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:

    Colonel Shaw
    and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
    on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
    propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)

    They have been waiting for us in a foetor
    Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
    Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
    Of the expropriated mycologist.
    Derek Mahon (b. 1941)

    The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I’d call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America’s whole culture—aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn’t part of the local atmosphere.
    Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)