Transcriber’s Note: Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
SOME
RECOLLECTIONS
OF OUR
ANTISLAVERY CONFLICT.
BY
SAMUEL J. MAY.
BOSTON:
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1869.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
SAMUEL J. MAY
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.
Many of these Recollections were published at intervals,during the years 1867 and 1868, in TheChristian Register. They were written at the specialrequest of the editor of that paper; and without theslightest expectation that they would ever be put to anyfurther use. But so many persons have requested meto republish them in a volume, that I have gatheredthem here, together with several more recollections ofevents and transactions, illustrative of the temper ofthe times as late as the winter of 1861, when our guiltynation was left “to be saved so as by the fire” of civilwar.
My readers must not expect to find in this book anythinglike a complete history of the times to which itrelates. The articles of which it is composed are fragmentaryand sketchy. I expect and hope they will notsatisfy. If they whet the appetites of those who readthem for a more thorough history of the conflict withslavery in our country and in Great Britain, they willhave accomplished their purpose. That in the two freest,most enlightened, most Christian nations on earth thereshould have been, during more than half of the nineteenthcentury, so stout a defence of “the worst systemof iniquity the world has ever known,” is a marvel thatcannot be fully studied and explained, without discoveringthat the mightiest nation, as well as the humblestindividual, may not with impunity consent to any sin,nor persist in unrighteousness without ruin.
ivI am happy to announce that in due time a somewhatelaborate history of the rise and fall of the slave powerin America may be expected from the Hon. Henry Wilson.He is competent to the undertaking. He is cautiousand candid as well as brave and explicit. He wasan Abolitionist before he became a politician. He hasnever ignored the rights of humanity, for the sake of partisansuccess or personal aggrandizement. Mr. Wilson,I believe, did as much as any one of our prominentstatesmen to procure the abolition of slavery in theDistrict of Columbia, and to effect its subversion throughoutthe country.
My brief sketches have been taken, I presume, from apoint of sight different somewhat from his. Many ofmy readers may wish that I had not reported so manyof the evil words and deeds of ministers and churches.I have done so with regret and mortification. But ithas seemed to me that the most important lesson taughtin the history of the last forty years—the influence ofslavery upon the religion of our country—ought leastof all to be withheld from the generations that arecoming on to fill our places in the Church and in theState.
My book, I fear, will be displeasing to many becausethey will not find in it much that they expect. I canonly beg such to bear in