Parker
Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (1883)
CHAPTER
II. NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS
When some discerning Romans
saw how many statues were reared in their city to persons of only indifferent
merit, while Cato, one of their wisest and best, had none, they wondered. But
the great man had answered the question beforehand: "Better that posterity
should ask why Cato has not a monument, than why he has."
In the cemeteries of
Concord, New Hampshire, are many memorial stones. Some of great beauty and
cost, with proportionally elaborate and, perhaps, appropriate inscriptions. But
situated among them is one lot of the ordinary family size, protected by no
iron railing, no granite embankment, and whose dead level surface would seem
never to have been invaded for burial, agricultural or any other human purpose.
And yet to that hallowed spot I
have conducted many devout pilgrims from east and west, both women and men. For
there, since Sunday, the 18th day of October, 1846, exactly thirty-six years
ago this very [1882] day, and almost hour, have slumbered the mortal remains of
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, surely one of the brightest, noblest, truest and
every way most gifted sons, not only of the Granite state, but of any state of
this union of states, departing at the early age of only fifty-two years.
And no visitor from near or
remote, ever fails to ask, sometimes with almost stunning emphasis: "Why
has Rogers no monument?"
Should that sacred spot
speak out from its silence of six and thirty years, doubtless its answer to the
eminently pertinent inquiry would be, as was that of Cato, so well remembered,
so much admired, so often repeated now, after more than two thousand years.
Such as was Rogers, never die. They
need no monuments reared by other hands than their own. Time mows down all
marble and granite, tramples out all inscriptions in bronze or brass. And so
such registers are soon lost for evermore.
It has been said of the immortal
Senator [Charles] Sumner [1811-1874] and his humble tombstone at Mount Auburn,
and lowly indeed it is:
"The grass may grow
o'er the lowly bed
Where the noblest Roman
hath laid his head;
But mind and thought a
nation's mind
Embalm the lover of
mankind."
And scarcely of any man departed
or still visible to mortal sight, could this be sung more appropriately than of
the subject of this chapter {Nathaniel P. Rogers]; and for some seven years
editor of the Herald of Freedom, published in Concord, New Hampshire, ten or
twelve years.
Mr. Rogers was born at
Plymouth, on the 3d of June, 1794, and was one of the tenth generation from him
who is so well, widely and honorably known as "Rev. John Rogers," the
first in that blessed company of martyrs who suffered in the reign of the bigoted
and bloody [English Queen] Mary, in the year 1555.
And surely the blood of the martyr,
literally and spiritually, flowed in the veins of his remote descendant,
answering "heart to heart," as well as "face to face."
For those who have been
privileged to see both our departed editor in the flesh and form, and a
singularly well preserved portrait of the martyr in the American Antiquarian
Society hall at Worcester, Massachusetts, have wondered at the remarkable
resemblance in the shape of head and face, in complexion, color of eye and
hair, and the whole general expression of the two memorable men.
He graduated with honors at
Dartmouth college, in the year 1816. He studied law with the distinguished
Richard Fletcher, and then settled down to its practice in his native town,
marrying a daughter of Hon. Daniel Farrand, of Burlington, Vermont. He
conducted a flourishing and successful law practice in Plymouth for about
twenty years before moving to Concord to take charge of the Herald of Freedom.
As student in general
literature, especially in history and poetry, none of his day were before him.
Few ever heard Shakespeare, Scott, Byron and Burns read more beautifully, more
thrillingly, than at his fireside, surrounded by his estimable wife and seven
children, with sometimes a few invited friends. But general reading and home
delights never detracted from the duties of his profession. When he died, an
intimate friend, who had known him long and well, wrote that so accurate was
his knowledge of law, and so industrious was he in business, that the success
of a client was always confidently expected from the moment his assistance was
secured. His life mission, however, was neither literature nor law. He was in
due time ordained, consecrated as a high priest in the great fellowship of
humanity, and wondrously, divinely did he magnify his office in the ten or
twelve last years of his earthly life.
In the year 1835, he made
acquaintance with Garrison, and soon placed himself at his side as the hated,
hunted, persecuted champion of the American slave, as by this time Garrison was
known to be. And from that time, too, Rogers was ever found the firm, unshaken,
uncompromising friend and advocate of not only the anti-slavery enterprise, but
of the causes of temperance, peace, rights of woman, abolition of the gallows
and halter, and other social and moral reforms.
Here may be the place to
say what certainly should be said at some time and place, a few words on the
early religious character of Mr. Rogers. For it is neither known to this
generation nor presumed what manner of men and women were most of those who
early espoused the cause of the American slave; especially in their relations
to the popular and prevailing religion of their time. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers
were active and honored members in the Congregational church at Plymouth, when
they espoused the cause of the slave. And they naturally looked, as did other
anti-slavery Christians, to the church and pulpit as the divinely appointed
instrumentality for emancipating the bondmen, especially of their own country,
enslaved, too, by laws of their own enactment and religious sanction and
approval.
Perhaps a few excerpts from an
early editorial in the Herald of Freedom will illustrate the quality of the
religious sentiment and opinion of the editor, as well as the tone and temper
of his heart and spirit. The whole article is in the Herald of August 11, 1838,
and is a review of a contribution to the Christian Examiner, entitled "The
Presence of God." The Examiner was a Unitarian journal, the sect at that
time quite alien to the more evangelical views of Mr. Rogers:
"We wander a
moment from our technical anti-slavery sphere, to say, with permission of our
readers, a word or two on a beautiful article in the Christian Examiner. It is
from the pen of one of our gifted fellow citizens, to whom the unhappy subjects
of insanity in this state owe so much for the public charity now contemplated
in their behalf. It is written with great eloquence, perspicuity and force of
style; and what is more, it seems scarcely to want that spirit of heart-broken
Christianity so apt to be missing in the peaceful speculation of reviews, and
may we not say in the speculations of the elegant corps among whom the writer
of the article is here found. We will find briefly what fault we can with the
article.
"Its beauties
need not be pointed out. They lie scattered profusely over its face. It is an
article on "The Presence of God," and treats of our relations to Him.
But does it set forth that relation as involving our need of the Lord Jesus
Christ, in order that we may be able to stand in it?
"For ourselves
we cannot contemplate God, and dare not look towards Him unconnected with
Christ. Our writer seems boldly to look upon Him as the strong-eyed eagle gazes
into the sun. God is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. He cannot look upon
sin but with abhorrence. We have sinned; therefore we fear to behold him. In
Christ alone is He our Father in heaven, and we His reconciled children. In Christ
we dare take hold of His hand, and of the skirts of His almighty garments. The
Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the medium through whom alone we dare
look upon God, in His works, His providence, or His grace. Sinless man might,
without this medium. Fallen man may not. * * *
"The writer
contemplated God in His works‹but he seems, though awed, elevated and delighted
at their grandeur, beauty and wisdom, to feel still baffled of the great end in
their contemplation. Does he not, we would ask him, feel the absence of some
link in the chain of communication with this ineffable being, which might, if
not interrupted, anchor his soul securely within the veil, which after all
continues to shroud him from communion and sight? Can he, in sight of the works
of God, speak out and sing in the strains of the Singer of Israel? * * *
"The writer speaks of
the communion of God with our minds. This he seems to regard with chief
interest. He speaks of "the need of having attention," meaning
intellectual attention, "waked up to these old truths."
"Listlessness of mind," he continues, "an inveterate habit of
inattention to the existence of the Eternal Spirit, needs to be broken in upon.
We need to help each other to escape a fatuity of mind on this subject that we
may feel that God's ark still rides o'er the world's waves, and that the
burning bush has not gone out."
"There is an
"inattention," it is true, but it is of the heart, not merely of the
mind, of the nature and not of "habit" merely; a spiritual inattention,
or rather alienation from God, which must be broken in upon. It is not the
creature of habit. Adam felt it in all its force on the very day of his first
transgression. He heard the voice of God, which, in his innocency, he had
hailed with joy, beyond all he felt at the beauties of Paradise; heard it
walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and he hid himself from the
presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
"His wife also hid
herself, for she, too, had transgressed, and we, their moral heirs, hide
ourselves so to this day. They could walk in the garden in sight of the
beautiful works of God, perhaps admire the splendors of Eden, but when they
heard His voice, they hid themselves.
"Not from habit
surely, that not being the creature of a day. There was "inveteracy,"
not of habit, but of fallen nature. It is that which must be "broken in
upon" before we shall incline to come out from among the trees to welcome
the presence of God.
"It may be there is a
figurative meaning in this hiding among the trees from the presence of Him who
made those trees. And may we not deceive ourselves in supposing we contemplate
God in His works, when, in truth, we are seeking to hide ourselves from His
presence among the glorious trees of this earth's garden? * * *
"We have revolted from
God. We are born universally in a state of alienation from Him. The Scriptures
and all experience teach this. We do not more certainly inherit the transmitted
form of our fallen first-parents, than their descended nature. We are born with
the need of being "born again." Of this we are sure. We cannot evade
it. It is our fate in the wisdom of God. We cannot escape it any more than the
Old World could the deluge. * * *
"We have an ark of
safety, to be sure, capacious enough to save the entire race of man. It will
save only those who will enter it. And the time of entering, as it was at the
flood, is before the sky of probation is overcast. The door is that now, as
then, before the falling of the first great drops of the eternal thunder
shower.
"The ark of safety, we need
not say, is Christ. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man can come to
the Father but by Him. Whoever hath seen Him hath seen the Father. And by Him
is the only manifestation of the presence of God. The presence of His power may
be seen in all objects around us. But His strong love to the children of men,
cannot be seen but through Christ. * * *
"But we
are forgetting that our Herald is a small sheet. We have not space to notice
the exquisite beauties of our writer's production as a composition merely; or
the argument it draws of God's presence from his works; and as it purports to
notice merely this evidence of his presence, we will not here express our
regret that the name of Christ is not mentioned in the article. May the gifted
writer if he be out of the ark of safety, not delay to enter in. Let him not
tarry without to gaze with the eye of elegant curiosity on the scenery of this
Sodom world‹but bow his neck, "and enter while there's room." And as
we bespeak his immediate heed to "the one thing needful," so we
demand his pen, voice, influence, prayer and action and open cooperation in the
deliverance of his fellow countrymen from the CHAIN OF SLAVERY."
Thus loyal was the editor of the
Herald to the religious doctrine and teaching of his time in the church of his
choice. The church of his fathers through nine generations. Thus diligently had
he studied and considered them; and thus eloquently and faithfully, though tenderly
and affectionately, did he present, recommend and enforce them, whenever and
wherever he had opportunity.
In 1838 he removed from Plymouth
to Concord, and became sole editor of the Herald of Freedom,
He had, from its establishment in
1834, furnished many most brilliant and trenchant articles for its columns. To
the readers of the paper, now alas! the most of them, with its editor, no more,
nothing need be said of his power with his pen. Only a single duodecimo volume
of three hundred and eighty pages of his editorial writings has been reprinted
and preserved, and that long ago disappeared from the market. Ten dollars, it
is said, have been offered for a single copy; though that perhaps might have
been before most of the early readers had passed away. Some of its descriptive
articles have been pronounced as unsurpassed in life and vigor, brilliancy and
beauty, as were their rebukes of slave holders and their abettors and
accomplices, scathing, withering, but always eminently just.
His "Jaunt to the White
Mountains" with Garrison in the year 1841, was copied from the Herald
columns into a neat tract and was a capital contribution to the tourist
literature of that period. Its length precludes possibility of insertion here;
but one of less volume and of scarcely less power entitled "Ailsa
Craig," may not so reasonably be rejected. For the world never knew the
sublimely gifted writer as it should have known him, and doubtless would, but
for his too early removal to higher spheres. Young readers will surely pardon a
page or two when they have read them, introduced here for their profit as well
as pleasure, showing not only the power of the writer, but also giving them a
description of one of the most remarkable as well as interesting spots in the
British realm. It is from the Herald of Freedom of April 30, 1841:
AILSA CRAIG.
This famous rock in the Irish Sea, we meant to have said something about
when we saw it, long before this time. But anti-slavery makes us omit and
forget the wonders of the Old World. We passed it on a trip from Scotland to
Ireland. We left Glasgow on the twenty-eighth of July, 1840, at ten in the
morning, for Dublin. William Lloyd Garrison in company, our fellow passenger to
the Irish Capital. * * *
"We went on board a
steamer and rode down the ship-thronged Clyde. Nothing can exceed its beauty
below the great city of Glasgow. To be sure, they have robbed it of its native
banks,-and commerce has substituted for the green slope, a sloping wall of neat
and firm stone masonry on each side, and straightened its once indented shores.
But the utility of the metamorphosis is so mighty, and so palpable, making this
narrow stream, far away inland, the highway for the commerce of one of the
great ports of Britain; of a city as large as New York or Liverpool, where the
largest ships may ride as freely as in the ocean for depth of water, that it
gives it a most imposing, singular, and interesting appearance. It is hardly
broader than some of the widest streets of London.
"Our little
steamer elbowed its way among the keels that thronged it like "the full
tide of human existence," along the slippery pavements and broad
side-walks of Cheapside, or Glasgow's Broadway, the swarming Irongate. It was
amusing to see the ploughed up water roll along the stone banks, half way up
their slopes, in waves that coiled and convolved like the folds of the sea
serpent. The walls were a good deal higher than the natural shores, which were
wet and low. They had filled in behind them with earth, and made high, wide and
level land on either side which was now covered with old verdure, and planted
with stately trees:-and the promenader might take his rural walk there, side by
side with the winged commerce of every quarter of the globe:-the "white sail
gliding by the tree," and the smoky plumage of the steamers streaming off
over among the glorious woodlands.
"We made our way
steadily, though not rapidly down the widening channel, and came to where the
"bonnie" Vale of Leven, came upon the Clyde from Loch Lomond and its
enclosing mountains which we could descry in the misty distance, up the Vale.
"All
abolitionists have heard of the Vale of Leven, and remember its Remonstrance to
the Women of America, sent over here some four years ago, and unfurled over the
heads of thousands in Broadway Tabernacle at an anti-slavery anniversary. The
four thousand Scottish women who signed it, dwelt in the Vale of Leven. We saw
John Summerville, the minister who obtained their signatures. What would induce
one of our clergy, with any "weight of influence" to be seen going
about for women's signatures to an abolition petition? Where Leven Vale meets
the Clyde rises a tremendous rock, in the clefts of which lodges the grim old
fortress of Dumbarton Castle, famous in the history of Sir William Wallace.
"The river soon
broadened into a frith, as the Scotch call their bays. The mountains retreated
from each other, and sails were to be seen here and there at anchor in the
coves and harbors of the wide waters near their bases. We met a naval horse
race on the frith of eight beautiful little vessels at the very top of their
speed. They were running the heats, in a wide circle, and leaning down hard to
the sea close on each other's heels; all sail crowded they made the water foam
white about their prows. It was quite an animating sight, with none of the
painful sensations at seeing poor quadruped horses scourged and pressed beyond
their powers. There was no distress, nor faltering of wind, in these graceful
little racers, as they swept the frith of Clyde.
"A Mr. McTear
had come aboard the steamer at Greenock for Dublin. He was a Greenock merchant.
We were talking with him on the deck when we spied a conical rock, as it
seemed, rising out of the water some distance ahead. It appeared through the
thin mists like a hay stack, and about as large. We spoke of it to Mr. McTear,
and he told us it was Ailsa Craig. We remembered mention of it by [Scottish
poet Sir Walter] Scott [1771-1832], in the "Lord of the Isles," where
he calls it rock instead of craig, in the mouth of Robert Bruce [1274-1329;
King of Scotland, 1306-1329]:
"Lord of the Isles, my trust in thee
Is
firm as Ailsa rock!"
"We
had supposed it was in the Forth on the other side of Scotland. As we were
looking at it, Mr. McTear asked us to guess the distance to it. Strangers he
said, were apt to greatly mistake the distance. We looked at the rock along the
intervening water. We could get no aid from the shores which were at great
distance, quite out of sight on one hand. We supposed of course, we should
underrate the distance. So we stretched it liberally, as we thought, and
guessed two miles, though it did not look like that distance.
"You have
made the common mistake, he said; it is over twenty. We could hardly credit it;
but he told us we should see it was so, for we would be over two hours getting
to it and were going at ten knots. And over two hours it was; and such was the
deceptive character of the way, that when we thought we were coming right upon
it, and wanting our friend Garrison, who was asleep below, to see it, we went
down and told him to hurry up and see "Ailsa Rock." It proved, to the
amazement of us both, that we were then nearly ten miles from it. And the
little prominence, that looked so like a hay stack, or a hay cock, when we
descried it first, grew as we neared it, a mighty mountain, nine hundred and
eighty feet high, rising abruptly out of the sea, and two miles about the base.
"He had been
himself governor of the Craig some years before, and had great sport and some
danger in killing the birds. His way of killing them was with a club, and he
told us how many thousands, we dare not say how many he had killed in a single
day of a famous kind of goose. He had let himself down to a quarter of the
cliffs where they hunted to get the young and eggs, and the old ones attacked
him and he fought them with his club till he was covered with blood, theirs and
his own.
"He had a good
mind, he said, to give them one gun, just to let us see them fly, as we were
strangers. As he had been the Marquis's governor, he said, he would venture
that he would overlook it in him. He ordered his boy to bring the musket. The
boy returned and said it was left behind at Glasgow.
"Load up the swivel
then," said the captain. "It will be all the better. It will make
quite a flight, ye'll find. Load her up pretty well." The steamer
meanwhile kept nearing the giant craig, which was a bare rock from summit to
sea, and all of a dull, chalky whiteness, occasioned, as the captain said, by
the excrement of the birds. We saw caves in the sides of the mountain and down
by the water; the retreats, our informant told us, in former times, of the
smugglers who used to frequent the craig and carry on an extensive trade from
these places of concealment. We had got so near as to see the white birds
flitting across the entrances to the caverns like bees about the hive. With the
spy-glass we could see them distinctly and in very considerable numbers; and at
length approached so that we could see them on the ledges all over the sides of
the mountain.
"We had
passed the skirt of the craig, and were within a half mile, or less, of its
base. With the glass we could now see the entire mountain side peopled with the
sea fowl, and could hear their whimpering, household cry as they moved about,
or nestled in domestic snugness on the ten thousand ledges. The air, too, about
the precipices, seemed to be alive with them. Still we had not the slightest
conception of their frightful multitude. We got about the center of the
mountain, when the swivel was fired. The shot went point blank against it and
struck the stupendous precipice, as from top to bottom with a reverberation
like the discharge of a hundred cannon.
"And what a
sight followed! They rose up from that mountain, the countless myriads and
millions of sea birds, in a universal, overwhelming cloud that covered the
whole heavens, and their cry was like the cry of an alarmed nation. Up they
went, millions upon millions, ascending like the smoke of a furnace; countless
as the sands on the sea shore; awful, dreadful for multitude, as if the whole
mountain were dissolving into life and light, and with an unearthly kind of
lament, took up their line of march in every direction off to sea.
"The sight
startled the people on board the steamer, who had often witnessed it before,
and for some minutes there ensued a general silence. For our own part, we were
quite amazed and overawed at the spectacle. We had seen nothing like it before.
We had seen White Mountain Notches and Niagara Falls in our own land, and the
vastness of the wide and deep ocean, which was separating us from it. We had
seen something of art's magnificence in the old world; its cloud-capped towers,
gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, but we had never witnessed sublimity to be
compared to that rising of sea-birds from Ailsa Craig. They were of countless
varieties in kind and size, from the largest goose to the smallest marsh bird,
and of every conceivable variety of dismal note. Off they moved in wild and
alarmed route, like a people going into exile, filling the air far and wide,
with their reproachful lament at the wanton cruelty that had broken them up and
driven them into captivity.
"We really felt remorse at
it; and the thought might have occurred to us how easy it would have been for
them, if they had known that the little, smoking speck that was laboring along
the sea-surface beneath them had been the cause of their banishment, to have
settled down upon it and engulfed it out of sight forever.
"We felt astonished
that we had never heard before of this wonderful haunt of sea-fowl, and that no
one had ever written a book upon it. It struck us really as one of the wonders
of the world. And not us alone. Others, not at all given to the marvellous,
declared it surpassed everything they had ever before witnessed. We supposed
the mountain must have been quite deserted from the myriads that had flown
away; but lifting the glass to it, as we were leaving its border, we were
appalled to find it still alive with the myriads that were left behind. They
kept leaving and leaving until our steamer got far beyond the Craig, and till
we could no longer discern their departure with the telescope.
"And it was
miles off into the dusky Irish Sea, before we saw the ebbing of their mighty
movement, and that they were beginning to return. We felt relieved to see them
going back. It had scarcely occurred to us in our surprise, that they were not leaving their native cliffs forever.
Slowly and sadly they seemed to return, while the eye sought in vain to ken the
outskirts of their mighty caravan. And Ailsa Craig had sunk far into our rear,
and quite sensibly diminished in the distance, before the rearmost of the feathered
host had disappeared from our sight.
"The
excitement occasioned us considerable depression of spirits, from which we were
not entirely relieved until night came down upon the St. George's Channel, and
the protracted northern twilight could no longer disclose objects to our
wearied vision. Then after refreshing ourselves with some substantial
confectionery, with which dear George Thompson had kindly stuffed our pockets
from a shop at Greenock, before leaving "the land of cakes," our beloved
fellow-passenger and ourself, after sundry fond remembrances of the other side
of the ocean, some expectations of next day's greeting in Dublin, and some
grateful sense, as we trust, of the goodness that had not forgotten us amid all
our dangers by sea and land, we forgot what we had seen, and whereabouts we
were, in the arms of oblivious sleep."
To do justice to the memory
of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, to his character and work, would require genius
and inspiration like his own.
Nor, perhaps, would this cheap
age even then understand nor comprehend it.
It manufactures
sham and shoddy at too many of its mills, political, literary, social, moral
and religious.
It quotes Pope and
Burns about an "honest man," but seems not to know him when he comes.
It celebrated the
birthday of [Scottish poet] Robert Burns [1759-1796] with much pomp and
demonstration in less than one month after it hung [abolitionist] John Brown
[1800-1859] for a heroism and devotion to freedom and humanity, which began,
rekindled with divine fervor, where the zeal of LaFayette for a white man's
liberty paled out of human sight.
And socially, morally
and religiously it [this "cheap age"] had hung Rogers long before, in
the same persecuting spirit that burned his illustrious ancestor [the first
English Protestant martyr, Rev. John Rogers (1500-1555] in the [1555]
Smithfield pyre [under English Queen Mary (1553-1558)].
In the true spirit of
martyrdom did Rogers, like John Brown, join the anti-slavery movement in an
hour of peril. Garrison had been mobbed in Boston, as was said, "in broad
day, by Boston's best men in broadcloth, gentlemen of property and
standing"; driven from a female anti-slavery concert of prayer which he
had been invited to attend and address. Mr. Garrison said of the spectacle when
all the streets near the place of meeting were thronged with a mob burning with
murderous intent:
"It was an awful,
sublime and soul-thrilling scene‹enough, one would suppose, to melt adamantine
hearts, and make even fiends of darkness stagger and retreat. Indeed the clear,
untremulous voice of that Christian heroine, Miss Parker, in prayer
occasionally awed the ruffians into silence, and she was heard distinctly, even
in the midst of their hisses and yells and curses."
Garrison withdrew
from the prayer meeting and the mayor entered in obedience to the wishes of the
fiendish crew, and dispersed it. Then the cry, the shriek, the yell was,
"we must have Garrison." "Out with him! Lynch him!"
Some of the rioters
discovered and seized him. They drew him furiously to a window and were about
to thrust him out, when one of them relented and said,
"Let us not kill him out-right."
But they coiled a rope
about his body, nearly stripped him of his clothing, then dragged him through
the streets till he was finally rescued by posse comitatus and at frightful
peril was at length got to the mayor's office. There he was provided with
clothing and from thence sent to jail, as "a disturber of the peace,"
the mayor and his advisers declaring that "the only way to preserve his
life."
In Alton Rev. Elijah Parish
Lovejoy, too, another anti-slavery editor, had been shot and killed by a mob,
five bullets being taken from his body, three from his breast, and that, too,
in 1837, only a few months before Mr. Rogers removed with his family to Concord
to conduct the Herald of Freedom.
So that in assuming such
position, he also, as might be said, "took his life in his hand." For
Concord itself was no stranger to the mob at that time and for years afterward
was the consecrated guardian of slavery.
As a member of the Plymouth
Congregational church, both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had cooperated earnestly,
faithfully in works of religious benevolence and charity. But when they
demanded that those in bonds in their own country should be remembered even
"as bound with them," they were repulsed as disorderly, contumacious
disturbers of the peace of the church and its minister, who, at that time, was
among the most virulent opposers of the whole anti-slavery enterprise.
But they did not withdraw
from their church connection till they saw that southern slaveholders were more
welcome to the pulpit and sacramental table, than were faithful, devoted
abolitionists, whose moral and religious integrity of character, as well as
soundness of opinion, were above reproach or suspicion. Rogers, beyond most
public men, ever had unshaken faith in the people, though conservative while a
politician, and orthodox in his religious faith. When he left the church he
investigated its character anew and for himself. The claims of the clergy to
prerogative in things temporal as well as spiritual, he soon learned to hold in
profound disesteem. To no one man then living, or who has appeared since, does
the world owe more than to him for exposing and rebuking the arrogance and
insolence not to say down-right fraud and dishonesty, of a ministry whose
ruling, directing power in all the great popular demonstrations of the land,
north as well as south, was exerted in support and sanctification of slavery.
The exceptions to this charge were too few to change the result, as will appear
in the progress of this work.
Mr. Rogers never doubted
for a moment that the people, well and wisely taught, would abolish slavery and
cease to oppress one another. And so like the Great Emancipator of Nazareth, he
directed all his sternest strokes and rebukes at the priests and rulers, who
really "bound the heavy burdens and laid them on men's shoulders [Matthew
23:4]," as in Judea, two thousand years ago. He and his associates of the
Garrison school of abolitionists relied solely on the power of moral and
spiritual truth to rescue the slave as well as to redeem and save the world.
They formed, they joined no
political party. They abjured the ballot altogether as a reforming or restoring
agency, as much as they did the bullet, the only specie redemption of the
ballot, in every government of force. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were members and
officers of the New England Non-Resistance Society. And none ever more highly
adorned the doctrine of their profession than they.
As one with vision anointed
to perceive all moral and spiritual truth, Rogers seemed to stand almost alone.
His editorial writings are witness to this, and will be to more than the next
generation. It were well for man and womankind, if whole volumes of them,
judiciously selected, could be reproduced and scattered everywhere, like the
shining constellation among the dimmer stars. His words to-day are, many of
them, wondrously fresh and new.
The temperance cause had no
firmer or more consistent friend. The peace societies had best of reasons to be
proud of his support, in word and deed. To him human life was sacred as the
life of God. Once, at a grand Peace gathering, it was strenuously argued by
most of the members who spoke, that human life could and should be taken by
divine command. And the president of the society himself made an argument in
defence of all the slaughters of the Canaanites and other tribes and peoples,
men, women and children, by Moses, Joshua and their destroying hosts, because
perpetrated by command of God.
It was at one of the last
meetings Rogers ever attended, and he was then too feeble to bear an active
part m the deliberations. But after listening a good while to scripture text
and learned logic under Levitical law, he rose to his feet and in low voice
asked: "Does our brother yonder say that if God commanded him, he would
take a sword and use it in slaying human beings, and innocent, helpless human
beings? "Yes, if God commanded," was the answer. "Well, I
wouldn't," responded Rogers, and sank back into his seat, amid loud cheers
of evident approval and admiration.
Woman, to him, was in all
rights, privileges and prerogatives, the full equal of man. He was a Christian
in the divinest, sublimest sense of that still mysterious and much abused word.
And as such his kingdom was not of this world. And so he could neither vote in,
nor ask others to vote in nor to fight for any government based on military
power.
As husband and father, none
ever knew one in whom his family were more supremely felicitated. As companion
and friend, blessed and happy were all those who enjoyed his confidence and
esteem. Gentle, simple, tender, kind, ready to sacrifice his own comfort;
sharing on occasion, like General Washington, his room and bed with a colored
man, and yet always discriminating in high degree; with tastes most refined;
ever ready to criticise, even censure a friend, however dear, when he deemed it
just and demanded; firm as his own Ailsa Craig, whenever or wherever, or
however a moral principal was in jeopardy; running over with music, poetry, and
culture of every kind, he was a man, the like of whom the world has seldom seen‹may
not soon see again.