Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro continued. In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of petition, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amusement, and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the army and the militia. He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to insult and outrage.
One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a positive stand. Unfortunately, as so often happens, it was on the side of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed. We have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his indictment, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery." He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month to repent or withdraw from its conferences, by 1836 it had so drifted away from its original position as to disclaim "any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave, as it existed in the slaveholding states of the union." Meanwhile in the churches of the North there was the most insulting discrimination; in the Baptist Church in Hartford the pews for Negroes were boarded up in front, and in Stonington, Conn., the floor was cut out of a Negro's pew by order of the church authorities. In Boston, in a church that did not welcome and that made little provision for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He decided that there should be some place where there might be more freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.
Into all this proscription, burlesque, and crime, and denial of the fundamental principles of Christianity, suddenly came the program of the Abolitionists; and it spoke with tongues of fire, and had all the vigor and force of a crusade.