Note 314:1 — Chapter XVII
Reading edition
A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844 is given in the "New Englander," vol. ii. (1844), pp. 470, 624.
This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete. The American Missionary Association, since distinguished for successful labors chiefly among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by men of advanced antislavery views with the position of the "American Board" and the American Home Missionary Society on the slavery question. The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very fruitful schism in its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio. The beginning thus made with a class in theology has grown into a noble and widely beneficent institution, the influence of which has extended to the ends of the land and of the world.
The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies known as Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date—1827-28.
No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish extraction. A curious diagram, on page 146 of volume xi. of the present series, illustrates the sort of task which such a chronicle involves.
An illustration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery and the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements (see above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell's claim (identical with Mr. Garrison's) that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders ought to be excommunicated (vol. vi., p. 157, note). Dr. Thornwell may not have been the "mental and moral giant" that he appears to his admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi., p. 355), but he was an intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon by a palpable "ambiguous middle," except for his excitement in the heat of a desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.