In an essay on colonial slavery, the Presbyterian Review and Religious Journal of Edinburgh stated that ‘justice must prevail, and a higher tribunal will award it’.Footnote 1 This comment encapsulated the periodical's attitude to chattel slavery in the British West Indian colonies: it was an unjust system, which was an affront to the God of justice. The basic contention of this article is that the attitude of the Presbyterian Review to black slavery initially reflected the radicalism associated with the Church of Scotland Evangelical, Andrew Thomson (1779–1831). Later, however, as circumstances changed, the position of the Presbyterian Review to some extent reflected the antislavery moderation of the leading Free Church of Scotland divine, Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847).Footnote 2 Thomson and Chalmers each represented the divergence among British proponents of antislavery between immediate, uncompensated abolition and gradual, compensated emancipation. While the Presbyterian Review never went as far as Chalmers, its reluctance to criticise the Free Church during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy was indicative of a move away from its initial abolitionist radicalism towards a more moderate stance.
The Presbyterian Review began in July 1831 and ceased publication in July 1848. A group of Edinburgh divinity students comprised of Alexander Turner, John Reid Omond, Patrick MacDougal and John Grant initially acted as an editorial committee. Omond, however, soon became the periodical's first editor. In 1834 the editorship transferred to Alexander Dunlop, who received literary assistance from Robert Buchanan.Footnote 3 William Maxwell Hetherington, who later became a noteworthy theologian and ecclesiastical historian, was also an early contributor to the periodical.Footnote 4 The famous hymn-writer, Horatius Bonar, was a contributor to the Presbyterian Review from its earliest days, and he later succeeded Dunlop as its editor (probably in 1838).Footnote 5 Various contemporary journals in Scotland, Ireland and America praised the Presbyterian Review for its judicious contribution to theological literature.Footnote 6 With the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843 and the subsequent formation of the Free Church, the periodical came under increased competition from other pro-Free Church publications.Footnote 7 This developed in spite of its reputation as the ‘ablest organ of the Free Church party’.Footnote 8 One of its competitors, The Witness newspaper of Edinburgh, expressed grave disappointment at the discontinuance in July 1848 of a journal that ‘during its existence has done much for the cause of Christ and for the Church of Scotland’.Footnote 9 The Presbyterian Review provided a forum in which the Evangelical clergy of the Scottish establishment could display their ‘familiarity with those higher walks of theological literature, philosophy, and science’.Footnote 10 Most contributions to the journal were ostensibly reviews of recently published books and editions of other periodicals. Often the review articles served as springboards for the contributors to opine at length on the general subjects raised in the literature. Thus, the articles in the Presbyterian Review often reflected more the prejudices of the reviewer than the writings under review.
The purpose of this article is to examine how this significant journal reacted to the campaign for the abolition of British colonial slavery, and its attitude towards abolitionism in America. It commenced before West Indian emancipation and ceased publication shortly after the failure of the ‘Send back the money’ campaign (1844–7) to get the Free Church of Scotland to return monies received from the United States. Hence, the Presbyterian Review provides significant insight into how Evangelical Presbyterians viewed these critical events in abolitionist history. Given its theological interests, moreover, the Presbyterian Review is also significant for highlighting the relationship between antislavery and issues such as Church-State relations, revivalism and Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England. An analysis of the periodical's articles reveals that abolitionism was appropriated by Reformed, establishmentarian Evangelicals in Scotland to discredit theological and denominational rivals.
Notwithstanding the obvious importance of the Presbyterian Review’s contribution to the discussion over the campaigns for the abolition of West Indian slavery and the emancipation of the slaves in the United States of America, it has received virtually no attention in the historiography of Scottish antislavery. This omission is surprising, because, as the historian Stewart J. Brown reminds us, the founding of the Presbyterian Review in 1831 was part of a wider movement of appreciation for Presbyterianism in Scotland.Footnote 11 Accordingly, the Presbyterian Review was a vital source for Evangelical viewpoints within the Church of Scotland before the Disruption of 1843, and of Free Church opinion after that event.Footnote 12
West Indian slavery
In March 1826 Thomas Chalmers published a short pamphlet entitled A few thoughts on the abolition of colonial slavery.Footnote 13 Chalmers had prepared this piece two years earlier as a preface to one of Thomas Clarkson's pamphlets, which the Glasgow Abolition Society had proposed to publish. British abolitionism was by 1823 moving towards demanding the total abolition of West Indian slavery, though the establishment of the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery throughout the British Dominions is indicative of a cautious approach on the part of the abolitionists.Footnote 14 In 1824 the Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick published an influential pamphlet, Immediate, not gradual abolition, which set the case for immediate emancipation as the safest means to ensure the end of West Indian slavery.Footnote 15
Even to some Scots favourable to emancipation, immediate abolition was not congenial to their interests. When the British parliament abolished slavery in its West Indian colonies in 1834, Scots comprised only 10 per cent of the United Kingdom's population. However, they represented approximately 15 per cent of the absentee slaveholders whom the government compensated. Glasgow, where Chalmers had served as a minister between 1815 and 1823, contained one of the most concentrated regional groups of claimants for compensation in Britain. Individuals connected with Glasgow were involved in claims of over £400,000 for approximately 14,000 slaves.Footnote 16 The Glasgow West India Association (established in 1807) and its press ally, the Glasgow Courier, were vocal opponents of slave emancipation during the 1820s.Footnote 17 Obviously, the absentee slaveholders and those connected to them had a vested economic interest in either opposing abolition outright or advocating a gradual system of emancipation that would protect their property rights. The arguments outlined in Chalmers's pamphlet were sensitive to the concerns of these groups.
Chalmers admitted that ‘the process which I have ventured to recommend, does not altogether meet the views of many Abolitionists’. He believed that the British legislature must respect the planters’ private property rights, and he stated that there was ‘a sacredness in property’ that the British parliament could not disregard without injustice. Chalmers, therefore, proposed an ingenious scheme whereby the imperial government would pay the proprietors one-sixth of the value of the slaves. This proposal would enable the slave to have one free day a week in which he could earn money for himself. After earning enough money, the slave could purchase another free day a week from his owner. He could then use these two free days to earn sufficient money to pay for his complete emancipation. Chalmers claimed that a West Indian proprietor had suggested this idea to him.Footnote 18 This claim is unsurprising because not only was the idea naïve in the extreme but, if adopted, it would have delayed complete emancipation for a considerable period. Chalmers was indicative of one who favoured gradual emancipation. When he advocated a moderate approach to emancipation during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy, there was no fundamental change in his gradualist approach to slave-liberation.Footnote 19
Not all Church of Scotland Evangelicals were satisfied with Chalmers's position. Andrew Thomson, Chalmers's predecessor as leader of the Evangelical party within the established Church, was one such figure. A few months after the publication of Chalmers's pamphlet, a correspondent to the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, which Thomson edited for twenty years before his death, wrote a critique of gradual emancipation.Footnote 20 Thomson probably published this article to challenge Chalmers's position on abolition. Given the Edinburgh Christian Instructor's influence on religious questions in Scotland, it likely reflected a significant body of dissent from Chalmers's views among Scottish Evangelicals.Footnote 21
The divergence of opinion among these Scottish Presbyterians was similar to the contemporary disagreements among abolitionists south of the border. At the beginning of 1830, the London Anti-Slavery Society concluded that if left to the government and the colonial legislatures, West Indian slavery would continue to exist for ages to come. Abolitionists generally came to the conclusion that gradualism had failed and that immediate abolition was the only viable solution.Footnote 22 Chalmers's moderation was similar to that of English abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton. More radical abolitionists such as the Quaker Joseph Sturge and the Agency Committee (founded in 1831) moved away from the cautious, incremental approach associated with Wilberforce and Buxton and, like Thomson, advocated immediate and uncompensated emancipation.Footnote 23
On 8 October 1830 a meeting was organised by the Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Negro Slavery. After Francis Jeffrey (dean of the Faculty of Advocates) had proposed and the Revd John Ritchie (United Secession minister and Voluntaryist) had seconded the motion that the parliament abolish colonial slavery ‘at the earliest opportunity’ and emancipate all the children born of slave parents after 1 January 1831, Andrew Thomson rose to oppose it. Thomson argued that gradual emancipation legitimised slavery by recognising ‘the principle that man has a right of property in his fellow man’ and that immediate abolition was necessary. He even said that while he was ‘no friend to the shedding of blood, I would rather that a great deal of blood was shed, if necessary, than that 800,000 human beings should continue in hopeless bondage’. Confusion reigned when the Lord Provost vacated the chair in protest at Thomson's apparent endorsement of violence, while Dr Thomas McCrie refused to occupy the chair instead as he likewise questioned the propriety of Thomson's statements.Footnote 24
Thomson's supporters decided to reconvene on 19 October to petition for immediate emancipation.Footnote 25 A few days later the lawyer and phrenologist, George Combe, published a letter praising Thomson's philanthropy but arguing that immediate emancipation was unsafe and should not take place until the moral and intellectual condition of the slaves had been improved.Footnote 26 At the second meeting, the Revd James Buchanan of Leith moved a series of resolutions on behalf of the committee, which condemned colonial slavery as contrary to natural rights, the British constitution and revealed religion. The resolutions demanded the instant and unqualified abandonment of the evil and agreed to petition the British parliament for the immediate and total abolition of colonial slavery.Footnote 27
Thomson was called on to propose that the text of the petition be sent to both houses of parliament to ‘adopt effectual measures for the immediate abolition of Slavery, throughout the Colonies of the Empire’. In his speech, Buchanan also alluded to Chalmers's 1826 pamphlet on emancipation, but he dismissed Chalmers's arguments on the basis that freedom was the absolute birthright of every British subject. Thomson agreed with Buchanan and denied that either the slaves should have to pay for their freedom or that the parliament owed compensation to the slave-owners. If anything, compensation was owed to the slaves, not to their oppressors. Thomson believed that if it was unChristian to steal a human being, it was also unChristian to retain to retain that human being in unlawful bondage.Footnote 28 Hence, immediate abolition was the only just solution to the slavery question, as it was wrong to attempt to ‘come out of sin by degrees’ when God commanded them to break every yoke of oppression.Footnote 29 Thomson's petition was unanimously adopted, and the Society changed its name to the Edinburgh Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery, which reflected its acceptance of Thomson's radical views. Thomson, however, died four months later on 9 February 1831 after a heart attack.Footnote 30
One of the most radical abolitionists in the United States noted Thomson's views with approval. In his 1832 book, Thoughts on African colonization, William Lloyd Garrison described Thomson as ‘one of the most learned and able divines in Great Britain’. Garrison said that he could not ‘portray the absurdity of the doctrine of gradual abolition, and the danger and folly of attempting to mitigate the system of slavery’ more strikingly than Thomson had done, which constitutes conclusive proof of the latter's antislavery radicalism.Footnote 31 In December 1844, during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy, The Witness attempted to contrast the Christian antislavery benevolence of Thomson with the ‘merely earthly principle’ of radical abolitionists such as Garrison.Footnote 32 This assessment was hardly accurate, as Thomson and Garrison were kindred spirits in their shared rejection of gradualism.
The Presbyterian Review commenced publication a few months after Thomson's death and initially reflected his legacy of demanding immediate abolition. In its first edition, it published a summary of a recent essay on ‘The West India question’ in the Quarterly Review. This article claimed that immediate abolition would be disastrous for the West Indian planters and might even lead to the separation of the West Indian colonies from the British Empire and their union with the United States. While it offered no detailed refutation of these claims, the tone of the review was highly negative, indicating that its sympathies were for immediate emancipation.Footnote 33
An occasion for more extensive comment on West Indian slavery occurred the following year in July 1832, as the periodical published a review article on John Jeremie's Four essays on colonial slavery (1831). Jeremie was a colonial judge who had conducted a personal campaign against slavery and racism in the colonies. His book had considerable influence on British parliamentary debates and is thought to have contributed to the abolition of slavery.Footnote 34 The English abolitionist, Thomas Babington, drew Chalmers's attention to Jeremie's work, such was its importance.Footnote 35 The review article, however, says virtually nothing about the book. It does, nevertheless, tell us a lot about what the Presbyterian Review thought concerning slavery: the essay stated that ‘there are few subjects on which we feel more strongly and decidedly’.Footnote 36
The article made several points that further clarified the Presbyterian Review’s radical position. There was an outright rejection of gradual emancipation as a viable solution to the slavery question. The periodical had little time for those who admitted the injustice of the system, yet indefinitely delayed doing anything to rectify it.Footnote 37 It noted that ever since 1823 it had been fashionable for people in British society to complain of the abstract injustice and evil of West Indian slavery. Moreover, since the tide of popular opinion was so clearly favourable to eventual emancipation, it was deemed uncharitable even to suppose that a supporter of slavery on principle existed among the apologists for the West Indian planters.Footnote 38
Contrary to abolitionist hopes, the British parliament's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 did not lead to an amelioration of slavery in the West Indies.Footnote 39 As leader of the antislavery cause in parliament, Thomas Fowell Buxton submitted a proposal to the House of Commons on 15 May 1823, calling for the emancipation of all children born after an agreed date. The earl of Liverpool's ministry sympathised with some aspects of Buxton's scheme but believed that it was too early to consider emancipation as a practical measure, given that the slaves were not ready for freedom. George Canning submitted an alternative set of resolutions on behalf of the government. The government favoured eventual emancipation, yet it believed that the responsibility for ameliorating slavery lay with the colonists. On 9 July Lord Bathurst, Secretary for War and the Colonies, wrote to colonial governors outlining the measures that the British government had in mind. It desired an increase in religious instruction of the slaves, the removal of obstacles to emancipation, an end to the separation of slave families, and a decreased use of the lash.Footnote 40
The British government was, therefore, committed to eventual emancipation in the abstract. The Presbyterian Review, however, wanted more than an abstract commitment that was contingent upon the supposed civilisation of the slaves. Whatever the intention of the parliamentary resolutions of 1823, it argued that the colonists evaded them, and it was foolish to think that they would enact measures that they had long opposed. In fact, the planters rejected the imperial parliament's involvement with slavery in the colonies. Gradual emancipation could only work with their co-operation, but as they were unwilling to countenance such measures the desire for incremental abolition was futile.Footnote 41
The Presbyterian Review saw promises of gradual emancipation as too vague to be trusted and called for the ‘immediate adoption of measures by which this system of slavery may come to a speedy and certain conclusion’. Arguments against emancipation derived from expediency or fear of financial loss were invalid, since what was radically unjust could not be rendered right by asserting that its maintenance was in the public interest. The contrary principle would justify any form of tyranny, irrespective of the injustice that it sanctioned. Hence, to admit the injustice of West Indian slavery, yet resist its abolition, was inconsistent. If it was unjust, then the solution was immediate abolition. In the end, it concluded that gradual emancipation tended towards the same conclusion as that of proslavery defences of the institution, namely, that the slaves were presently unfit for freedom.Footnote 42
The Presbyterian Review asserted that appeals to history and experience were not proof of gradualism's expediency, but rather of the ‘temporizing policy’ to which governments were prone. Such gradualism revealed the tendency of a ‘natural and rooted clinging to evil’ on the part of those governments unwilling to do justice.Footnote 43 Drawing on an analogy between the freedom of nations and the liberty of individuals, the periodical argued that since history and experience taught that nations did not gradually win their freedom, neither should they expect the liberty of the individuals to be acquired gradually. Hence it said that ‘It is by great and sudden transitions that the rights of men and of nations have always been vindicated.’ Moreover, it stated that ‘Every advancement in our liberties from slavery upwards, has been gained not by concession but by force.’ To this end, it cited Lord Byron's famous line, ‘Who would be free, themselves must strike the first blow.’Footnote 44 In making these statements, the Presbyterian Review was echoing Thomson's sentiment that if abolition required bloodshed, then it was a price worth paying for the emancipation of 800,000 slaves.Footnote 45 The real choice facing the British was, therefore, one between immediate peaceful abolition and sudden violent emancipation through a slave insurrection.
The Presbyterian Review was sceptical about claims that abolition was incompatible with private property rights. The complaints of the planters about the threat of abolition to their private property served to prove that the planters regarded the negro slaves as personal chattels. This point only raised the question as to whether or not such property was justly acquired. It is probable that the periodical regarded the ownership of other human beings as a form of manstealing. Although it would probably have permitted involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime, the Presbyterian Review condemned as iniquitous a system that made ‘one unoffending man a part of the goods and chattels of another, who of course considers himself entitled to do what he will with his own property’.Footnote 46 Even if the planters could prove that they had justly purchased their existing slaves, what property could they claim in the children of these slaves, who, like all other British subjects, came into the world with a natural right to liberty? The Presbyterian Review, however, denied that there was such a thing as a just claim to property in human beings. If people had the right to own other human beings as personal chattels, then it was vain for gradualists to talk of eventual emancipation, as that would be incompatible with legitimate private property rights. Conversely, if they do not have the right to make other human beings their personal chattels, then slavery ought to be immediately terminated.Footnote 47
The Presbyterian Review maintained that it was absurd to compare the abolition of black slavery with Jacobinism. It did so in response to scaremongering about the dangers of natural equality or human reason simply because the infidel Tom Paine wrote The rights of man and the French Revolutionaries had made a goddess of reason. The question at hand was not one of the civil rights in society, but whether or not one person had the right to own a fellow human being. The periodical was not calling for the government instantly to make the slaves legislators. While there may have been abuses and injustices in the distribution of civil rights, chattel slavery was a violation of man's natural rights as a creature made in the image of God. The overruling principle of chattel slavery is that ‘he cannot think, or act, or feel, as a living creature of God's hand; that he has no moral or intellectual nature to be cultivated, and no immortal spirit to be saved or lost’.Footnote 48 As it stated elsewhere, such a system was self-evidently hostile to ‘the spirit and precepts of Christianity, and inconsistent with the responsibility of man to his Creator’.Footnote 49
The corrupt anthropology of chattel slavery was thus inconsistent both with the natural rights of man and with the Christian imperative to teach all peoples the way of salvation. Accordingly, the notion that the liberty of slaves should be contingent upon their civilisation was rejected by the Presbyterian Review. A person's title to natural freedom was not dependent upon his progress in civilisation, as such a notion set aside justice and was an argument from pure expediency. The periodical rejected all talk of educating the slaves for freedom as both impractical and impolitic. Slaves could not be educated for freedom while they remained in a state of bondage wholly inconsistent with liberty. Hence, it asked, ‘Can he be taught his rights as a freeman, while those very rights are violated in his own person? Will he understand the laws of social order and natural order the better that he sees them openly and continually disregarded?’ It also dismissed the argument that slavery was natural and beneficial because it existed in ancient Athens and Rome, and in feudal times as ‘a strange perversion of history to attempt to justify all it relates simply on the score of having existed’. While the Presbyterian Review did not go into any detail in refuting proslavery Christianity, it argued that if West Indian slavery was contrary to natural justice, then it must of necessity be contrary to the Christian religion. Otherwise, one would have to hold that Christianity was at variance with natural justice. The Presbyterian Review evidently believed that while grace perfects nature, it does not abolish it. For this reason, a system of slavery that violated man's natural rights was positively condemned by Christianity.Footnote 50
Since real Christianity favoured liberty, the periodical claimed that the West Indian planters would never sanction the preaching and practice of pure Christianity among their slaves. It attributed the late disturbances in Jamaica during the Baptist War (27 December 1831 to the end of January 1832) not to the slaves’ hostility to their masters, but to the fact that they had learned that they had a right to freedom. The missionaries, whom the planters blamed for the uprising, were judged to have done nothing to excite insurrection except preach the Gospel conscientiously. Proclamation of the Gospel was enough to convince the slaves that they had a right to freedom.Footnote 51 Contrary to the alleged ferocity of the blacks, the Presbyterian Review claimed that they did not put one white man to death during the insurrection.Footnote 52 While the insurgents had killed fourteen whites in the course of the struggle, the insurrection that the Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe advocated consisted of stoppping work, backed by the threat of force in self-defence. There was no attempt at a massacre of the white population, and those supressing the rebels far exceeded them in brutality.Footnote 53
The destruction of private property during the revolt was not owing to the dangers of immediate emancipation, but to withholding it. In the opinion of the Presbyterian Review, the speedy implementation of immediate abolition would prevent Jamaica from becoming a second Haiti. Sound constitutional measures for both the freedom of the slave and the protection of private property would prevent the British West Indies from being ‘thrown loose, in a storm of revolutionary frenzy’. While it was eager to preserve legitimate private property rights, the Presbyterian Review was adamant that the planters were owed no compensation for their property in slaves. It thus essentially agreed with Thomson on this point, and it asserted that ‘the claim of the planters of compensation is the most unfounded, in law or in equity, in principle or in application, that ever was advanced to terrify a nation from justice’.Footnote 54
Another reason why the Presbyterian Review opposed West Indian slavery was owing to the absolute power that masters exercised over their slave property. Even some of the apologists for the West Indian planters conceded this point. For instance, in the 1824 Report of the Council of Barbadoes into the condition of slaves of the island, it stated that ‘it cannot be thought that a system which subjects man to the absolute power of his fellow-man is a desirable state of society’.Footnote 55 As Scottish Presbyterians and British patriots, they did not believe in anyone being allowed to exercise absolute power over other people. Thus, the central evil of slavery was in the possession of absolute power by the owners over their slaves, not in the actual exercise of that power. The possession of such absolute power would, owing to human depravity, lead to despotism. It concluded that ‘An unlimited power, therefore, is to be trusted to no one, which, if it does not find a tyrant, commonly makes one.’Footnote 56
It was possible to observe the effects of absolute power in the severe punishments meted out to slaves. For example, the Jamaican legislature in 1826 enacted that it was lawful to punish slaves with no more than thirty-nine lashes for a single offence. The planters regarded something as mitigation that, if it had occurred in Britain but once, would be regarded as inhuman barbarity. This severity was the natural fruit of a system of absolute power; thus, such an unjust system required immediate abolition.Footnote 57 Accordingly, the Presbyterian Review concluded that the only rational thing for the British government to do was to put an immediate end to this system of misrule. Such an act would vindicate Britain's national character, and those who enacted the measure would earn ‘eternal renown’.Footnote 58 It was careful, however, not to overstate the case concerning slavery's abuses. In a review of James Douglas of Caver's Address on slavery, Sabbath protection and church reform (1833), the Presbyterian Review claimed that the author too frequently made broad and unguarded assertions concerning West Indian slavery.Footnote 59
The periodical did not merely demand that the politicians abolish slavery. It urged those who had benefited from the expanded franchise resulting from the Great Reform Act of 1832 to use their new-found liberty to promote the freedom of the slave. This act enfranchised middle-class men occupying houses valued as being worth £10 a year, and thus increased the electorate by 50 per cent.Footnote 60 In this context, the Presbyterian Review predicted that ‘The electors of Britain will listen to the complaints of the negro. In this hope, and in the confidence that another parliament will not run its course without destroying the evil, we take our leave of the subject for the present.’Footnote 61 At the general election of December 1832, the electorate returned 132 MPs who had pledged to support abolition. The Reformed Parliament subsequently legislated in favour of West Indian emancipation on 28 August 1833 with its ‘Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies’, which became effective on 1 August 1834.Footnote 62
Of course, the provisions of the act did not meet the Presbyterian Review's desire for uncompensated emancipation. In addition to making the slaves work for their masters as apprentices for six years (though the colonial legislatures abolished apprenticeship in 1838), it stipulated that West Indian slaveholders receive £20 million in compensation from the imperial government.Footnote 63 This scheme of compensation (equal to 40 per cent of the national budget) represented the largest financial transaction ever undertaken by the British state.Footnote 64 Still, the Presbyterian Review published the address of the Church of Scotland's General Assembly of June 1834 to King William iv, which gave thanks for the Abolition Act.Footnote 65
The legacy of William Wilberforce
The Presbyterian Review saw itself as standing in the tradition of British Evangelical abolitionism. This perspective is exemplified most clearly in its veneration of the most famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce. The great abolitionist died on 29 July 1833, as the bill for abolition was going through parliament. Before he died, Wilberforce heard that the bill had received its second reading in the House of Commons, which gave it approval in principle.Footnote 66 As heirs of his Evangelical abolitionist legacy, the Presbyterian Review even claimed that ‘WE admire and love Wilberforce as we do Luther or Knox. We place side by side with the giants who vanquished Popery, the champion who brought slavery to an end.’Footnote 67
Ever since the late eighteenth century, there had been close ties between the popular or Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland and the English Evangelicals aligned with the Clapham Sect, which included Wilberforce, John Venn and Zachary Macaulay. Thomas Chalmers embraced Wilberforce's world-affirming brand of rational Evangelicalism upon his conversion from Moderatism to vital religion.Footnote 68 Indeed, Wilberforce's famous book A practical view (1797), which he mentions reading in his private journals, had been instrumental in Chalmers's spiritual transformation during 1810–11, and it had deeply influenced him ever since.Footnote 69 The Presbyterian Review discussed Wilberforce's career in review articles based on two multi-volume publications by his sons, Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, about the late abolitionist, The life of William Wilberforce (1838) and The correspondence of William Wilberforce (1840).Footnote 70 The periodical's veneration for William Wilberforce is perhaps, at one level, surprising given that he was an Anglican, and that the periodical compared the erastian constitution of the Church of England to West Indian slavery.Footnote 71 It would also appear that Wilberforce did not share the Calvinism of Church of Scotland Evangelicals.Footnote 72 But, on the other hand, Wilberforce and Chalmers were friends and correspondents. Wilberforce's links with the most eminent Evangelical Scottish Presbyterian divine of the age and his tireless labours for the slaves thus meant that it was natural for Wilberforce to be one of the Presbyterian Review’s spiritual heroes.Footnote 73
The Presbyterian Review was unconcerned with what it viewed as the trivial issue of whether or not the idea of emancipation originated with Wilberforce, James Ramsay or Thomas Clarkson.Footnote 74 It was more concerned with emphasising the religious factors that motivated Wilberforce's efforts to suppress the slave trade.Footnote 75 To that end, it quoted his remark that ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave-trade and the reformation of manners.’Footnote 76 Of course, the Presbyterian Review recognised that Wilberforce encountered many trials and difficulties in his abolitionist campaigns. It concluded that divine grace sustained Wilberforce during his various battles, ‘amidst the treachery of political supporters, the misconstructions of friends, and the calumnies of the world, his trust in God sustained him’.Footnote 77 The Evangelical Arminian, John Wesley, was not one for whom the Presbyterian Review would have had much theological sympathy. Still, it quoted his last letter to Wilberforce, written shortly before the eighty-eight-year-old Wesley's death on 2 March 1791. Wesley stated that ‘Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils … Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.’Footnote 78 The Presbyterian Review concurred with that sentiment, and concluded that the weapons of Wilberforce's warfare against African slavery were not carnal, but were the spiritual weapons of faith and prayer. Experiential Christianity was the chief means of securing abolition. The career of Wilberforce reminded the Presbyterian Review that civil liberty for the slaves resulted from ‘nothing else but the gospel felt in its saving power!’. This grand lesson from Wilberforce's life ‘tells man what a believer can do, and what the world would be without Evangelical truth and vital godliness’.Footnote 79
It was not, however, content to heap praise on Wilberforce without offering pointed criticism of both his contemporaries and his descendants. While it did not question the sincerity of the former prime minister, William Pitt (1759–1806), in the support that he gave to Wilberforce, the Presbyterian Review lamented that it went no farther than it did.Footnote 80 Neither was it particularly impressed with Wilberforce's sons nor with the books that they had published. It viewed the Life of William Wilberforce as a good book insofar as it gave the reader Wilberforce's views, but it thought that his sons should have produced something better. On the whole, the Presbyterian Review condemned it as ‘a straggling memoir, without compactness or continuity’ and added ‘a memoir of 2200 pages cannot long be popular’.Footnote 81 The biography had evidently failed to meet acceptable standards of brevity and conciseness. It also criticised the Correspondence of William Wilberforce because it was mostly a collection of other people's letters to Wilberforce. Had it been a collection of Wilberforce's writings, they would have thanked the editors for it with the ‘warmest gratitude’. Wilberforce's letters, while imperfect and tainted with sin, were essentially holy as they were ‘a precious treasury of Christian love and wisdom’. Instead, his sons had produced volumes of correspondence that were largely useless and trifling.Footnote 82 Given this complaint, it is noteworthy that none other than Chalmers furnished Wilberforce's sons with copies of their father's letters in his possession.Footnote 83
The real problem with these publications, however, was that they told the reader more about the authors/editors than about the subject. The review concluded: ‘Read this Life, and you will know Mr Wilberforce, but you will know his sons still better.’ The readers would learn about his sons’ High Church views, but not that their father often attended dissenting chapels.Footnote 84 In the Presbyterian Review's opinion, both these publications were the products of ‘individuals not only deeply tinctured, but far gone in the ruinous errors of Puseyism’. Indeed, it believed that these books by Wilberforce's ‘semi-Popish sons’ were another means of luring the unsuspecting into the Oxford movement (Tractarianism).Footnote 85
The Presbyterian Review evidently concluded that the sons of Wilberforce had betrayed their father's Evangelical principles and exchanged them for the Tractarian errors associated with E. B. Pusey and his followers.Footnote 86 Such was the journal's zeal against Puseyism that Chalmers appears to have recommended its writings on the subject to the New School Presbyterian, Samuel Hanson Cox.Footnote 87 Whether it was entirely justified in representing the alleged Puseyism of Wilberforce's sons as a betrayal of their father's principles is, at best, debatable. In his diary, William Wilberforce stated that E. B. Pusey was ‘a cleverly good young man’ and on one occasion ‘Called Pusey & [had] much pleasure with him’.Footnote 88 Moreover, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to Chalmers in 1840 to complain that the Presbyterian Review had misrepresented his views, and even alleged that the editor had ‘some secret personal grudge’ against him.Footnote 89 He was basically correct to make this complaint. While Samuel Wilberforce was a traditional High Churchman, he made it plain both to the Tractarians and their enemies that he was not a Puseyite. As bishop of Oxford, moreover, he also clashed with Pusey and used his episcopal authority to prevent Tractarians entering the priesthood.Footnote 90
Slavery and American voluntary religion
The attitude of the Presbyterian Review to American religion differed as circumstances changed. In the wake of the Great Reform Act, a major British movement emerged to disestablish the national Churches of England and Scotland. In early 1832 the United Secession Church formed a committee to organise a national campaign to disestablish the Scottish Kirk. This was called the ‘Voluntary movement’ to signify the ideal of freedom of choice, without state interference, in matters concerning religion. By the end of 1832 the Dissenters had formed Voluntary church associations in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Voluntaries looked to the United States, where the federal constitution enshrined the principle of the separation of Church and State, as an example of how true religion could flourish without an established, national Church.Footnote 91
As supporters of the establishment principle, the Presbyterian Review opposed Voluntaryism and adopted a sceptical attitude to both American Church-State relations and the religious revivals that occurred in the United States. They differed from the Voluntaryist abolitionists in the Glasgow Emancipation Society who regarded the separation of Church and State as fundamental to securing civil and religious freedoms.Footnote 92 As early as 1834 the Presbyterian Review looked with scorn upon the Voluntaryist claim that America displayed the ‘excellence of the voluntary system’. Instead, it argued that the Voluntaries were ‘in profound ignorance of the true state of America’. An understanding of the nature of American religion would, in fact, give people reason to be grateful that they lived in a land where the civil magistrate ‘has been taught to regard it as his duty and his privilege to endow the church’.Footnote 93
Shortly after the birth of the Voluntary movement, the Presbyterian Review published an article on Frances Trollope's Domestic manners of the Americans (1832). Trollope's writing was representative of those in nineteenth-century Britain who took pleasure in attacking American culture and society.Footnote 94 While it considered Trollope's opinion of Americans as too uncharitable, the periodical denied being admirers of the American Constitution or Church-State relations in the Unites States.Footnote 95 It concurred with Trollope's opinion that the want of legal provision for the American clergy was a bad thing, and noted her complaint about the lack of churches in western villages.Footnote 96 The Presbyterian Review attributed these evils to Voluntaryism and argued that if this error were not corrected, it would prove to be America's ruin. In order that the Scottish not fall into the same error, they must beware of destroying their established Church.Footnote 97
As late as 1841 the Presbyterian Review denied the assertion of the Revd John Dunmore Lang (a Presbyterian missionary in New South Wales) that America was equal in its religious character to the mother country. For all the shortcomings of Britain, ‘we are not oppressed with the same amount of insidious and fatal error, and we have no slavery’. Moreover, it argued that the Voluntary provision of religion did not adequately supply free blacks, slaves and many whites in the south and west of the United States with access to the Gospel. This neglect indicated that the ‘unaided Voluntary system is utterly unable to keep pace with the increase and wants of the people’.Footnote 98
The Presbyterian Review, however, was not entirely opposed to all things American. It recognised that the freedom of American society was ‘beyond all doubt one of its chief recommendations; the desire of this freedom originally formed the state, and the consciousness of it riveted the national character’.Footnote 99 However, the existence of black slavery in the United States undermined its boasted freedom and was an instance of glaring hypocrisy. Black slavery in America was ‘a standing denial of their free principles, a scandal to freedom itself, and a topic of exultation to their worst enemies: – a self-contradiction, in which humanity and consistency are equally outraged’.Footnote 100 Of course, these criticisms were not emanating from an entirely disinterested source. The Presbyterian Review itself later admitted that the British were jealous of the ‘immense resources and growing power of the United States’.Footnote 101
Still, it did have valid grounds for pointing out the incongruous nature of a supposedly free society tolerating such a system of bondage and tyranny. The Presbyterian Review thought little of Calvin Colton's special pleading to justify American slavery in his Manual for emigrants to America (1832). Colton argued that it was not within the jurisdiction of the Federal Government to interfere in the question of slave property, which was the responsibility of the states.Footnote 102 Perhaps displaying its lack of sophistication regarding American constitutional issues, the Presbyterian Review argued that ‘This shifting of blame does not argue much in favour of a people who are perpetually sounding in the ears of their visitors from Europe, that all men are born equal, and that one man is as good as another.’ It also highlighted laws prohibiting slave literacy in South Carolina and the existence of racism even in the Northern states that had abolished slavery. The Presbyterian Review also condemned racial prejudice among the Northern Churches, where ‘even the slightest tinge of African descent, excludes … even from social worship and communion with whites at the Lord's table, thus practically denying that God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth’.Footnote 103
Later, when reviewing an essay by Calvin Stowe of Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, the periodical could not understand how Stowe could be equally vehement when criticising both slavery and the abolitionists.Footnote 104 While it admitted that the language of the abolitionists was often ‘unguarded, injudicious, and passionate’, there was no comparison between that fault and the crime of slaveholding. Once again, this discrepancy only served to highlight the inconsistency of those who, ‘with the loudest assertions of the rights of man, struggle to death for the privilege of enslaving their coloured neighbours’.Footnote 105
The Presbyterian Review interpreted the existence of proslavery religion, violation of treaties with the Native Americans and the lack of ‘Men of principle and piety’ taking part in public affairs in the United States as further evidence of Voluntaryism's moral poverty.Footnote 106 While it did not believe that ministers of the Gospel should be political partisans, it did argue that religious considerations should influence a statesman's conduct. If, however, one had imbibed the principle that the State was to have nothing to do with the Church, then it logically followed that the Church has nothing to do with the State. Although it agreed with Stowe on the need for universal education in America, the Presbyterian Review was adamant that what was needed was a ‘Christian education conducted by Christian men’. They were not so anxious about what in general the schools should be teaching the children, but that the public schools inculcate Christianity as integral to their education. The obvious implication was that the absence of an established Church in the United States rendered the task of introducing universal Christian education in America even more difficult.Footnote 107
Another aspect of American popular religion that the Presbyterian Review looked sceptically upon was the phenomenon of religious revivals. Like most Evangelicals, it did not oppose revivals in the abstract. In fact, it commended the Cambuslang Revival of 1742 and criticised the Seceders and Covenanters who had earlier made opposing this awakening a term of communion.Footnote 108 Nor was it scathing of all revivals or theories of revivalism that had come out of America. For instance, it recommended the works of Calvinistic commentators on revival such as Jonathan Edwards and W. B. Sprague (the latter was one of Chalmers's correspondents).Footnote 109 Even the New School Presbyterian theologian, Albert Barnes, was commended for his book The theory and desirableness of revivals (1842). The Presbyterian Review said that all ministers should be earnest in seeking revival within their towns and parishes, ‘even at the risk of being charged with imprudence, excitement, fanaticism, turning the world upside down!’. Extravagance among ministers was wrong, but it was preferable to the deadness that permits souls to die in sin without warning.Footnote 110
Still, it condemned the New Measures or Finneyite Revivalism that had emerged in the mid to late 1820s and early 1830s for ‘vainly indulging all the phantasies of a heated imagination’.Footnote 111 As early as 1832 the Presbyterian Review had expressed doubts about such revivals and stated that ‘no good effects can arise from a system which attempts to work by human device that which can only be effected by superior power’.Footnote 112 Moreover, the evangelist Charles G. Finney's book Lectures to professing Christians (1839) received a damning review. This criticism was largely owing to the perception that the author taught the ‘pernicious doctrine’ that ‘faith justifies, just because it sanctifies!’, which it deemed to be ‘a flat denial of justification by grace’.Footnote 113 While the excesses of Finneyite Revivalism may have been a symptom of Voluntaryism in America, it could not be entirely blamed on proslavery religion, as Finney was an ardent abolitionist who by 1832 had rejected colonisation as a solution to the slavery question.Footnote 114
The ‘send back the money’ controversy
By the mid-1840s there was a softening of attitudes towards the American Churches on the part of the Presbyterian Reivew. It is necessary to consider the changed context in which they now operated to understand why this was so. In 1840, while the Voluntary Controversy was still raging, the journal indicated that the relationship between American Presbyterians and the Church of Scotland was a cold one. It said, ‘Between none, so nearly agreeing in doctrine and discipline, is there less intercourse.’Footnote 115 While the establishment principle was the main area of divergence between the American Presbyterians and their Church of Scotland brethren, it is probable that the Scots also looked with suspicion upon their American counterparts' relationship to slavery. In May 1843, however, the Free Church of Scotland was formed after the Disruption of the established Church of Scotland. The Presbyterian Review, having supported the Evangelical non-intrusionists during the ‘Ten years conflict’, sided with the Free Church. The conflict between the Scottish non-intrusionists and both the Moderates in the Church of Scotland and the British state emerged after the Evangelical-dominated General Assembly passed a Veto Act in 1834. This restricted the power of patronage and gave a majority of male heads of families in communion with the Church the power to veto a patron's presentation of a minister to a parish if they believed that the candidate was not suitable to be their minister.
In 1838, however, the Court of Session had declared the Church's Veto Act to be an illegal infringement on the civil rights of patrons; the House of Lords confirmed this decision in 1839. Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government, which assumed office in September 1841, was determined to resist the non-intrusionists claim to spiritual independence. The General Assembly of May 1842 adopted the ‘Claim of Right’, which denied the authority of the civil courts over ordination and ecclesiastical discipline. Peel refused to submit to the Church's claims and maintained that ecclesiastical courts could not have exclusive authority in questions relating to patronage and discipline.Footnote 116 Thus, on 18 May 1843, the non-intrusionists left the Church of Scotland and signed a deed of demission, relinquishing their charges, stipends, glebes and manses. They then constituted themselves the Free Protesting Church of Scotland.Footnote 117
In the wake of the Disruption, the Free Church of Scotland was in a precarious financial situation, though 454 out of 1,195 ministers and between a third and half of the lay membership of the established Church had joined it. The Disruption occurred at a time of economic distress and widespread unemployment, which rendered it difficult for parishioners to support Free Church ministers. Furthermore, owing to opposition from various landowners, the Free Kirk had difficulty obtaining sites for their churches and manses. Some landowners even threatened tenants with eviction for supporting the Free Church. Despite this opposition, by 1846 the new denomination had managed to establish the New College for training ministers, by 1847 it had built over 730 churches and was maintaining 513 teachers and 44,000 school children, and by 1848 it had erected 400 manses.Footnote 118 In total the Free Church raised £363,871 in the years 1843–4, which was indicative of the great generosity of its supporters.Footnote 119
At the time of the Disruption, the leaders of the Free Church obviously did not know that the new denomination was going to be so successful. In these fraught circumstances, it naturally looked to other branches of the Presbyterian and the wider Evangelical world for support. A deputation was sent to the United States to explain the Free Church's position and gather funds. The deputation included George Lewis of Dundee, William Chalmers of Ayrshire, Robert Burns of Paisley, William Cunningham of Edinburgh and Henry B. Ferguson (a Dundee merchant and ruling elder). At the Free Church General Assembly in May 1844, Cunningham claimed that the Free Church had received approximately £9,000 from the Americans. The precise sum collected from America, which protagonists debated at the time, was only a small percentage of the total collected by the Free Kirk after the Disruption. Its symbolic importance was nevertheless huge.
Even while they were still in the United States, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society warned the Free Church Commissioners ‘against soliciting money from the slaveholders of this country’. Lewis Tappan lamented that ‘They have visited several slave states & taken contributions & solicited donations, and two of them are now at Charleston, S.C. for this purpose. We consider this a monstrous error, & tending to paralize [sic] the efforts of Christian abolitionists in this country.’Footnote 120 The receipt of monies from slaveholding sources and the Free Church's defence of fellowship with slaveholders provoked a storm of protest from abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. The resulting ‘Send back the money’ controversy raged for the next three years. Various American abolitionists, including Henry C. Wright, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, worked alongside British abolitionists such as George Thompson to get the Free Church to return the money and break fellowship with the American Churches.Footnote 121
The position that the Free Church adopted regarding fellowship with proslavery Churches was not without precedent within British Evangelicalism. For instance, various abolitionists, including those of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, strongly criticised the fact-finding tours to the United States in 1834 of the Congregationalists Andrew Reed and James Matheson and the Baptist ministers Francis A. Cox and James Hoby in 1835 for not refusing fellowship with slaveholders.Footnote 122 Defenders of the Free Church's policy later referred to Reed and Matheson's visit as justification for their conduct.Footnote 123
By the 1840s, however, there was greater opposition to fellowship with slaveholders on the part of British Christians. The World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, resolved that it was the ‘incumbent duty’ of Christian Churches to bar slaveholders from communion.Footnote 124 Abolitionists, in their struggles with various denominations, were able to cite this resolution as an endorsement for abolitionist principles.Footnote 125 It is also noteworthy that, in the 1840s, several dissenting denominations passed resolutions condemning fellowship with slaveowners.Footnote 126 As with the rest of the Free Church, the Presbyterian Review was in something of a predicament. It had previously been among the most zealous opponents of slavery, but now it had to walk an intellectual tightrope, trying to defend the Free Kirk's position while remaining opposed to American slavery.
Judging by the reaction to the Presbyterian Review, Free Church partisans did not receive this criticism well. Initially, it avoided the subject of the Free Church's position in relation to the American Churches that tolerated slavery. Following the Disruption, the periodical published favourable reviews of the writings of the Revd Thomas Smyth of Charleston, South Carolina. He was praised both for his defence of Presbyterian church government against Prelacy and Puseyism and for his support for the Free Church.Footnote 127 It regarded Smyth's book, The exodus of the Church of Scotland (1844), as a well-reasoned, admirably written work in which the principles of the Free Kirk were ‘manfully set forth as Bible truth’.Footnote 128 When George Lewis and Robert Burns visited the Southern States, the Irish-born Smyth was their host and guide. Smyth was a moderate defender of Southern slavery, though his defence of the religious education of slaves and his hope that providence would eventually enable the end of slavery meant that he was much less rabid in his defence of the institution than more hardline proslavery ideologues.Footnote 129
In September 1844 and May 1845, during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy, Chalmers wrote to Smyth to inform him that he did not consider slaveholding a sin in itself and that he had no sympathy for those who would excommunicate slaveholders or refuse to engage in commercial transactions with the American South.Footnote 130 Abolitionists perceived Chalmers's correspondence with Smyth as deeply damaging to their cause. Referring to the letter of September 1844, Lewis Tappan informed Joseph Sturge of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that ‘I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the immediate mischief a letter will do in this country.’ Tappan asserted that Chalmers's letter would ‘prolong the contest’ for emancipation and ‘blind the eyes of many in the free states’ who would otherwise have joined in ‘our great struggle for human rights’.Footnote 131
In 1845 the Presbyterian Review decided to print some of the pronouncements regarding the Free Church within the American Old School Presbyterian Church. It is probable that it did so to bolster its readership's view of American Presbyterians at a time when they were under attack from abolitionists in Scotland. First, it reprinted a report adopted by the Old School Synod of Virginia on 12 October 1843. While sympathising with the Free Church in leaving the establishment ‘for the great principles of gospel liberty’, the Synod said that it ‘would have have been gratifying to us had they for conscience sake, renounced the doctrine of church establishments’. The Free Church responded by expressing its desire for ‘a friendly correspondence and real union and co-operation’ between the Churches. It would not let the matter of church establishments prevent it from uniting with the American Presbyterians ‘in these times of trouble and rebuke’.Footnote 132
The resolutions of the Synod of New Jersey on 19 October 1843 likewise commended the Free Church for abandoning worldly interests for the sake of maintaining Christ's headship over the Church. It praised Disruption worthies for ‘acceding to the great principles for which American Presbyterians have contended’. The Synod also resolved that application for pecuniary contributions to the Free Church to relieve its ‘extraordinary necessities’ should be met with generosity. In response, the Free Kirk thanked the New Jersey Synod ‘for the eagerness which you, and many of our Christian brethren in America, have shown to promote our interests, and to contribute to our funds’.Footnote 133 It is evident from this correspondence that while the Free Church maintained its commitment to the establishment principle, Voluntaryism had declined as an issue. The fact that the American Presbyterians viewed the Disruption as a vindication of their Voluntaryist principles was no barrier to the Free Church's fellowship with them. Nor, for that matter, was the issue of slavery. In a different polemic context from that of the Voluntary Controversy of the 1830s, it too had declined as a divisive issue between Scottish establishmentarian Evangelicals and American Presbyterians.
The Presbyterian Review evinced its approval of the Free Church's policy by publishing the report on slavery presented to the General Assembly's Commission on 11 September 1844. The report admitted that American slavery was ‘a system of oppression which cannot be defended’. It went so far as to argue that ‘Natural reason, sound policy, a sense of justice between man and man, as well as the whole tenor and spirit of the Divine Word, and especially of the dispensation of the gospel, concur in condemning it.’ Therefore, it was painful to observe its continued existence in the United States, ‘a country making her just boast of the maintenance of equal liberties and equal rights’. In fact, given the existing slave laws, it condemned American slavery as ‘one of most deplorable forms of evil, peculiarly calling for the exertions of a sound Christian philanthropy in regard to it’. While the Committee believed that the American Churches should set their faces against this evil, they did not believe that it was for the Free Church to dictate to their American brethren how they should behave in their peculiar circumstances. They recalled that the British Churches had not always done their duty regarding slavery in Britain's colonies. Hence, they saw no reason in the present circumstances to break off fellowship with the American Churches.Footnote 134
Later, in July 1845, the Presbyterian Review stated that ‘[t]he question of slavery, and the duty of Christian churches regarding it, is now creating a great sensation in this land’. It expressly endorsed the position of the Free Church when it stated that as ‘denouncers of slavery’ they did not ‘find themselves warranted to break off Christian intercourse with the above-mentioned American churches, simply because of the fact, that amongst their members slave-holders are to be found’. Still, it admitted that the ‘slave-holding in the American states, is an unhuman, unscriptural, and accursed thing’. It even went so far as to affirm that ‘The entire abolition of slavery is what every one, actuated by right principles, most earnestly desires.’Footnote 135
Because the slavery issue had contributed to the schism between the Old and New School Presbyterians in America during 1837–8 and had caused splits in both the Methodist and Baptist denominations in the United States during 1844–5, the Presbyterian Review feared that a similar division could occur in Scotland.Footnote 136 Following the General Assembly in 1845, it expressed concern that ‘a slight collision might have taken place in regard … to the subject of American slave-holding’. Thus, it impressed upon every member of the Free Church the incalculable importance of preserving unity within the new denomination.Footnote 137
After the General Assembly of 1846, it was again evident that the Presbyterian Review supported the course adopted by the Free Church leadership. It even compared the non-intrusionists’ struggles with the British state to the Free Kirk's recent battle with the abolitionists.Footnote 138 It now denounced the abolitionists as being obstacles to the slaves’ liberation, which was a view that it had previously rejected. The Presbyterian Review said that the Free Church had ‘no sympathy … with the senseless ravings of those men, who, though pretending to be the exclusive friends of the slave, have really done more to rivet his chains than any class of men in America, or the world’. It acknowledged that the American Churches regarded the sin of slaveholding among its members with ‘undue leniency’. Nevertheless, it was not the duty of the Free Church to end their communion with the Americans until they had exhausted all means of friendly remonstrance.Footnote 139
Although the Presbyterian Review mentioned neither Thomson nor Chalmers by name in connection with slavery, it is certain that the influence of both men loomed large within its pages. As it was founded shortly after Thomson's death, its earlier comments on slavery in the West Indies and the United States reflect both Thomson's radicalism and the usefulness of slavery as a polemical weapon in the midst of the Voluntary controversy. It also demonstrated its antislavery zeal by its appropriation of the legacy of William Wilberforce on behalf of Evangelicalism and in opposition to the alleged Tractarianism of his sons. The Presbyterian Review never went as far as Chalmers in refusing to condemn American slavery as sinful. Still, its support for the position adopted by the Free Church leadership during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy is indicative of the influence of Chalmers's moderation upon it in the midst of the controversy.Footnote 140 The Presbyterian Review's strong language against both slavery and the radical abolitionist critics of the Free Church is evidence that it had a conflicted conscience about the whole subject. On the one hand, it hated American slavery and desired its speedy abolition. On the other hand, denominational loyalty rendered it unwilling to criticise the course of action taken by the Free Church.
