PAM. MISC. L e: ^ i ^ T p:; k s KESPECTING THE JJ'etu^HJork: LEWIS J. BATES, PUBLISHER, 48 BEEKMAN STREET. I 1 8 6 3 . JOHN A. GRAY, PRINTER, P?! & 97 CLIEF STREET. LETTER TO THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. » New-York, Monday, February 14, 1853. To Rev. R. 8. Gooh^ Corresponding Secretary American Tract Society: Reverend Sir :—I have been favored with your letter of the last month setting forth the pecuniary exigences of the American Tract Society, and sug¬ gesting to my “charitable consideration” a donation to its funds. Few persons hailed with more satisfaction than myself the establishment of your Society, or more cordially approved the truly Catholic principles on which it was founded. I long since became one of its Life Directors, and have fre¬ quently contributed to its funds. The professed object of the Society was to inculcate Christian faith and practice, and to a very great extent it has been faithful to its profession, and I doubt not that it has been largely instru¬ mental in promoting the spiritual welfare of multitudes. But the good effected by human agency is seldom without alloy, and for some years painful doubts have intruded themselves upon my mind, as to the propriety of the course pursued by the Society in regard to a most mo¬ mentous subject. Against these doubts I have long struggled, and at times with success. But they have again and again returned with increased force, and they have been so entirely confirmed by some recent developments, that I am constrained to return a most reluctant denial to the application in your letter. I am well aware of the deep responsibility I assume in placing any obstacle, however slight, in the way of the Society. Of this responsibility, the pain I may give valued friends, and the obloquy I may draw upon myself from a very minor portion—I feel the infinitely greater weight of my respon¬ sibility even to my Maker, for withholding my aid from an agency that has effected so much for his glory and the good of man. This responsibility I have anxiously pondered, and have come to the conviction that I may not avoid it. The facts and reasons which have produced this conviction I will proceed to state. Should they be found insufficient to justify me, they will 2 tend to save others from the error into which I have fallen; and should they, on the other hand, be found valid, they may lead to salutary results. The classification of sins into those of commission and omission is trite. All Scripture testifies that mere inaction has often incurred the Divine wrath. Ths Jewish priests, although sedulous in the routine of ceremonial duties, were denounced in the indignant language of inspiration as “dumb dogs,” because they omitted to rebuke popular sins. In the account of the last judgment, those who are to “go away into everlasting punishment” are not condemned as heretics, nor as the perpetrators of crime, but as guilty of having omitted to administer to the necessities of Christ’s afflicted and oppressed brethren. You have by this time. Sir, anticipated that my charge against the Society is one of omission. There is a giant, and in its influence an all-pervading sin in our land—a sin which is destroying the peace and happiness of mil¬ lions, both for the life that is and for that which is to come ; and which is hardening the hearts and paralyzing the consciences of many more by its reflective consequences. Yet the American Tract Society has publicly and officially announced through you, as its organ, that it does not intend to recognize even the existence of this sin! About a year since, the ministers and delegates of the Congregational Union of Fox River, Illinois, addressed a very Christian letter to the Society. In this letter they very forcibly remark : “We feel sure that the time has come when the continued absence from the publications of your Society of all that relates to Slavery will be significant; that silence can no longer be neutrality or indifference: and that a tract literature which speaks less plainly of Slavery than of other specific evils will conduce to a defective, partial, and unsound morality.” In your official reply of 27th February, 1852, without letting a word escape your pen, acknowledging the sinfulness of American Slavery, you urge various reasons for not breaking the silence so long observed by the Society respecting human bondage. “It would seem a sacrifice of a greater to a lesser good to engage in the discussion of a topic already exhausted, with the likelihood of satisfying none, and with the certainty of alienating multitudes of our best friends,” &c. Your publications, we are informed, must be of a character “ calculated to meet the approbation q/uZ? evangelical Christians ;” and you seem to think, that amid the anti-slavery agitation it is desirable “ that at least one institution should move forward on the simple errand that brought the Saviour into the world—proclaiming Christ and him crucified,” &c.; and you aver “that on no subject, probably, are evangelical Christians more at variance” than Slavery; and you conclude with declaring that “ the course of duty seems plain before us to adhere as a Society to the simple gospel in its essential saving truths.” The Union were not convinced by your arguments; on the contrary, they resolved that ere long no catholic Society of publication can well refuse to express anti-slavery truth in some of its various forms of moral or biblical argument, fact or sentiment; and to hasten this desired consummation they ordered the correspondence to be made public. 3 I am unable to reconcile the position assumed in your letter with the past action of the Society, or with the usually received ideas of Christian obliga¬ tion. It seems your tracts must meet the approbation of all evangelical Christians. If we ask who these are, we shall be told, such as agree in maintaining the scriptural authority of certain abstract doctrines. But we all know that these same Christians differ widely on various questions of moral practice. You are not ignorant that evangelical wine and rumsellers and drinkers abound both in town and country; and yet your Society is lavish of its censures on them. It condemns the theatre and race-course, although not ^ few believers in the evangelical creed frequent both. You issue publications against dancing, and yet how many sons and daughters mingle in the waltz, in the presence and with the consent of their evangel¬ ical parents? You condemn travelling on the Sabbath, yet our Sunday steamboats and railcars are not without their evangelical passengers. You do not hesitate to rebuke gambling, yet evangelicals may be found at the card and the billiard-table. As far as I can judge, the publications of your Society have been in accordance with the rule you announce on few sub¬ jects, except that of human bondage and its attendant atrocities. I know not that in the twenty-seven years of its existence the Society has published a line intended to touch the conscience of an American slave-breeder or trader. On the contrary, especial care has been taken to expunge from your reprints every expression that could even imply a censure on our stupendous national iniquity. The Society has no hesitation in condemning cruelty, oppression, and injustice, but it shrinks with affright at the very idea of acknowledging that it is cruel, oppressive, and unjust, to reduce a MacTcm^xi to the condition of a beast of burden, to deny him legal marriage, and to sell him and his children to the highest bidder, in company with the beasts of the field. This extreme sensitiveness is shown in the alteration of a pass¬ age in your reprint of Gurney’s essay on the habitual exercise of love to God. Gurney says: “ If this love had always prevailed among professing Christians, where would have been the sword of the crusader ? Where the African slave-trade ? Where the odious system which permits to man a property in his fellow-men, and converts rational beings into marketable chattels ?” (Page 142.) This was meat too strong for the digestion of the Society, and hence it was carefully diluted, so that it might be swallowed without producing the slightest nausea, as follows ; “If this love had always prevailed among professing Christians, where would have been the sword of the crusader ? Where the tortures of the Inquisition f Where every system of oppression and wrong by which he who has the pow^r revels in luxury and ease at the expense of his fellow-men?” (Page 199.) It was an inge¬ nious thought to turn upon the Inquisition Gurney’s application of his sub¬ ject to slave-traders and holders, and to lose sight of property in man^ in indefinite generalities. Your last Report, in announcing the reprint of the Memoir of Mary Lundie Duncan, tells us: “A few pages, which the Committee deemed of less interest to the general reader, or which alluded to points of disagreement among, evangelical Christians^ have been dropped.” pages dropped are indeed: 4 few and unimportant, and seemed to have been dropped for the purpose of justifying the word “abridged” on the title-page. But the passages dropped are very significant. In her Diary for March 22, 1833, the following passage is expunged in the Society’s edition, while every other word on the page is retained; “We have been lately much interested in the emancipation of slaves. I never heard eloquence more overpowering than that of George Thompson. I am most thankful that he has been raised up. Oh that the measure soon to be proposed in Parliament may be effectual!” Poor Mary! The American Tract Society will not allow you to breathe a v/ish for M/^est India emancipation by act of Parliament, nor to admire the eloquence of an anti-slavery lecturer. The biographer of this lovely and highly gifted saint remarks : “ When George Thompson, the eloquent pleader for the abolition of slavery, was called to visit the United States, in the hope that his remarkable power of influencing the public mind might be beneficial there, we find the youthful philanthropist, whose ardent mind glowed with exalted sympathies, and felt an interest in loftier occupations than usually kindle the enthusiasm of girls of her age, embodying her desires for his suc¬ cess in the following verses.” This paragraph and the lines they introduced are both expunged from your edition. A Broadway bookseller had already published an unmutilated copy of the book, but this religious Society, more sensitive than even New- Yorh traffic to the good-will of the slaveholders, suppressed not merely the anti-slavery poetry, but the testimony of a mother to the philanthropic sentiments of her departed daughter I But the work of expurgation did not stop here. In Mary’s Diary is the following entry: “August 1: Freedom has dawned this morning on the British colonies. {No more degraded lower than the brutes—no more bowed down with suffer¬ ing from which there is no redress^) the sons of Africa have obtained the rights of fellow-subjects—the rights of man, the immortal creation of God. {Now they may seeh the sanctuary fearless of the lash—they may call their children their own.) Hope will animate their hearts, and give vigor to their efforts. Oh for more holy men to show them the way of salvation! The Lord keep them from riot and idleness! They have been so little taught that He only can avert confusion and tumult as the result of their joy. Some Christians there are among their number who will influence others. My poor fellow-travellers through life’s short wilderness, may I meet with many of you in heaven, where even I can hope to dwell through the love of my risen Lord! There none will despise the negro whom Jesus Christ has pitied and redeemed.” The passages in italics and in parentheses are expunged in the Society’s edition. Mary is permitted to announce that the negroes have become Brit¬ ish subjects, to express her apprehensions of riot and idleness, confusion and tumult, as consequences of emancipation, and to indulge the hope of meeting negroes in heaven, where they will not be despised. But she is not permitted to allude to the cruelties and abominations to which these same negroes had been subjected. The expunged passages involve no doctrinal “ points of disagreement among evangelical Christians.” Why, then, were they stricken out? Because the same cruelties and enormities to which she alluded are 5 perpetrated at home, by evangelical Christians, who belong to and support the American Tract Society. The Society will not venture the denial of the tr^lth of the expunged assertions. It would surely not aver that American slave children do belong to their parents. It would be put to confusion by the solemn judicial affirm¬ ance of the validity of a bequest of a mother to one person, and of her nnhorn children to another. It would be confuted by the sale of children at auction, and in particular of a sale reported within the few last days, of a child three years old bringing $800 under the hammer; while a Southern paper adverts with pride to the high price of human flesh, as evidence of “our agricultural prosperity.” Your Societ}^ Sir, expunged Mary’s asser¬ tions, not because they were untrue, but because they are now as true here as they were in the West Indies; and it is the policy of the Society to cover up and conceal whatever reflects odium on the “peculiar institution.” Your Committee tell us, in their last Report, that they “have never lost sight of their responsibilities to those of tender years ;” and it seems they issue The Child's Paper^ of which great numbers are circulated. Yet the responsibilities to children resting on the Committee permit them to expunge an expression likely to remind us that there are hundreds of thousands of children in our land who are mere articles of merchandize. These very responsibilities are, it seems, perfectly compatible with entire silence re¬ specting the ignorance and degradation of this great multitude “ of tender years.” The Committee know that in some of our States even a free mother, if her complexion be dark, is by law liable to be scourged on her bare back, should she be caught teaching her little ones to read jmur Childs Paper; yet not a word of remonstrance escapes the American Tract Society ! In the very last number of The Childs Paper I read that “ there are between 10,000 and 12,000 children in the city of New-York v/lio never enter a church or school, and who cannot read the Bible.Here are heathen at home ; what is doing for them ?.These children must be cared for.” Indeed! And is it nothing to your Society that there are in our country about half a million of little black heathen who are prevented by law from reading the Bible ? These little heathen have souls as imper¬ ishable, destinies as momentous, as the white heathen in New-York. Must this half million be cared for? Ah! that is a “ point of disagreement among evangelical Christians,” and hence the Society must not even recognize the existence of children who do not belong to their parents. Permit me now to ask your attention to the very different course pursued by the Society in regard to the traffic in the bones and sinews, the mind and soul of immortal man, and the traffic in intoxicating drinks. Between twenty and thirty of your tracts are devoted to the subject of intemperance in all its relations. It is curious to observe the desire of your writers to avail themselves of the arguments and illustrations furnished by slavery, and at the same time their extreme caution in avoiding all reference to American slavery. Where (even by implication) censure is cast on human bondage, it is human bondage in other countries than our own. In Tract No. 800, to the excuse of the distiller that he cannot sacrifice his property, conscience is 6 made fo answer; “ Suppose you were now in Brazil^ and the owner of a large establishment to fit out slave-traders with handcuffs for the coast of Africa, and could not change your business without considerable pecuniary sacrifice, would you make the sacrifice, or would you keep your fires and hammers going?” In remonstrating against the cruelty of the traffic in rum, it is remarked : “ If a man lives only to make a descent on the peaceful abodes of Africa, and to tear away parents from their weeping children, and husbands from their wives and homes, where is the man that will deem this a moral business?” “Other men will prey on unoffending-4/’Wc> • -•^ ■ *‘* - •«>’■ - ,, /i- > -V - -i,;. A ‘ ^ A i^- ' 4, , . —• ■^.i* * *# V»* »; ' ■ ■ ^' h ' • t* ' ■ ■ .‘uo ■■ ■. . .'' 't'A ". .'. :.■•:■ ;.i' ; - ^'■. ■'‘•4 ■.•■,. w i- •Jii' ' .'. I' ■;Vj ' ■■••’ '■'■•■ ■ f'fK ' . -4' A / ■■t'- >