One Charming Friend Took Me
To The Church Of St. Germain L'Auxerrois, Pointing Out With Great
Interest The Statues And Pictures Of Saints Who Had Been Distinguished
For Their Antislavery Efforts In France.
In a note expressing her warm
interest in the cause of the African slave, she says, "It is a
Tradition of our church, that of the three kings which came to worship
Jesus in Bethlehem, one was black; and if Christians would kneel
oftener before the manger of Bethlehem they would think less of
distinctions of caste and color."
Madame Belloc received, a day or two since, a letter from a lady in
the old town of Orleans, which gave name to Joan of Arc, expressing
the most earnest enthusiasm in the antislavery cause. Her prayers, she
says, will ascend night and day for those brave souls in America who
are conflicting with this mighty injustice.
A lady a few days since called on me, all whose property was lost in
the insurrection at Hayti, but who is, nevertheless, a most earnest
advocate of emancipation.
A Catholic lady, in a letter, inquired earnestly, why in my Key I had
not included the Romish clergy of the United States among the friends
of emancipation, as that, she said, had been always the boast of their
church. I am sorry to be obliged to make the reply, that in America
the Catholic clergy have never identified themselves with the
antislavery cause, but in their influence have gone with the
multitude.
I have received numerous calls from members of the Old French
Abolition Society, which existed here for many years. Among these I
met, with great interest, M. Dutrone, its president; also M. - - , who
presented me with his very able ethnological work on the distinctive
type of the negro race. One gentleman, greatly distressed in view of
the sufferings of the negro race in America, said, naively enough, to
Mrs. C., that he had heard that the negroes had great capability for
music, dancing, and the fine arts, and inquired whether something
could not be done to move sympathy in their behalf by training them to
exhibit characteristic dances and pantomimes. Mrs. C. quoted to him
the action of one of the great ecclesiastical bodies in America, in
the same breath declining to condemn slavery, but denouncing dancing
as so wholly of the world lying in wickedness as to require condign
ecclesiastical censure. The poor man was wholly lost in amazement.
In this connection, I cannot but notice, to the credit of the French
republican provisional government, how much more consistent they were
in their attachment to the principles of liberty than ever our own has
been. What do we see in our own history? Our northern free states
denouncing slavery as a crime, confessedly inconsistent with their
civil and religious principles, yet, for commercial and pecuniary
considerations, deliberately entering into a compact with slaveholders
tolerating a twenty years' perpetuation of the African slave trade,
the rendition of fugitives, the suppression of servile insurrections,
and allowing to the slaveholders a virtual property basis of
representation.
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