Observations about the Boston Council of Congregationalists in 1865:

Even mild and bespectacled Alonzo Quint, who had just returned from service as a Union army chaplain, burst out in protest during a discussion of the civil rights of rebels, declaring them “uncommonly stupid and ignorant” and “unfit to come back and be trusted with a vote.” Quint let fly again at the delegation from Great Britain, who were present at the council. Still deeply angry over British support for the Confederacy, and egged on by hisses from other delegates, he denounced them as “always ready to follow the powerful, and always read to crush the weak,” “robbing in India [and] plundering in Ireland.”

Sometimes bitterness boiled over. A report on evangelization in the South prompted Samuel Pomeroy, who was both a Republican senator from Kansas and president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, to declare that it would suit him better “if we spoke out a little more plainly about hanging somebody.” When the delegates responded with applause, Pomeroy pressed on: “I am very willing to mingle our justice with mercy to the common people of the South . . . but it does seem to me it is time somebody was hung.” Pausing for yet another round of applause, he further advised that “some wholesome hanging, I think, would have settled this question in the minds of the American people long ago; and I do not believe that a convention, even of this character, composed largely of clergymen, — men who love forgiveness and mercy, — would not be harmed if it adopted a little stiffer resolution on this question.” (Margaret Bendroth, The Last Puritans, 55)

This makes Thabiti Anyabwile look restrained.