The Underground Railroad by William Still (best fiction books of all time txt) 📖

of "The Unitarian Miscellany:" "Though I humbly trust that God made my trials in 1836 the means of bringing me to true repentance, yet I have kept these books as monuments of what I once was, and to remind me how grateful I should be to Him for having snatched me as a 'brand from the burning,'" Such a faith as this, born of the spiritual travail of years, what a life it always has for the heart that forms it! It tells not of a persuasion, but of a conviction; a disproof of skepticism through the gathered forces of the soul; a struggle, through epochs of doubt and dismay, into an attitude of positive vital faith. Its process is the only one that gives real right to ultimate peace. In comparison with the method and measure of such a conviction, what matters its specific form? Self-truth is the point,—the fact for starting, the line for guiding; and as for result, this lonely and solemn rally on the deepest within us, as it is continuously unfolded, must lead to a glad and solemn union with the Highest without us. Who can know unfailing inward energy except through this new birth? It proved an ever-fresh spring of vigor to my father, and because of it he was chosen, in 1839, president of "The Philadelphia Bible Society." What changes were wrought in the policy of the Society, what numerous plans were devised and executed for multiplying its operations, how it was made a cordial alliance of all denominations, will presently appear. This is now to be said: that, after filling his office for five years, he found that his Anti-slavery testimony had engendered in the managers a bitterness that would seize the address of 1844 for pretext, and make retaliation in his sacrifice. Thankful, for the thousandth time, to be a sacrifice for the cause he loved, he sent in his resignation in a letter full of Christian kindness and sorrow. A short extract will show its tone:

"One whose great heart wishes the best for humanity calls to us from the West: 'When your Society propose to put a Bible into every family, and yet omit all reference to the slaves; and when, giving an account of the destitution of the land, they make no mention of two and a half millions of people perishing in our midst without the Scriptures, can we help feeling that something is dreadfully wrong?' This, brethren, is a most solemn question. It is a question which I verily believe the American Bible Society, so far as they may have yielded, directly or indirectly, openly or silently, to a corrupt public sentiment on this subject, will have to answer at the bar of Him who has declared, that, 'If ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin,' and that 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.' The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of universal love and philanthropy. She looks down with pity, and, if she could, she would look with scorn upon all the petty distinctions that exist among men. She casts her benignant eye abroad over the earth, and, wherever she sees man, she sees him as man, as a being made in the image of God, whether an Indian, an African, or a Caucasian sun may shine upon him. She stoops from heaven to raise the fallen, to bind up the broken-hearted, to release the oppressed, to give liberty to the captive, and to break the fetters of those that are bound. She is marching onward with accelerated step, and, wherever she leaves the true impress of her heavenly influence, the moral wilderness is changed into the garden of the Lord. May it never be ours to do what may seem to be even the slightest obstacle to her universal sway.

"But I have already written more than I intended. In bringing this communication to a close, allow me to express to you individually, and as a Board, my most sincere Christian attachment. Whatever course any members may have taken in relation to this matter, I must believe that they have acted from what has seemed to them a sense of duty. Far be it from me to impeach their motives. Time, the great test of truth, may show them their course in a very different light from that in which they now view it. I may, as a Christian, lament that their views of duty are not more in unison with my own. I may, as a man, feel heart-sickened at the diseased, the deplorably diseased state of the public mind, in relation to two and a half millions of my fellow-men in bondage. I may, as a citizen of a Free state, blush at the humiliating fact, that not only the tyranny, but the ubiquity of the slave power is everywhere so manifest; that it has insinuated itself into our free domain to such a degree that there seems to be as much mental Slavery in the Free states, as there is personal in the Slave states. I may feel all this, but I must not impeach the motives by which others have been governed."

There were twenty-one managers present at the reading of this letter, and, at its conclusion, a noble friend of the slave moved that the resignation be not accepted; the motion was lost by a vote of fourteen against seven. It was then moved that it be accepted 'with regret:' this was carried by the same vote! But 'with regret' was not an empty form for easing this action to its recipient; how much it meant is seen in the resolution that was added by unanimous acceptance: "Resolved,—That this Board are mainly indebted to Professor C.D. Cleveland for the prominent and influential position it has attained in the regards of this Christian community, and that they bear an earnest testimony to the sound judgment and unwearied zeal which have ever characterized the discharge of his duties in his responsible office." Let this tribute, coming from the bitterest personal opposition that ever man encountered, measure the work that extorted it. Looking at it, it will be difficult for the reader to believe that a sacrifice was made of the man to whom it refers by a representative Christian body, and merely to sate for a time the inhuman slave-greed; yet it is only one fact out of many that might be adduced, and I have brought it forward because it is, in my father's words, "a fair exponent of the position of the Christian Church at that time upon the subject of Slavery." Henceforward, he ceased not to rain blows, not only at his own (the Presbyterian) denomination, but at all the organized expressions of Christian purpose,—the Sunday-School Union, the Tract Society, etc.

While working thus by voice and pen, he was incessantly busy in personal rescue of the slave. Especially was this the case when it became the duty of every lover of his kind to defy the Fugitive Slave Law. How eagerly he then sprang to aid the escape of those against whom a law of the land impotently tried to bar the law of our common humanity! During the years that followed the passage of this infamous bill, the position he had attained here was of particular service. Recognized as one, who, being a sort of standing sacrifice, might as well continue to battle in the front; trusted implicitly even by his bitterest foes; with such a broad philanthropy to back his appeals; pushing straight into every breach where work was needed; blind to everything but his one light of moral instinct;—he became an organ for the charities of those whose softer natures longingly whispered the cry, but could not do the cut and thrust work, of deliverance. Dr. Furness held the same position, and others who, like him, refused to be enrolled in the 'Underground Committee,' or in any definite Anti-Slavery organization. These men knew that they were of greater service to the cause by being its body-guard, by standing between it and the public, by making the appeals and taking the blows, and by affording access, pecuniary and other, of each to each.

Thus the times moved on—growing hotter, more difficult and dangerous, but always working these two results: redoubling the labors of this noble band, and shaking the city from lethargy into ferment. Men were compelled to take sides, and but one result could follow, (the result which always follows when human nature is stung and quickened to find its highest instincts,) the Party of Right steadily moved to triumph.

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For a lesson to us in courage, it is worth while to ask, how these Apostles of Freedom stood the terrible strain put upon them for so many years. I can answer for the two of whom I write, and do not doubt that the answer is true of the rest: This self-forgetfulness was made easy by a love that filled and overfilled all their moral energies—the simple love of man, as God's highest creation, and of his natural rights, as God's best gift. Their work was not a mere result of will, not an outcome of faculty, not an unsupported impulse of heart. It was character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in producing. Hence, their work was not apart from them, even so far as to be called ahead of them; nor parallel with them; it was one with them by a necessary spiritual inclusion. Will and Duty ceased to be separate powers; they were transfused through the whole breadth of their human sympathies, adding to their warmth a fixity of purpose that bore them without a falter, through thirty years of such bitter obloquy, as, in these latter days, only the early Anti-Slavery disciples have had to endure. These men never said, in reference to the Anti-slavery cause, I ought or I will, because they never needed to say them. The sun shines without them, and life expands without them; and here were souls as unconsciously beneficent as the one, as spontaneous in growth and shaping as the other. Theirs was not a force that moved mechanically in right lines, with limited objects before it. It did, indeed, sweep with arrowy swiftness of assail on every point that offered; but when I remember that it more often pleaded than stormed, that it penetrated into every secret recess that mercy casually opened, and gently stirred into fuller life those roots of human feeling that can be numbed by apathy but not killed even by hate, I know that it was persuasive, diffusive, inbreathing force, an influence vital in others because an effluence vitalized from themselves.

So they stood, self-consecrated, enveloped by the love of God, permeated by the love of man,—twin Perfect Loves that cast out all dream of fear. And so they walked, calm as if a thousand stabs of personal insult never brought them one of personal pain, passing through all as if nothing but the serenest skies were above them. And, as I have said, right there is one explanation of the anomaly; there were the serenest skies above them—heaven's love perpetually shining. Why should it not shine? all the powers of the men were dedicated to rescuing the image of God on this earth,—not man as he suffered physically, but the moral instinct threatened with annihilation. It was sacred to them, this soul so sacred to redeeming love, but too brutalized to find its way to it. Nor merely the slave. Their love embraced, with yet more pitying fervor, the master compelling his spiritual nature into death, and the northern apologist letting his die; and this overmastering love of