esteeming him to be eminently qualified for the task by his just
appreciation of the extraordinary intellectual and moral
qualities of their departed brother and especially by his
intimate knowledge of the most admirable and distinctive portion
of his character, so fully developed by his course during the
early struggles of the friends of human rights and impartial
liberty in the dark and evil days of the infancy of their
enterprise. The Discourse having been prepared, it became the
duty of the Board to procure a suitable place for its public
delivery. It immediately occurred to them that one of the
unitarian churches would be the proper scene for the sad
solemnity; Dr. Follen having been an eminent divine of the
denomination, and Mr. May being still a living ornament and honor
to the same persuasion. Application was accordingly made to the
proper authorities of most of the Unitarian societies for the use
of the buildings under their charge, stating explicitly the
nature of the service for which a church was needed, and the name
of the society in whose behalf the request was made. From some
of the parochial communities, no answer was received. Some
declined, without assigning any reason for their refusal.
Others, again, on the ground that they had no means of lighting
the churches under their care, and could not, therefore, grant
them for an evening service. The application for the building
owned by the society under your pastoral charge was successful,
and that only. This success we understand to have been, in some
degree at least, owing to the favorable opinion you expressed,
and the interest you took, in our behalf. Having thus succeeded
in procuring a suitable place -- the most appropriate on all
accounts that could have been obtained, and the very one we
should have chosen had the choice been ours -- we went on with
our arrangements, and nearly completed them. Affairs were in
this posture, when notice of the occasion was given by you last
Sunday from the pulpit. This was, probably, the first intimation
which a majority of the congregation had had of the purpose for
which their property had been granted; and it was followed by an
excitement on the part of a portion of the proprietors, as
unexpected to us, as it probably was to you. The Sabbath
comforts of many a substantial citizen were sadly interrupted by
the painful and humiliating intelligence which had just reached
his ears. The standing committee were besieged on the following
day by their grieved and outraged constituents. They demanded a
redress of their grievances. The deep disgrace which hung over
their beloved church must be averted, or they could never enter
it again. If the threatened sacrilege were permitted to be
perpetrated, padlocks, or nails driven in a sure place, should
preserve at least a few of the pews from the impending pollution.
Even the possibility of a riot, in case the services should be
allowed to proceed in that place, which was suggested, though
doubtless deprecated. These indignation remonstrances and
pathetic appeals were too much for the nerves of the standing
committee; --they were but men, and they yielded. Though a
majority, if not all of the committee were favorably disposed, as
individual proprietors, to our request, still, at a meeting held
on Monday evening, their permission which had been previously
granted was unanimously recalled.
Now, sir, were the fact that permission had been granted to
use your church on a particular evening, to certain persons
simply stated to an intelligent foreigner, unacquainted with the
occasion for which it was asked, and were then to be told of the
holy horror which it excited in so many breasts, and of its
consequent revocation, -- what would be his inference as to the
character of the applicants, and of the purposes for which it was
to be used? Would he not suppose that, by some disingenuous
artifice a body of abandoned men and women had procured that
edifice, so sacred in the eyes of its owners, for the celebration
of their orgies of vice or crime? Would he not have reason to
think that the use to which it was to be applied could be none
other than the perpetration of some flagrant crime against God
and man -- such as prostitution, murder, or the manufacture or
sale of spirituous liquors? And were he to be told that it was
for a funeral occasion, would he not naturally infer that the
eulogy, which was to have been there pronounced, was a panegyric
upon some ruffian, who had ended his career upon the gallows,
delivered before the banditti he had led, by an accomplice of his
crimes?
And what, sir, are the real facts of the case? As to the
character of the individuals composing the Society, which has
received the contumelious treatment, I shall quote from your own
testimony, borne several years since, but which I do not
apprehend that time has induced you to change. In your letter to
James G. Birney, you make use of the following language: --'I
speak not from vague rumor, but from better means of knowledge,
when I say, that a body of men and women, more blameless than the
abolitionists in their various relations, or more disposed to
adopt a rigid construction of the Christian precepts, cannot be
found among us.' If this be a just description of the persons
applying for your church, was their any thing in the nature of
the services to be there celebrated, or in the character of the
man who was to take the most prominent part in them, which can
account for the strange distemperature, which the intelligence
that it had been granted to them worked in the minds of some of
your parishioners? I need not enter into any large discourse to
you upon the merits of Charles Follen and Samuel J. May. Your
friendship for both those admirable men would be wronged by any
attempt of mine to show how well it is deserved. If it would be
a desecration of a building set apart for public worship, to have
its walls resound with the praises of one of the noblest, freest
and purest beings that ever passed from earth into the bosom of
the Father, uttered by one of the holiest, freest and purest
spirits that are yet spared to the race, then were the doings of
the last week a holy and acceptable work in the sight of God and
good men.
I will not enlarge upon the indifference manifested towards
your own known wishes in this transaction; for I am assured that
this causes but the least part of the concern it occasions you.
Nor shall I speak of the insult offered to the memory of the
dead. He is beyond its reach. And I will not dwell upon the
cruelty of pouring this added drop of bitterness into her cup of
sorrows, who loved the dead as none other loved, because she knew
him as none other knew. She might, indeed, have expected a
different treatment from the people with whom it was her early
choice to worship. But she has been taught by the discipline of
many such trials, sustained, indeed, and soothed under them, by
the society and sympathy of the departed, the hard but blessed
lesson of endurance and forgiveness.
Were there no other aspect of this case than those which
regard the applicants, yourself, the departed, and his sad
survivor, such a violation of Christian courtesy might indeed
excite our surprise and curiosity, but these emotions would soon
pass away with their occasion, and be forgotten. But there is
that about this occurrence, which takes it out of the rank of
ordinary events, and which should make us pause, and give it more
than a passing look of wonder. The character of the applicants
for the church, of the dead for whose honor it was asked, and of
him who was to speak within it of his genius and virtues, being
such as I have described them, we must look yet farther for the
real cause of this singular proceeding. And we shall soon find
it in a word of might -- a spell of power, enough to call into
visible presence the fiend which lurks privily in the church,
broods over the exchange, hovers above all the walks of busy men
--which is omnipresent and almost omnipotent in our land. And
that word is 'ANTI-SLAVERY.' An innocent word enough, we might
think, if daily experience did not teach us the jealous tyranny
of the spirit of slavery in our midst. He seems at times to be
sleeping, if not dead; but if the least word be spoken in
derogation of his godhead, or the faintest attempt made for the
overthrow of his power, he is aroused into all the vitality of
fear and hatred. The event of which I am speaking is surely a
sufficient answer to the captious question which is often asked
as to what the North has to do with slavery. What have we to do
with it, indeed! when it encircles us like the air we breathe --
as invisible but as ever near us -- when it makes our laws,
controls our interests, appoints our rulers, sets a price upon
our heads, demands the sacrifice of our free utterance,
disfranchises in one half the States the citizens when the
Constitution has made free every where--when it makes Religion
its pander, and the Church its sanctuary! Is it not passing
strange, Sir, that men who are in the habit of receiving weekly
instruction in His truth, who came to preach deliverance to the
captive, and whose gospel is an everlasting proclamation of
immediate and universal emancipation from all tyranny, should not
be able to endure a word expressive of an organized and earnest
hostility to slavery? Is it not a fearful sign of spiritual
death and corruption? Is such a state of feeling and opinion the
harvest of your labors for nearly forty years in the vineyard of
the Lord?
I do not conceive, however, the general state of opinion on
the subject of slavery to be worse in your Society, than in the
great majority of Unitarian churches in the metropolis. It would
be strange if it were, for I am not aware that the topic has even
been introduced into more that one other pulpit besides your own.
And here, Sir, we have another proof of the overshadowing and
benumbing influence of the spirit of slavery. One would have
thought, who had studied the history of Unitarianism, and
recognized in it, as its vital principle, the spirit of freest
inquiry and the freest discussion, that when the test of religion
and reason was to be applied to any established opinion or
institution, Unitarians would have been found among the foremost
of the searchers after truth. It might have been expected that
the divines of that denomination would have delighted to turn
their weapons of argument and eloquence from the wordy warfare
which they had so long stoutly maintained, to a field where the
natural rights and inherent liberties of millions wee to be lost
or won. It would naturally be hoped, that men who had been
zealously engaged, for years, in a contest for the deliverance of
men's minds from what they esteem the chains of error, so that
they might stand upright in the spiritual liberty wherewith
Christ hath made them free, --that such men would have rejoiced
in bringing the strength and skill they had acquired in those
battlefields to the rescue of millions of their brethren from the
iron of real fetters which had entered into their souls. It
might at least have been expected, that, if they had been
unwilling themselves to plunge into the heat and dust of so
vulgar and material a battle, they would at least have seen to
it, that those who did had fair play. It might have been
considered as certain, that they would have watched with a holy
jealously over that freedom of inquiry and discussion, for which
they had so long and so manfully contended -- that they would
have regarded any invasion of those rights in others, as a
dangerous wound dealt to themselves. That, whatever might have
been their opinion as to the principles or measures of those who
were striving for the restitution of their natural rights to a
sixth part of their countrymen, they would never have feared for
the ultimate triumph of Truth, or attempted to suppress the
knowledge of discussion, lest haply she might not prevail.
But how different has been the course pursued by the
Unitarian party. How few of that numerous body, powerful from
wealth and education, whether ministers or laymen, have placed
themselves by the side of the suffering bondman. The freedom of
discussion, which was fearlessly applied to metaphysical
doctrines and theological subtleties, was found to be a dangerous
weapon when it was used for the examination of an institution,
the ramification of which entwined themselves around every altar
of mammon worship. Commerce uplifted her voice against what
seemed to threaten a possible diminution of her gains. Fashion
fulminated her bull against the cause of the vulgar black man --
and soon proceeded to excommunicate his advocates. Learning
shook his sage head, and Wit his merry sides, at the new and
preposterous fanaticism. And what could the pulpit do for the
slave, under such a pressure from without?
'Trade, wealth and fashion asked him still to bleed,
And holy men gave Scripture for the deed.'
The Unitarian clergy, with but few (and how few!)
exceptions, fell in with the current tone and practices of
society, in common with the great mass of the clergy of all other
denominations. They seemed to consider themselves as the priests
of the people rather than of the Lord. What they were allowed to
prophecy, by those who gave them their hire, they uttered. The
silence of death seemed to settle down upon the churches. The
odious cause of wronged humanity became as much a forbidden thing
in the pulpit as in the drawing-room. Neither in the services of
the altar or of the desk was it allowed a place. In the splendid
procession of images which issued from the lips of the preacher,
either in prayer or discourse, there was room found for all else
but the claims of the outcast captive. But there were those to
whom his idea was more strongly suggested by this speaking
silence, than it would have been by the most eloquent assertion
of his rights; as in the triumphal procession of the Roman
tyrant, the absence of the statues of Brutus and Cassius was more
observed than all the pomp aside. Even the immemorial practice
of giving information to the people of benevolent efforts from
the pulpit, had been forbidden to be used in behalf of the slave,
or voluntarily abandoned by the minister-- and this on the part
of men, who make a boast of freed discussion.
Was it to bring about such a state of things as this, Sir,
that you devoted your prime of manhood to the Unitarian Reform?
Did you encounter the odium of that movement for the attainment
of such a spiritual liberty as this? Did you endeavor to bring
order out of the chaos of old opinions, that the new face of
things might be thus submerged under the stagnant waters of a
dead sea? Alas! Sir, when you witness the spiritual deadness
that reigns around you, are you not sometimes almost tempted to
sigh for the days of Priestly and persecution? In his day
Unitarianism was something more than a negation -- the mere
privation of an idea! Its spirit was the same this is now abroad,
under other names, trying all opinions and customs by the test of
reason and scripture; its dead carcass lies instate, in
multitudes of lofty churches throughout the land.
Under these circumstances, Sir, you cannot be surprised that
the people have begun to do the work which the church have left
undone, and the laity to take the business of applying the
principles of the gospel to the practices of society, out of the
hands of the clergy. Nor should it astonish you that men are
beginning seriously to inquire, whether the institution of a paid
order of men, sustained chiefly by the wealthier classes as
public teachers of religion, the practical condition of whose
support is their silence upon the darling and profitable sins of
their supports, is not the most serious obstacle which true
Christianity has to encounter in its reforming progress. The
sublime attitude in which one of your brethren stands at this
moment before the world, while it is a proof of the power of a
noble nature, sustained by Christian principle, to rise superior
to the trammels of a false position, also shows the fate that is
reserved for any man who dares to preach the whole truth to his
people. These are things to make men think; and I am sure that
you will agree with me, that serious thought and careful
investigation, if pursued in the fear of god, cannot but lead to
the advancement of His truth, and the promotion of Christ's
kingdom on earth.
I do not know, Sir, but I may seem to have wandered from the
subject matter of this letter. But I apprehend that what I have
said has naturally flowed from the consideration of the power of
slavery at the north, and especially over the northern church;
which was the subject to which I wished to draw your attention at
this time. Of course, I have but touched upon the confines of
this fertile theme. But I must hasten to a conclusion.
I sincerely hope that the occasion which has elicited this
letter may lead some minds, that have as yet neglected the
consideration of the great subject of American slavery, to sound
reflections and right conclusions. Should such be the case, the
agitation which it has caused will have produced its wholesome
effects, and our disappointment will not have been in vain.
I am, dear Sir, affectionately, and respectfully,
Your friend,
EDMUND QUINCY
________________________________________
Eulogy on Dr. Follen
A Eulogy on the Life and Character of the deeply lamented Dr.
Follen will be delivered THIS (FRIDAY) EVENING, April 17th, at
the Marlboro Chapel, by Samuel J. May, of South Scituate, at the
request of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Services to
commence at half past 7 o'clock. The friends of liberty and
humanity, of moral worth and true greatness, in Boston and
vicinity, are respectfully invited to attend. The Chapel, large
as it is, ought to be crowded on the occasion. Difficult as is
the task, we have no doubt the Eulogy will do justice to the rare
merits of the deceased, and be listened to with profound and
thrilling interest.
In consequences of the disgraceful revocation of their
permission to have the Eulogy delivered in the Rev. Dr.
Channing's meeting-house, on the part of the committee of said
house, the Corporation of Marlboro Chapel have generously offered
the Chapel for this purpose; which offer has been gratefully
accepted.