Now the whole country knows that the Church South is pro-slavery, that it glories in being so. This Report suggests to my mind these inevitable reflections: 1st. It is unequivocally a pro-slavery document. 2d. Its doctrines are still held by a majority of the Philadelphia Conference, for the Conference has not repudiated them, but continues to send preachers to Virginia, with the understanding that they are to act in accordance with the Report. 3d. The right of the laity to breed and hold slaves is guaranteed to them by the present Discipline. 4th. The Committee, at that time, held the doctrine of the Discipline as their private views. 5th. If in the last ten years they have not changed their views, we must sorrowfully place them and their great talents and influence among the ranks and resources of the pro-slavery party. 6th. I repudiate the doctrine of the Report, and believe that slaveholding is a sin in all men. 7th. The Discipline of the M. E. Church ought to be altered so as to exclude slaveholders from the church. 8th. I believe three-fourths of all the ministry and laity of the M. E. Church are Christian abolitionists; that is, they are antislavery in sentiment.
SLAVERY IN THE PHILADELPHIA ANNUAL
CONFERENCE OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL
CHURCH.
I profess to know as much about slavery in the Philadelphia Conference as any member of the Conference of my age. I have travelled some of the most laborious circuits lying in the slave portions of its territory.
In pursuing my pastoral duties, I have visited the abject slaves in their huts or cabins, the free negroes in their little houses, and baptized their children.
I have seen slavery in the quarter, in the kitchen, and in the parlor; at the church, at the funeral, at the marriage, under the eye of the overseer in the fields, and on holiday occasions. I have seen it in its most disgusting forms, and amid circumstances so mild as to veil from the stranger its real character.
I have witnessed its effects on the owners and employers, in the relations of master, mistress, and overseer. I have studied it with a painful and prayerful interest. From the year 1835, in which I confessed Christ, to this hour, I have never wavered in my conviction that to hold a human being in bondage, as a chattel, would be a sin. For one human being has no right to force another to work for him, or take his labor without paying for it. One man has no right to own another; therefore, chattel slavery is a gross violation of right. It is sin and a crime. I always felt, too, that, if I treated a slave well, my death, or failure in business, might nevertheless consign him to chains and to the lash of the merciless slave-trader.
Of the few hundred dollars received from my father's estate, one-fourth of the whole was in the person of a valuable and honest slave. I immediately filed a deed of manumission; and had I owned five hundred slaves, and had every cent I was worth been invested in them, I should have set them free. Believing slavery to be a sin, why should I have hesitated? "For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Nevertheless, I have patiently listened to every vulgar and obscene argument advanced in its favor, and read all the arguments in its defence from Dr. Fuller to Taylor Bledsoe. Dr. Fuller is the ablest advocate that has yet taken the field in support of chattel slavery; and should he ever attempt to prove from the Bible that we ought not to eat with our teeth, or see with our eyes, he will be just as successful as in his defence of slavery. From all these antecedents, I think I am prepared to give a tolerably good idea of the state of things in the slaveholding portions of our Conference. As regards the supposed number of actual slave-holders immediately under the jurisdiction of our Conference, I have a word to say. By actual slaveholders, I mean those who hold them for gain, just as the utterly irreligious hold them; without any reference to brethren who have manumitted their slaves, to be free at twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five years of age.
According to the Minutes of the Conference for 1856, there were upward of 15,000 white members and probationers in the slave portion of the Conference. Of this number there are at least 1000 mercenary slaveholders; these thousand slaveholders own at least 3000 slaves. Numbers own from five to ten. I know one individual who owns 20. Intelligent laymen, in that section of the country, will not think this a large estimate, but quite within the bounds of truth.
I cannot speak for the Baltimore Conference, though it is certain it has a vastly larger slaveholding territory than the Philadelphia Conference. If that Conference has jurisdiction over one thousand mercenary slaveholders, and these own 3000 slaves, then we have 6000 slaves owned by 2000 members of the M. E. Church, all sheltered by the Discipline of our church.
It is my opinion that 8000 of our Philadelphia Conference members, who are not actual slaveholders, are yet advocates of slavery; and would rejoice to inherit slaves, or otherwise obtain them. If these 3000 or 6000 slaves, doomed in their persons and posterity to toil that others may reap, could have appeared before the General Conference of 1856, that noble and generous body of Christian ministers would have been moved to tears. Indeed, the poor slave cannot go to conventions and Conference to plead his own cause. He cannot know his benefactors. His mind is doomed to eternal barrenness. He who advocates his cause, in the public estimation, partakes in some degree of his degradation. I will advance another opinion. I do it with caution. I know it will be called in question, if not positively denied; but I court investigation; and if the statement can be proved false, I will rejoice.
I make bold to declare that there are more slaves owned now by members of the M. E. Church than in 1845. There has been a vast increase of wealth in our church in the last fifteen years, especially among farmers. Wheat and corn have brought enormous prices. Luxury is on the increase, and slaves are very valuable. The pecuniary temptation to hold them is greater now than ever. Slaves have been better fed and clothed for the last twenty years than ever before in Maryland. The people of the free States scarcely know how fast slaves multiply. A brother who had two young girls in 1844 may now have twelve or fifteen young slaves as the product.
"Why, you astonish me!" says one; "I thought that antislavery principles were on the increase since the division of the church."
But the fact is, that our members don't care one cent how much the preachers slap each other and the bishops about holding slaves; nor how much they talk against slavery in the abstract, and advocate colonization, if they will but abuse abolitionists without defining the term, and never hint, even in private conversation, that it is a sin in private members to hold slaves, and get rich upon their labor. When you strike that key-note, you will find out that there is very little difference between the laity of the M. E. Church and the laity of the M. E. Church South, in theory or practice, on the subject of slavery. Do the members of the church South hold slaves for life? So do ours. Do their slaves live in promiscuous intercourse? So do ours. Do they refuse to nominate and vote for men who will advocate State laws prohibiting masters from separating mother from children? So do our members. On one point there is entire unanimity among the laity in the slaveholding portion of our Conference, and that is, opposition to the free colored people having day schools, in which to teach their children to read the Word of God. I know numbers of free colored people who are able and willing to educate their children, but no person dare teach them; and they must look on and see their children grow up in ignorance. A free negro can send his children to the grogshop with a black jug; he can get drunk, and no one interferes.
Tell it not in old papal Rome that Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, in the nineteenth century, in the United States of America, are contending that a part of the human race should be kept in ignorance, gross and hopeless ignorance; that ignorance in slaves is the mother of devotion and State security; that the grog-shop is better than