THE AMERICAN BOARD AND SLAVE TRADE.
By Editor
In No. 1 of present volume, we published an extract from an article in the N. Y. Independent, by Mrs. H. B. Stowe, in which she said that "the Episcopal Convention in New York, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston, being importuned, have refused to testify against an inhumanity the most loathsome and horrible that ever defaced human history—the Slave Trade." So far as the American Board is concerned, it appears that Mrs. S. was laboring under a misapprehension when penning the above. From a subsequent issue of the same paper we quote the following: "Quite a misapprehension has gone abroad touching the position of the American Board upon the African Slave Trade. Our esteemed contributor, Mrs. Stowe, in an article published by us last week, states that 'the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston, being importuned, refused to testify against an inhumanity the most loathsome and horrible that ever defaced human history—the Slave Trade.' We are sure she will be glad to learn that this is quite incorrect. Had Mrs. Stowe seen The Missionary Herald for November, before writing her article, she would have been led to a very different conclusion as to the attitude taken by the Board at Boston upon the Slave Trade. In the report of the Prudential Committee, accepted through the report of the subcommittee on the African Missions, the Board did 'testify' against the Slave Trade in the most emphatic manner, as 'an enormous evil—that pollutes whatever it touches and desolates wherever it goes.'" We are happy to be able to correct, so far as we have been instrumental in circulating, any false imputation. By the above item, the American Board is freed from the charge; but nothing is said of the Episcopal Convention. Nor does it change, in its general aspect, the position of the churches in their silent complicity with the evil of slavery.