Alexander Campbell arrived from Ireland in 1809, found his father had already written the Declaration and Address and agreed with it, and spent the next fifty-seven years as the movement's editor, publisher, debater and college president. He ran the Christian Baptist from 1823 and then the Millennial Harbinger from 1830 to 1866, founded Bethany College in what is now West Virginia in 1840, published his own translation of the New Testament, and served in the Virginia constitutional convention. His 1829 debate with Robert Owen in Cincinnati on the evidences of Christianity ran for eight days and drew a national audience; his 1837 debate with Bishop John Purcell on Roman Catholicism did similar. Campbell owned enslaved people at points in his life and freed them, held that slavery was not sinful in itself while opposing its extension, and worked to keep the movement out of the sectional split that broke the Methodists and Baptists in the 1840s — a stance that kept the movement nominally whole through the Civil War at the cost of saying almost nothing.