[Footnote 1:  Hart, 221, citing Liberator, V, 59.]

[Footnote 2:  Hart, 216, citing Channing, Works, V. 57.]

With the forties came division in the Church—­a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades.  Could the Church really countenance slavery?  Could a bishop hold a slave?  These were to become burning questions.  In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted.  In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year.  The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.

The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to beat back a resistless tide.  In the Mexican War it was freely urged by the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its assistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the North.[1] Nothing of all this was to be.  Out of the academic shades of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame.  In “The Present Crisis” James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was like a stern call of the whole country to duty: 

[Footnote 1:  Justin H. Smith:  The War with Mexico, I, 107.]

  Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
  In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
  Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
  Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
  And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.

* * * * *

  Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
  Ere her cause bring fame and profit and ’tis prosperous to be just;
  Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
  Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
  And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

* * * * *

  New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
  They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
  Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
  Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
  Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.