Welsh Journals

was in close and regular contact. One such was the Rev. Benjamin Williams Chidlaw,58 whose attitude to slavery affords an instructive contrast to Everett's, especially since no other Welsh-American so fully exemplified the prevailing evangelical temper. Born in Bala in 1811 Chidlaw was ten years old when he emigrated with his parents to the Welsh settlement of Paddy's Run in south-western Ohio. Having graduated from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, he became a licensed minister in 1835 and then embarked on the first of a series of preaching tours of North Wales Congregational churches. On the second of these, in 1839, he employed Finney's revival techniques, and especially the enquiry meeting, to such effect that he produced mass conversions, especially at Llanuwchllyn, while making his name a by-word for revivalism.59 He held a number of pastorates in the Paddy's Run region of Ohio but in 1846 left in order to become the first com- missioned missionary of the American Sunday School Union. During forty-six years of service he travelled thousands of miles through the scattered settlements of the West, opening Sunday schools, preaching and distributing religious literature. In Chid- law's case benevolence took the form of an almost exclusive com- mitment to the campaign against drink. Reacting against the moderation of temperance societies like that founded by Everett, he advocated total abstinence as the surest way of giving society a more homogeneous moral character.60 But while he denounced slavery as cruel and unrighteous and was apprehensive lest it ultimately break up the Union and involve Americans 'in all the horrors of a civil and servile war', he did not share Everett's passionate conviction that immediate abolition was the only remedy for the evil. Rather did he believe, as did many of his contemporaries, including Abraham Lincoln, that emancipation was possible only if the freed Negroes were colonized in West Africa. In a letter prompted by a discussion of American slavery in the Dysgedydd in 1837 by which time, incidentally, it was already obvious to most observers that colonization was doomed to fail, Chidlaw wrote: If the blacks are freed and left in this country among the whites they can never prosper. Our efforts now are to settle them in their own The Dictionary of Welsh Biography 74-75. 59 Robert Tudur Jones, op. cit., 200-1. 60 B. W. Chidlaw, The Story of My Life (Cincinnati, c. 1890).