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La Roy Sunderland: The Alienation of an Abolitionist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

J. R. Jacob
J. R. Jacob
Affiliation:
John Jay College of the City University of New York
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Extract

In November 1842, La Roy Sunderland, Orange Scott and Jotham Horton, leading abolitionists and ministers, withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first issue of the True Wesleyan, Scott's anti-slavery newspaper, published an announcement of their withdrawal and their reasons for deciding to do so. They could no longer serve a church that condoned slavery and that scarcely permitted delegates to its conferences to raise the issue there. The three dissenters saw what they regarded as the high-handed tactics of the bishops in preventing conferences from considering anti-slavery resolutions as resting upon ‘the assumptions of Rome’! This act of withdrawal and the formation of the wesleyan Methodist Church die following May came after a six years' struggle between the radical abolitionists within the Church and their more conservative brethren, principally the bishops, who had stifled discussion of the slavery issue in order to preserve the Church as a national entity. This Wesleyan schism is a token of the change that is the subject of this essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 1972 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

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