though at the same time lashing out at them on the platform and in the newspapers. He asserted that wherever they exerted “their influence, there languishes the cause of slaves, and there abound apologists for the oppression.” Eaton, who had a favorable impression of the more enlightened slaveholders as a result of teaching in Virginia in his youth, seems to have been chosen to represent his colleagues in disputes with Smith.
When the Peterboro reformer became incensed in 1841 at a visit to the campus of the Southern Elder Jonathan Davis, as well as at the suppression of the third antislavery society and the failure of the Seminary to support his new Liberty party, Eaton defended the faculty in a long letter to the Hamilton Palladium. He made it clear that, since they had not identified themselves with the abolitionists, it did not follow that they were pro-slavery. Elder Davis, he pointed out, had not come to reconcile the students to slavery, nor had he mentioned the subject on the Hill. Professor Maginnis, whose guest he had been, heartily opposed Negro servitude, but was convinced that the evil could be righted peaceably only with the help of Southerners whom Northerners should treat courteously and invite to discuss the subject without rancor or bitterness. Such an approach to the problem failed to make any impression on Smith whose avowed and constant purpose was “to abolitionize the public mind.”
The Hamilton Baptist Church, like the Seminary, refused to become involved in the slavery question. Jacob Knapp, the firebrand evangelist, had bitterly denounced a representative of the American Colonization Society from its pulpit in 1841 and a year later urged the church to declare slavery under all circumstances a sin. After extensive discussion, in which it was evident that the members agreed with his sentiments, they nevertheless decided against “the passing of any specific resolutions on the subject of slavery &to such a mode of church action; in general” and concurred “in the opinion, that by their public profession of Religion, &by their church covenant, they have clearly declared themselves against slavery as a sin, together with all other moral evil.”
Though the church avoided dissension on the slavery question, Knapp, with his genius for controversy, was able to plunge it into bitter turmoil on his own account. A plain, uncouth, loud, and uncompromising revival preacher, he was widely known throughout the