“At the Fulton Ferry there are two lines of omnibuses, one white and the other blue. I had been accustomed to go in them indifferently; but one day I saw a little paper stuck upon one of them, saying: ‘Colored people not allowed to ride in this omnibus.’ I instantly got out. There are men who stand at the door of these omnibus lines, urging passengers into one or the other. I am very well known to all of them; and the next day, when I came to the place, the gentleman serving asked: ‘Won’t you ride, sir?’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I am too much of a negro to ride in that omnibus.’ I called the attention of every one I met to that fact, and said to them: ‘Don’t ride in that omnibus, which violates your principles, and my principles, and common decency at the same time.’ I do not know whether this had any influence, but I do know that after a fortnight’s time I had occasion to look in and the placard was gone.” But perhaps the most important, at all events the hardest-fought, battle of this era was in behalf of the liberty of ministers of the Gospel to preach in their pulpits for the slave and against the atrocities of slavery. It sprang from the publication, by an influential New York daily paper, of an article in which it was threatened that clergymen who spoke in their pulpits upon slavery “would have their coats rolled in the dirt.” Mr. Beecher at once took up the glove in his own defence and that of his brethren who thought it their duty to preach on this subject. He entered into an examination of the whole status of the slave with great thoroughness, and gathered his materials for defence and attack from Southern sources. A report made to the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia in 1833 says: “They have no Bible to read by their own firesides; they have no family altars; and when in affliction, sickness, or death, they have no minister to address to them the consolations of the Gospel. “They are destitute of the privileges of the Gospel, and ever will be, under the present state of things. They may justly be considered the heathen of this country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any country in the world.” “Says Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, in a case brought against defendant for shooting and wounding a _woman_ who endeavored to run away from a whipping: ‘With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person and in his posterity to live without knowledge, and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that others may reap the fruits.’” Aroused by such testimony from reports of religious bodies and the decisions of the courts, he exclaims, with hot indignation: “Yet the pulpit, whose echoes roll over the heathenism of the globe, must be dumb!