capacity for shielding their flock from consorting with “niggers,” by availing themselves of a technicality to relet the pew to a member who was not cursed with a dark skin.  On another Lord’s day, in another stronghold of Boston Christianity, Oliver Johnson ran the battery of “indignant frowns of a large number of the congregation” for daring to take a fellow-Christian with a skin not colored like his own into his pew, to listen to Dr. Beecher.  The good people of the old Baptist meeting-house, at Hartford, Conn., had evidently no intention of disturbing the heavenly calm of their religious devotions by so much as a thought of believers with black faces; for by boarding up the “negro pews” in front and leaving only peep-holes for their occupants, they secured themselves from a sight of the obnoxious creatures, while Jehovah, who is no respecter of persons, was in His holy place.  Incredible as it may seem, a church in the town of Stoughton, Mass., to rid itself of even a semblance of Christian fellowship and equality with a colored member, did actually cut the floor from under the colored member’s pew!

These cruel and anti-Christian distinctions in the churches affected Garrison in the most painful manner.  He says: 

“I never can look up to these wretched retreats for my colored brethren without feeling my soul overwhelmed with emotions of shame, indignation, and sorrow.”

He had such an intimate acquaintance with members of this despised caste in Boston and Philadelphia, and other cities, and appreciated so deeply their intrinsic worth and excellence, as men and brethren, that he felt their insults and injuries as if they were done to himself.  He knew that beneath many a dark skin he had found real ladies and gentlemen, and he knew how sharper than a serpent’s tooth to them was the American prejudice against their color.  In 1832, just after a visit to Philadelphia, where he was the guest of Robert Purvis, and had seen much of the Fortens, he wrote a friend: 

“I wish you had been with me in Philadelphia to see what I saw, to hear what I heard, and to experience what I felt in associating with many colored families.  There are colored men and women, young men and young ladies, in that city, who have few superiors in refinement, in moral worth, and in all that makes the human character worthy of admiration and praise.”

Strange to say, notwithstanding all their merits and advancement, the free people of color received nothing but disparagement and contempt from eminent divines like Dr. Leonard W. Bacon and the emissaries of the Colonization Society.  They were “the most abandoned wretches on the face of the earth”; they were “all that is vile, loathsome, and dangerous”; they were “more degraded and miserable than the slaves,” and ad infinitum through the whole gamut of falsehood and traduction.  It was human for the American people to hate a class whom they had so deeply wronged, and altogether human for them to justify their atrocious treatment by blackening before the world the reputation of the said class.  That this was actually done is the best of all proofs of the moral depravity of the nation which slavery had wrought.