No concessions to slavery - 1860
Abolitionist William H. Furness.
Introduction
William H. Furness was the Unitarian pastor of Philadelphia’s First Church and an ardent opponent of slavery. In a sermon preached on this day, 16 December 1860, he urged that the U.S. government should make no compromise with the slave states and predicted terrible consequences as a result of the South’s insistence on evil. Within four months, the states were in a desperate civil war, making his words seem prophetic.
Quote
“By annihilating free speech; by forbidding the utterance of a word in the pulpit and by the press, for the rights of man; by hurling back into the jaws of oppression the fugitive gasping for his sacred liberty; by recognizing the right of one man to buy and sell other men; by spreading the blasting curse of despotism over the whole soil of the nation, you may allay the brutal frenzy of a handful of southern slave-masters; you may win back the cotton States to cease from threatening you with secession, and to plant their feet upon your necks, and so evade the trouble that now menaces us....
“We cannot put the trouble off. Or, we put it off in its present shape, only that it may take another and more terrible form....in the name of God, let us let all things go, and cleave to the right.”
Furness, William H. Sermon in William Still’s The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872.