Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. DURING the May of the Conference year, 1844, I attended the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which met in Green Street Church, New York, as a spectator, and saw and heard all that occurred in that historic Conference on the subject of Bishop James O. Andrew and Rev. Francis A. Harding, as slaveholding bishop and minister. Bishop Andrew was suspended from episcopal functions as long as the impediment of his connection with slavery should remain. The' Conference refused to reverse the action of the Baltimore Conference, by which Mr. Harding had been expelled from the Conference for being a slaveholding minister. There were giants in that body on both sides of the great debate, which lasted through several days. That was a very live question in our section of the country, and some twenty thousand of our members in the Eastern and Northern States seceded from the Methodist Episcopal Church, and organized the Wesleyan Methodist Connection. The whole scene of that General Conference is mapped out in my memory as vividly and strongly as though it occurred yesterday. The great speeches on the side of the North, were by Ham- line, Peck, Bangs, Olin, Durbin, John A. Collins of Baltimore, and others. On the South side, William A. Smith, of Virginia; George P. Pierce, ofGeorgia; Ignatius A. Few, of Georgia; William Capers, of South Carolina; and John Early, of Virginia. The Ohio Conference delegation impressed me very strongly. It included James B. Finley and Joseph M. Trimble, whose resolution was the one at last adopted, and it included, also, William H. Raper, who impressed me as the noblest Roman of them all. Edmund S. Janes and L,. L. Hamline were elected bishops. In more orderly and elaborate form, a few years ago I carefully wrote up my impres... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.