in the Abolition camp
150 years ago this week the Dispatch reported on an editorial in The Times of London that compared slavery with some practices of Roman Catholicism – the Bible might frown on some of the activities of each but does not outright forbid either. And only slavery has a national government using its war power to try to abolish it. The Richmond paper also points out that much of the English press condemned the editorial in The Times.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch January 29, 1863:
The London times and the scriptural view of slavery.
In an editorial of the London Times, commenting on the share Messrs. Beecher, Chever, Tyng, and others, have taken in this war, the following paragraph occurs:
These gentlemen preach not for an infallible or an established church, for no such church has yet ventured to be as dogmatic and positive on this point as they are. They preach with the Bible in their hands. In that book there is not one single text that can be perverted to prove slavery unlawful, though there is much which naturally tends to its mitigation, its elevation, and its final extinction. In the New Testament we have an epistle written by the man who represents the last revealed phase and development of the Gospel, sent by the hand of a runaway slave, who had sought a refuge with the writer, to his lawful master, to the purport that the master and his slave were to get on better and do their duty to one another more thoroughly for the future. The same writer tells his recent converts that if they are slaves they must make the best of that condition, and not try to escape it, at least by any means contrary to the laws of the country. The only possible doubt about the exact meaning of his advice is, whether the slaves are to refuse their liberty, even if it be offered, or whether they are merely to remain true to their masters, even if chance presents the opportunity of escape. The context, which says that a faithful and dutiful Christian slave becomes the freedman of his Heavenly Master, clearly proves that a slave who refuses the offer of freedom has a high scriptural argument for his choice. If it be said that slavery is at variance with the spirit of the Gospel, so also are a good many things which are not yet laid under the ban of Abolition, or threatened with the “war power.” Sumptuous fare, purple and fine linen, wealth, ecclesiastical titles, unmarried clergy, good clerical incomes, and many other things are contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, or, at least, can be proved so as easily as slavery. But the Roman Catholics have just as much to say for any one of their peculiar doctrines as the Abolitionists have for their one article of a standing or falling community. Whether the Confederates have done right to throw off the Union is a distinct question, but they cannot have a better defence than a proclamation of war to the knife, a solemn invocation of the “war power” against every slaveowner who still claims the duty of his slave.
This has raised a decided commotion among the Exeter Hall papers of England, and we give the following sample, shaving from the mass. It is from the Liverpool Post:
The Times has raised a lion in the path of the Southern Confederacy. For a long period it has supported the Southern cause by every argument ingenuity could suggest, and by every statement an easy and sanguine credulity could adopt. Southerners, themselves, have been startled by the vehemency of the Times’s advocacy and the strength of its assertions. At length it has gone beyond bounds, and overreached itself. –King Public will suffer his royal ear to be abused a good deal, but there are things to which he will not hearken, and which he must resent. The Times has actually gone the length of advocating slavery, or at least of asserting that Christianity and the Bible say nothing against it; and this has proved too much for the mental stomach of the English people. On all sides indignant repudiations are heard. Nearly the whole press has raised its voice in denunciation of this godless and illiberal doctrine. Unless we greatly mistake the signs of the times a reaction will set in from this point. Men will begin to ask themselves what amount of confidence need be placed in a journal which, at its clients’s bidding, goes so far as to cast aside British prejudices in favor of freedom, and to justify slavery almost as boldly as Mr. Stephens [slavery was the Cornerstone of the Confederacy], the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy could do.
