John Bell Robinson

The argument over slavery and secession, abolition and states' rights, burned just as hot among Northerners as it did between the people of North and South. In the principal cities of the North, newspaper editors fought long, violent campaigns in their columns, politicians debated the questions endlessly in city halls and state legislatures, and church ministers attacked their ideological foes with the weapons of Biblical quotation and Christian theology. Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," set the scene for bitter accusations and feuding among the leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which divided in 1844 on the question of slavery and deposed its leader, a bishop who had married a slave-owning woman. This incident angered and inspired John Bell Robinson to collect sermons, letters, and articles into Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery, published in the midst of the war...