In 1863, Henry Ward Beecher—an American abolitionist preacher and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin—visited England, and became acquainted with Joseph Parker, Charles Spurgeon, and other prominent evangelicals.

Beecher had been reading Spurgeon’s sermons in the American editions, and he realized that they were being heavily edited (in a word: bowdlerized). Where Spurgeon had made statements that could be used to defend the abolition of slavery, those passages were kept in the British publications, but omitted in the American editions!

Beecher questioned Spurgeon about this, and Spurgeon publicly repudiated slavery. This resulted in a considerable hit to Spurgeon’s income when he had just started his college; the publication of his works was effectively halted in the United States since the pro-slavery publishers could no longer pretend that Spurgeon was on their side.

Source: G. Holden Pike, Dr. Parker and His Friends, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904, pp. 193–194.