Another powerful cause that contributes to leaven the entire population into one mind on the subject of slavery, is the double migration that annually takes place of people of the Southern States to the North, in summer, and of the inhabitants of the free States to the South in winter.  Hence follow family alliances, the interchange of hospitalities, and a fusion of sentiments, so that the slavery interest spreads its countless ramifications through every corner of the free north.

Another cause, and perhaps the most powerful of all, is the community of religious fellowship in leading denominations.  The Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians of two schools, are severally but one body, all over the Union, and as a matter of course, all are tainted with slavery, and for consistency’s sake, make common cause against abolition.  The pamphlet of James G. Birney, entitled “The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery,"[A] offers the amplest proof that the Methodist Episcopal, the Baptist, the Presbyterian, and the Anglican Episcopal Churches are committed, both in the persons of their eminent ministers, and by resolutions passed in a church capacity, to the monstrous assertion that slavery, so far from being a moral evil, which it is the duty of the church to seek to remove, is a Christian institution resting on a scriptural basis; this assertion is repeated in the numerous quotations of the pamphlet, in a variety and force of expression that show the utterers were resolved not to leave their meaning in the smallest doubt.  Indeed, it might be supposed, from the perusal of this pamphlet, that the suppression of abolitionism, if not the maintenance of slavery, was one of the first duties of the Christian churches in America.

[Footnote A:  Published by Ward & Co., Paternoster-row, London.]

The following extracts are offered in illustration:—­

    THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.—­“Resolved, That it is the sense
    of the Georgia Annual Conference, that slavery, as it exists in
    the United States, is not a moral evil.”

“The Rev. Wilbur Fisk, D.D., late President of the (Methodist) Wesleyan University in Connecticut—­’The New Testament enjoins obedience upon the slave as an obligation due to a present rightful authority.’”

    “Rev. E.D.  Simms, Professor in Randolph Macon College, a
    Methodist Institution—­’Thus we see, that the slavery which
    exists in America, was founded in right.’”

“The Rev. William Winans, of Mississippi, in the General Conference, in 1836—­’Yes, sir, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, should be slaveholders,—­yes, he repeated it boldly—­there should be members, and deacons, and ELDERS and BISHOPS, too, who were slave-holders.’”

“The Rev. J.H.  Thornwell, at a public meeting, held in South Carolina, supported