was on the side
of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed. We
have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced
the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his
indictment, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery."
He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal
Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month
to repent or withdraw from its conferences, by 1836 it had so drifted
away from its original position as to disclaim "any right, wish, or
intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between
master and slave, as it existed in the slaveholding states of the
union." Meanwhile in the churches of the North there was the most
insulting discrimination; in the Baptist Church in Hartford the pews for
Negroes were boarded up in front, and in Stonington, Conn., the floor
was cut out of a Negro's pew by order of the church authorities. In
Boston, in a church that did not welcome and that made little provision
for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro
people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He
decided that there should be some place where there might be more
freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the
plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become
the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.

Into all this proscription, burlesque, and crime, and denial of the
fundamental principles of Christianity, suddenly came the program of the
Abolitionists; and it spoke with tongues of fire, and had all the vigor
and force of a crusade.

2. _The Challenge of the Abolitionists_

The great difference between the early abolition societies which
resulted in the American Convention and the later anti-slavery movement
of which Garrison was the representative figure was the difference
between a humanitarian impulse tempered by expediency and one that had
all the power of a direct challenge. Before 1831 "in the South the
societies were more numerous, the members no less earnest, and the
hatred of slavery no less bitter,... yet the conciliation and persuasion
so noticeable in the earlier period in twenty years accomplished
practically nothing either in legislation or in the education of public
sentiment; while gradual changes in economic conditions at the South
caused the question to grow more difficult