MS. Henry C. MS. Cf. Whittier's Prose Works, 2:216. John Ber nard Fitzpatrick. CHAPTER VIII. THE ANTI-SABBATH CONVENTION.-1848. “G ARRISON," as Wendell Phillips reported to Elizabeth T Pease on February 11, 1848, "has quite recovered his flesh, looks quite hearty, and resumes work with ardor. His new Sabbath Call is finely drawn up, I think. I did not sign it, though agreeing with its principles; mainly because I feel no such necessity for a specific movement against the Sabbath as he and H. C. W. do. The popular mind seems to me clearing itself up fast enough for all practical purposes: these theological reforms have but a secondary interest for me." Quincy, too, was antipathetic. Edmund Quincy to R. D. Webb, in Dublin. DEDHAM, March 9, 1848. The letter to Patrick Keogh I did my best to get to him. But as no such person was to be found at the address, and after having been sent on fool's errands into various parts of the town by your "finest pisantry on earth," I had to give it up, and was about consigning it to the "all-swallowing, indiscriminate orifice of the common post," as the divine Charles Lamb says (whose name you blasphemously take in vain by mentioning it in the same sentence with Nat. P. Rogers's), when Mrs. Chapman suggested that some of the priests might put it in the way of getting to him. So I proceeded to call upon the Bishop of Boston, Fitzpatrick by name, the more willingly as I had a curiosity to make the acquaintance of a live Catholic Bishop. I sent up my card, and was graciously received and my business taken in charge. His Lordship then wished to know if I was the individual that was endeavoring to destroy the Sabbath, whose Call he had seen. Upon my confessing the 1848. soft impeachment, he said that he should like to see how the CHAP.VIII. parsons would answer it; that it was impregnable on Protestant grounds; that Scripture was clear against the Puritanico-Judaic Sabbath; that the observation of the First Day rested on the Canons of the Church, like that of other holidays, etc. He liked the movement, evidently, very much. He knew all about me and the rest of us, clearly. He said that the absurdities of Calvinism had driven us into infidelity, but that he thought we should finally take refuge in the arms of Mother Church. I told him that there was no tenable ground between the Come-outers (the genuine Quakers) and the Catholics, and that as soon as I doubted my own infallibility, I should go straight to Rome and kiss the Pope's Great Toe. To all of which he assented, and was good enough to recommend to me a course of Theology in Latin for my light reading. We abused the Protestants with great unanimity, and only differed on the trifling matter of Slavery, for all the evils of which (not the thing itself, which he seemed to consider rather an agreeable circumstance) Catholicism was the true remedy. And so we parted. Garrison seems quite well, considering how terribly he was pulled down by his dreadful fever. But such draughts upon the capital of life must seriously impair the amount. It was during the time of his convalescence that he and H. C. Wright got up this Anti-Sabbath Convention. It really seems as if the Devil always would put his foot in it, whenever the anti-slavery cause has got into a tolerable position, so as to keep it in hot water. The Clique generally Ante, p. 90. showed the project no great favor; not that they did not agree with the doctrines of the Call, and wish the Sabbath Superstition utterly demolished, but they thought they were doing as much incidentally, by their own example and their insisting upon using Sunday as a suitable time for holding A. S. meetings, etc., as they well could do, consistently with their A. S. work. And especially as we looked upon it as a Theological rather than Moral Reform a question whether an Institution not a malum in se, like Slavery or Drinking, was Divinely Ordained. At the same time, we had no objection to their doing what they thought best about it. Phillips declined signing the Call, and I allowed my name to go upon it on the strict condition that no service of any sort was to be expected of me. I was content to ring the bell, but not to do any part of the preaching or evangelizing. CHAP.VIII. 1848. You will understand, of course, that there was nothing like unkindness between us. We agreed to differ as to the measure, as far as we did, in the most catholic and merriest spirit. There will be fun at the Convention, I doubt not. The movement has made a great stir in the community, and especially Lib. 18:22. among the devouter sort of Unitarians! MS. Jan. 8, 1848, Clintock to MS. to The Call for an Anti-Sabbath Convention in Boston had Thos. Mc- begun to be sent out for signatures late in December, 1847. The author of it advised S. J. May that it had been “drawn up with great care and deliberation, and sanctioned by a large committee of our best reformatory spirits"; but Mr. May could not yield entire sympathy or allow his name to be appended. "I am sorry," he responded on January 15, 1848, "you are going to have a Convention, because it will help rather than hinder the project of the Sabbatarians. Opposition will give importance to their doings." He thought the Sabbath laws were a dead-letter. Theodore Parker, however, as in the time of the ChardonStreet Convention, was less disturbed than his Unitarian brother: W. L. G. Ante, 2: 422--426. MS. Theodore Parker to W. L. Garrison. BOSTON, Jan. 9, 1848. my name to the Call for But I don't think I shall MY DEAR SIR: I heartily subscribe the Convention which you speak of. be able to take any prominent part in the discussions at that Convention. Still, I will do what I can. Sometimes I have thought that hitherto, amid the fierce this-worldliness of N. E., nothing England. but superstition would keep [the people] (in their present low state) from perverting the Sunday yet worse by making all their time devoted to Mammon. But there is " a better time a-coming," and God bless you in all attempts to bring it now. New Jan. 21, 18:11. By the time the Call was first printed in the Liberator, 1848; Lib. the following signatures had been obtained: W. L. Garrison, Francis Jackson, Theodore Parker, Edmund Jackson, Charles F. Hovey,1 John W. Browne, Maria W. Chapman, 1"A rich, money-making merchant [of Boston]," as Quincy described him to Webb (MS. Oct. 3, 1848), "at the same time a thorough-going Garrisonian. He came into the cause some three years ago, by the way of 1848. Charles K. Whipple, Samuel Philbrick, Loring Moody, Ed- CHAP. VIII. mund Quincy, S. S. and Abby Kelley Foster, G. W. Benson, Andrew Robeson, Parker Pillsbury, James and Lucretia Mott, Edward M. Davis, C. C. Burleigh, H. C. Wright, J. Miller McKim, Thomas McClintock, and Joseph C. Hathaway. These were joined later by Samuel May, Jr., R. F. Wallcut, Increase S. Smith, William A. White, and Joshua T. Everett. The anti-slavery complexion of this list was unmistakable, and, in truth, if any experience could breed anti-Sabbath conventions, it had been precisely that of the abolitionists. On an earlier occasion, the Rev. Samuel May, Jr., had said: "The infidelity of the anti- Lib. 17: 3. slavery movement consists in this simple thing, that it has outstripped the churches of the land in the practical application of Christianity to the wants, wrongs, and oppressions of our own age and our own country." And since then, on his journeys as General Agent of the Massachusetts Society, he had "perceived that it was much more difficult Lib. 18:67. to get the ear of the people at large, in order to lay before them the story of the wrongs and sufferings of their enslaved countrymen, on the first day of the week than on any other"- thus making Sunday not the best but the worst day of the week. Contrary to Phillips's and Quincy's Ante, pp. view, therefore, anti-Sabbatarianism must, for abolitionists, be allowed to have been a moral rather than a theological reform. As for Mr. Garrison himself, his emancipation from the traditional views of the Sabbath proceeded on lines already displayed in this narrative; and Ante, 2 : 51, Democracy, Free Trade, Hard Money, No Monopoly, Freedom of Public Land, etc. Finding out that all the political parties were equally selfish and unprincipled, and really wishing to do some good in the world, he bethought himself of anti-slavery, and the first thing he did was to call and make Mrs. Chapman's ac "aintance, and give her fifty dollars for the Fair. Having thus come in at the gate and not over the wall, he was soon in line with us, and is now as thoroughly one of the Cab as if he had always belonged to it. He is a member of the American and Mass. Boards, and is always ready with his money, and has no reverences of any kind. He began by being a Come-outer. He is one of the best of fellows. A thorough man of business, managing a very large concern and making plenty of money, without being the slave of business or money." 218, 219. 107-114, 152-154; 3:3, 9, 65. 1848. CHAP. VIII. as far back as the summer of 1844, remarking the roving commission of the Rev. Justin Edwards, D. D., of Andover, Lib. 14:110. for a year past, to enforce Sabbatarianism, he proposed a New England Convention to discuss the Sabbath. Occurrences meanwhile, on both sides of the Atlantic, had made such a meeting seem imperative, whether from the standpoint of an abolitionist or of a universal reformer. But now his rally was of anti-Sabbatarians who needed no converting, but should unite their voices in protest. Ante, 2:111, Hence the Address (germinated a dozen years before) I12. Lib. 18: 11. To the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty. THE right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience is inherent, inalienable, selfevident. Yet it is notorious that, in all the States, excepting Louisiana,1 there are laws enforcing the religious observance of the FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK AS THE SABBATH, and punishing as criminals such as attempt to pursue their usual avocations on that day,-avocations which even Sabbatarians recognize as innocent and laudable on all other days. It is true, some exceptions are made to the rigorous operation of these laws, in favor of the Seventh-Day Baptists, Jews, and others who keep the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath; but this freedom is granted in condescension to the scruples of particular sects, as a privilege, and not recognized as a natural right. For those (and the number is large, and steadily increasing) who believe that the Sabbath was exclusively a Jewish institution,- a shadow of good things to come," which vanished eighteen hundred years ago before the light of the Christian dispensation, and therefore that it constitutes no part of Christianity, there is no exemption from the penalty of the law; but, should they venture to labor even for bread on that day, or be guilty of what is called "Sabbath desecration," they are liable either to fine or imprisonment! Cases of this kind have occurred in Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, within a comparatively short period, where conscientious and upright persons have been thrust into prison for an act no more intrinsically heinous than that of gathering in a crop of 1 Originally a Catholic settlement, where the Civil Law obtained. |