Christopher Newman Hall - Abolition & American Civil War

Abolition & American Civil War

During the 1860s, dissenting from the British government's position, Newman Hall passionately supported the north in the American Civil War. He disapproved of secession by southern states. England should side with the North, he wrote, particularly because emancipation of the slaves is just. He felt so strongly that he published one of his few non-theological books: The American War. A Lecture delivered in London, October 20, 1862. Newman Hall visited the United States during the Civil War, and published a passionate anti-slavery speech co-authored by Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ward Beecher.

At the Great Union and Emancipation Meeting at Exeter Hall, London, on 29 January 1863 in support of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the crowning speech of the evening was given by Christopher Newman Hall. The meeting was a huge success, showing support for abolition in the United States of America, and reported by Harper's Weekly to have been one of the largest and most enthusiastic meetings ever held in London; its overspill of people who could not get into the packed meeting itself, was formed into three large, ancillary, open-air meetings. Subsequently Newman Hall made extensive tours in the United States. At Washington, he was invited to open Congress with prayer, and in the House of Representatives he delivered an address on international relations.

Read more about this topic:  Christopher Newman Hall

Famous quotes containing the words civil war, abolition, american, civil and/or war:

    During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.
    —Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    I am gradually drifting to the opinion that this Rebellion can only be crushed finally by either the execution of all the traitors or the abolition of slavery. Crushed, I mean, so as to remove all danger of its breaking out again in the future.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)

    An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    ...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.
    Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)

    Soldier, there is a war between the mind
    And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
    For that the poet is always in the sun,
    Patches the moon together in his room
    To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
    Up down. It is a war that never ends.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)