The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War by Jared A. Brock

Author:Jared A. Brock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th Century, African American, Biographies & Memoirs, Civil War Period (1850-1877), History, Slavery, United States
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-05-15T03:00:00+00:00

PROVEN INNOCENT

Back at Dawn, a public meeting was called at the BAI premises in the autumn of 1851. One of the BAI’s founding trustees, Toronto Congregationalist minister John Roaf, presided over the assembly. The London committee had sent Scoble to investigate the conniving ways of Newman and Mathews before making any decisions about how the British could best help the Dawn community, and it turned out to be a battle of nation versus colony.

Mathews, who had rushed back to Dawn after his disastrous meeting with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, accused Scoble of trying to take the BAI away from the American Baptists in order to serve the British society’s interests. A colleague of Garrison’s, Samuel J. May Jr., wrote to the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard saying that Scoble was “a crafty villain who would not be worth 120 pounds on a Richmond auction block.” He promised to supply documents to support Mathews’s accusations. (Later, he would say that Garrison had lost them.) Others at the meeting also claimed that Josiah and the anti-Garrisonian Lewis Tappan were trying to put the British back in charge.

The convention made a thorough examination of the institute’s records and could find no fault with Josiah’s mission of raising more funds to help it. As Josiah matter-of-factly reported in his memoir, “The originator of the slander against me, denied having made it; it was proved upon him, and the whole convention unanimously repudiated the false charges.”15

Hiram Wilson later supported Josiah in a letter to a friend. He wrote: “That money was spent there unwisely and not with good economy there is no doubt. [But] [t]hat funds have been perverted or dishonestly applied has never yet been proved, and I believe never can be.”

John Scoble told Josiah that a bank draft was waiting in the hands of Amos Lawrence, and whenever Josiah wished to return to England, the cost of his journey would be completely covered.

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