[204:1] A full account of Hopkins's long-sustained activity against both slavery and the slave-trade is given in Park's "Memoir of Hopkins," pp. 114-157. His sermons on the subject began in 1770. His monumental "Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, with an Address to Slave-holders," was published in 1776. For additional information as to the antislavery attitude of the church at this period, and especially that of Stiles, see review of "The Minister's Wooing," by L. Bacon ("New Englander," vol. xviii., p. 145). [204:2] I have not been able to find a copy of this poem, the character of which, however, is well known. The son of Aaron Cleveland, William, was a silversmith at Norwich, among whose grandsons may be named President Grover Cleveland, and Aaron Cleveland Cox, later known as Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe. [204:3] Dr. A. Green's Life of his father, in "Monthly Christian Advocate." [206:1] Park, "Memoir of Hopkins," p. 112. [206:2] Buckley, "The Methodists," Appendix, pp. 688, 689. [207:1] See Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," pp. 267-278, where the subject is treated fully and with characteristic fairness. CHAPTER XIII. RECONSTRUCTION. Seven years of war left the American people exhausted, impoverished, disorganized, conscious of having come into possession of a national existence, and stirred with anxious searchings of heart over the question what new institutions should succeed to those overthrown in the struggle for independence. Like questions pervaded the commonwealth of American Christians through all its divisions. The interconfessional divisions of the body ecclesiastic were about to prove themselves a more effectual bar to union than the political and territorial divisions of the body politic. The religious divisions were nearly equal in number to the political. Naming them in the order in which they had settled themselves on the soil of the new nation, they were as follows: 1. The Protestant Episcopalians; 2. The Reformed Dutch; 3. The Congregationalists; 4. The Roman Catholics; 5. The Friends; 6. The Baptists; 7. The Presbyterians; 8. The Methodists; to which must be added three sects which up to this time had almost exclusively to do with the German language and the German immigrant population, to wit, 9. The German Reformed; 10. The Lutherans; 11. The Moravians. Some of these, as the Congregationalists and the Baptists, were of so simple and elastic a polity, so self-adaptive to whatever new environment, as to require no effort to adjust themselves. Others, as the Dutch and the Presbyterians, had already organized themselves as independent of foreign spiritual jurisdiction. Others still, as the German Reformed, the Moravians, and the Quakers, were content to remain for years to come in a relation of subordination to foreign centers of organization. But there were three communions, of great prospective importance, which found it necessary to