[134] Letter to Robert Pleasants, January 18, 1779: Goodloe's Southern Platform, p. 79.
[135] Speeches in the House of Delegates of Maryland in 1788 and 1789: Wheaton's Life of Pinkney, p. 11; American Museum for 1789, Vol. VI. p. 75.
Thus at that time spoke the NATION. The CHURCH also joined its voice. And here, amidst diversities of religious faith, it is instructive to observe the general accord. Quakers first bore their testimony. At the adoption of the Constitution, their whole body, under the early teaching of George Fox, and by the crowning exertions of Benezet and Woolman, had become an organized band of Abolitionists, penetrated by the conviction that it was unlawful to hold a fellow-man in bondage. Methodists, numerous, earnest, and faithful, never ceased by their preachers to proclaim the same truth. Their rules in 1788 denounced, in formal language, "the buying or selling the bodies and souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them."[136] The words of their great apostle, John Wesley, were constantly repeated. On the eve of the National Convention, that burning tract was circulated in which he exposes American Slavery as "vilest" of the world,--"such slavery as is not found among the Turks at Algiers"; and after declaring "Liberty the right of every human creature," of which "no human law can deprive him," he pleads, "If, therefore, you have any regard to justice (to say nothing of mercy, nor the revealed law of God), render unto all their due. Give liberty to whom liberty is due,--that is, to every child of man, to every partaker of human nature."[137] At the same time the Presbyterians, a powerful religious body, inspired by the principles of John Calvin, in more moderate language, but by a public act, recorded their judgment, recommending "to all their people to use the most prudent measures, consistent with the interest and the state of civil society in the counties where they live, _to procure eventually the final abolition of Slavery in America_."[138] The Congregationalists of New England, also nurtured in the faith of John Calvin, and with the hatred of Slavery belonging to the great Nonconformist, Richard Baxter, were sternly united against this wrong. As early as 1776, Samuel Hopkins, their eminent leader and divine, published his tract showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies to emancipate all their African slaves, and declaring that Slavery is "in every instance wrong, unrighteousness, and oppression,--a very great and crying sin,--there being nothing of the kind equal to it on the face of the earth."[139] And in 1791, shortly after the adoption of the Constitution, the second Jonathan Edwards, a twice-honored name, in an elaborate discourse often published, called upon his country, in "the present blaze of light" on the injustice of Slavery, to "prepare the way for its total abolition." This he gladly thought at hand. "If we judge of the future by the past," said the celebrated preacher, "within fifty years from this time it will be as shameful for a man to hold a negro slave as to be guilty of common robbery or theft."[140]