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.However, during the Civil War, nativist opposition to emancipation and racialequality led to a marriage of convenience with pro-Southern politicians likeWood and Horatio Seymour who had support in the immigrant community.Religion and SlaveryWhile many abolitionists, both White and Black, drew on religious principlesto sustain them during a long, difficult and dangerous struggle, there were alsoprominent Northern religious leaders arrayed under the pro-slavery banner, in-cluding New York City s Roman Catholic Archbishop John Hughes (Singer,2005a, pp.195 196; Singer, 2003e, p.13; Hassard, 1866; Andrews, 1934,pp.60 78; Allen, 1994).Hughes, an immigrant from Ireland, became the act-ing head of the New York Roman Catholic diocese in 1838.He was appointedits bishop in 1842 and an archbishop of the church in 1850.Biographers spec-ulate that Hughes s relationship with the Rodrigue family, refugees from theHaitian Revolution of 1793, and their accounts of massacres there contributedto an exaggerated fear of slave insurrection and a belief in the inferiority ofAfricans.His endorsement of the slave system also may have reflected theprocess of assimilation and Americanization by Irish immigrants who oftencompeted with free and enslaved Black labor in the marketplace.In 1853 and 1854, Archbishop Hughes traveled in Cuba and the Ameri-can South where he was a guest on a number of plantations and witnessed theslave system firsthand.In May 1854, Hughes delivered a sermon at old St.Patrick s Cathedral, in what is now Soho, where he discussed his experiencesduring this trip and defended slavery.In his sermon, Hughes cited passages from the Gospel According to John tojustify slavery.He compared the slave master to the father of a family, and toldhis congregation,  Is not the father of the family invested with the power ofGod that he is sovereign, commanding and expecting to be obeyed as heshould? Hughes claimed to recognize that  slavery is an evil, but declared itwas  not an absolute and unmitigated evil because it brought Africans toChristianity.He believed that conditions for Africans were actually improvedby enslavement.He claimed that during his trip he had  taken pains to inquireof some who had been brought to Cuba as slaves from the Coast of Africa,Debate 83whether they wished to return, and they invariably stated they did not; and thereason is that their condition here, degraded as it is, is much better than it wasat home,.it is really a mitigation of their lot to be sold into foreign bondage(New York Times, 1854a, p.4).In his column in the Metropolitan Record, hewrote:  We of course believe that no genuine Christian no decent manwould be engaged in this kind of business: still, we cannot discover the crime,even of the slaver, in snatching them from the butcheries of their native land(Andrews, 1934, p.65).Archbishop Hughes continued his public support for slavery during theCivil War.He warned Europeans who questioned his stance that the suddenemancipation of four million enslaved Africans would deprive them of thecommodities on which their national economies depended.In May 1861, hedeclared that efforts to abolish slavery would violate the United States Consti-tution and demanded that Lincoln resign from the presidency if this was hisgoal (Allen, 1994, p.190).Hughes wrote Secretary of War Cameron threaten-ing that if  the purpose of the war is the abolition of slavery in the South, itwould undermine efforts to recruit troops in New York City (Lee, 1943,p.156; Allen, 1994, p.182).In an October 12, 1861 editorial in the Metropolitan Record, Hughes assertedthat slavery exists by the  Divine permission of God s providence and was de-sirable because it permitted  humane masters to.take care of unfortunate peo-ple (Allen, 1994, 190).He dismissed the immorality of hereditary bondage bycomparing it with the inheritance of original sin by each new generation.Hughes wrote the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina defending statesrights and denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as a violation of prop-erty rights (Allen, 1994, p.190).In a letter to Secretary of State Seward, heblamed the 1863 New York City Draft Riots on an effort  to make black laborequal to white labor (Allen, 1994, p.192).Fugitive Slave LawIn football, and in social struggles, the ball can take a funny and unanticipatedbounce.In 1850, few commentators would have predicted a final victory for theabolitionists in the battle to end slavery.A legislative compromise allowingCalifornia to enter the Union as a free state included clauses in a new FugitiveSlave Law that allowed the seizure and transport back to enslavement of sus-pected runaways without due process.It also mandated that  all good citizensare hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient executiveof this law (Feder, 1967, p.129).Daniel Webster, Senator from Massachusetts and a leading Northern states-man, defended the compromise and the Fugitive Slave law as necessary for the preservation of the Union and to avoid a  convulsion that would dismemberthe nation.In a speech delivered before the Senate, he charged abolitionists with84 New York and Slavery mischiefs that tightened the  bonds of the slave.more firmly than before.He accused them of being impatient with the  slow progress of moral causesin the improvement of mankind and charged,  They prefer the chance of run-ning into utter darkness to living in heavenly light, if that heavenly light benot absolutely without any imperfection (Webster, 1850; Shewmaker, 1990,pp.121 130) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]