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Article: Slavery: 'A Trust from God'
- Article from:
- Freethought Today
- Article date:
- June 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Free Thought Today Jun/Jul 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Abolitionist Theodore Parker once remarked that if the whole American Church had "dropped through the continent and disappeared altogether, the antislavery cause would have been further on."
When William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first antislavery lecture in Boston, church halls were closed to him, and he was obliged to accept the use of the small and unprestigious Julian Hall from Abner Kneeland, a noted "infidel," who once had been prosecuted and imprisoned for blasphemy.
Mid-1 800s estimates reported 80,000 slaves owned by Presbyterians, 225,000 by Baptists and 250,000 by Methodists. Anglicans probably owned most of the rest of· the nearly 4 million blacks held in serfdom in the ...