Such God-fearing men had no commission merely to denounce and destroy. Their call was to aid in spreading a Gospel untinctured with the guilt of slavery, polygamy or caste prejudice. They strove earnestly to induce the most honored and loved of missionary boards, with which they had heretofore co-operated, to throw off all responsibility for slavery and its attendant vices. In this they were unsuccessful, and as they could neither cease to labor and contribute for missions, nor work with societies which they believed to be chargeable with that responsibility, they could do no otherwise than form one that should be free from it. In this way, and from this motive, the American Missionary Association came into existence. It was formed in no spirit of captiousness or fault-finding; not for discussion, but for work in the Master’s vineyard. Hence it soon established missions abroad—in Africa, Siam and among the recently emancipated slaves in the West Indies; at home—among the white population of the West, the Indians, and, even at that early date, among the Chinese in California, the refugees from slavery in Canada, and in the Slave States themselves.
Among the dark memories of those early days were the infidel tendencies in the anti-slavery ranks. The reformers were so goaded by the indifference and opposition of the orthodox churches that some of them retaliated with bitter denunciations against Christianity itself. From the outset the American Missionary Association took decided ground against this tendency and in favor of evangelical religion, and this not vaguely nor without temptation to swerve. At the convention in Albany in which the Association was organized, an influential Unitarian suggested the probable sympathy and aid of that wealthy denomination if the platform could be made sufficiently broad and “liberal” to admit of co-operation. Its response was given in its constitution, which required “Evangelical sentiments” as a condition of membership; and that there might be no mistake as to what it meant by “evangelical,” a star note was appended giving its explicit definition—a creed as commendable for its brevity as its sound orthodoxy. The elder Dr. Tyng once said: “I love the American Missionary Association because it is true to Christ as well as to the slave.”