Letter-1854, October 23

Oct. 23, 1854

   The intolerant and proscriptive spirit of slavery has recently manifested itself in two marked cases. The first is the case of Rev. Dr. Still, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who had a flourishing and prosperous mission among the Shawnee Indians; but because he believed and taught the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, the doctrines of humanity, and of the Bible, in reference to the rights of his fellow men he was prescribed by the slaveocuracy, and, at the instigation and by the management of his Rev. brother in Christ—intolerant, sensual, slaveholding missionary to the same tribe of Indians—the Rev. Mr. Johnson of the same Methodist Episcopal Church, of whom I spoke in my first letter—the mission of Dr. Still was not recognized at the conclusion of the treaty, and in consequence he was made a trespasser upon their lands, and was obliged to break up his mission, sacrifice all his property except $800 which a brother, more Christian than the former, though one of the red men of the forest, gave him for that which, had he willed to do so, he could have taken without compensation—and to leave the country. He has now made a “claim” a few miles from us, and is interesting himself in the establishment of a college under the control of the M. E. Church North as they termed, but which term he repudiates, as it implies a voluntary division of the church north and south, instead of which he considers the southern portion suceders.

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[The Daily Sentinel, Milwaukee, November 4th, 1854, Webb scrapbook, v. 2, p. 3.]