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1. All of the articles are about a controversial topic in American History.  The article will present two sides of the issue.

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. Write a one paragraph summary of one the arguments.  Include two examples. (26.4 points)

. Write a one paragraph summary of the other argument. Include two examples. (26.4 points)

. In your final paragraph, select which argument you believe is more convincing and explain why. (26.4 points)

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Slavery and Religion

Was the Bible Proslavery?

By Jeff Forret

The Issue

The issue: As the debate over slavery intensified in the mid-19th century, both supporters and opponents of the institution invoked religion to defend their positions. Was the Bible proslavery or antislavery?

· Arguments that the Bible was proslavery: Many theologians in the South as well as in the North believed that the Bible provided divine sanction for the institution of American slavery. In their view, the curse of Ham (or Canaan) condemned Africans and their descendants to slavery. The biblical patriarchs of the Old Testament owned slaves and nevertheless held favor with God, and the law of Moses offered clear instructions governing the keeping of slaves. In the New Testament, Jesus remained silent on the issue of slavery, never explicitly condemning the institution. Instead, the New Testament is filled with passages imploring slaves to obey their masters. One letter of the apostle Paul also ordered the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his owner. Looking at these passages collectively suggested to many clergymen and southern slaveholders that the Bible justified slavery.

· Arguments that the Bible was antislavery: Abolitionist ministers in the North found ample condemnations of slavery in the Bible. They pointed out that the forms of bondage practiced in biblical times differed markedly from the institution of southern slavery. Slavery was permitted in the Old Testament, but that did not make holding slaves morally right. Like slavery, polygamy and divorce occurred in the Bible, and theologians now denounced them. Slavery, too, had become morally repugnant over time and should be outlawed. Indeed, when God's chosen people were held in slavery in Egypt, God appointed Moses to deliver them to freedom. In the New Testament, Jesus never attacked the institution of slavery directly, but neither did he identify many sins by name. They were nonetheless wrong. Jesus' teachings—to love one another, to treat others as you would want to be treated—condemned slavery implicitly. Slavery, in short, violated the entire spirit of the Bible, with its emphasis on freedom from oppression, equality, and love.

Background

In the late 1820s and 1830s, a radical abolitionist movement took shape in the North. In 1829, the free black David Walker published in Boston his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that endorsed violence as means to end slavery.

The blossoming of radical abolitionism continued in 1831 with the publication of William Lloyd Garrison's weekly newspaper, the Liberator. Although small in numbers and confined mainly to the New England states and the Northeast, abolitionists proved exceptionally vocal in their denunciations of slavery as sinful, a great moral evil to be eradicated. In a departure from previous antislavery efforts, they called not for the gradual abolition of slavery but rather for the slaves' immediate emancipation. To achieve their goal, they organized antislavery societies, launched a mass mailing of abolitionist materials into the South, and deluged Congress with abolitionist petitions. Their efforts consistently emphasized the immorality of bondage in the American South and provided biblical evidence of the sinfulness of slavery.

Surprised by the new vehemence of antislavery forces, proslavery theologians gathered biblical evidence of their own in justification of slavery. By the early 1840s, Thornton Stringfellow and other proslavery ministers both South and North unfurled a list of proslavery arguments culled from the Bible. They attributed slavery to the curse Noah placed on Canaan, which condemned his descendants to bondage. They pointed out that even though Abraham and other great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament owned slaves, God did not smite them but bestowed his grace upon them. Moreover, Mosaic law codified the rules governing slaveholding in ancient times. Turning to the New Testament, proslavery forces observed Jesus' failure to condemn slavery as evil. To the contrary, the New Testament repeatedly entreats slaves to comply with their masters' wishes. The Bible furthermore beseeches fugitive slaves to return to their masters. Proslavery forces made the Bible central to the intellectual defense of slavery.

Abolitionists had drawn upon the Good Book even earlier than their proslavery foes and arrived at the opposite conclusion. For them, the Bible offered no rationale for the continuation of slavery in the American South. A vast gulf separated American slavery from the more benevolent varieties of bondage of the Old Testament. Old Testament slavery existed side by side with polygamy and divorce, two practices widely condemned in mainstream 19th-century Christian churches. If polygamy and divorce had begun to be recognized as wrong over time, slavery merited a similar moral judgment. In the Old Testament itself, Moses had redeemed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. Surely, the abolitionists figured, God wanted the same for enslaved black Americans. That Jesus in the New Testament failed to censure slavery by name did not make the practice of slaveholding any less sinful. His instructions to love one another and to follow the Golden Rule betrayed the broad antislavery spirit contained within the pages of the Bible.

From "Necessary Evil" to "Positive Good"

Eighteen thirty-one proved a pivotal year in the development of the abolitionist movement as well as of proslavery thought. William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, in Boston on January 1. In it, he rejected gradual emancipation schemes in favor of the immediate liberation of American slaves. Many southerners believed it no coincidence that Nat Turner launched the bloody Southampton insurrection late in the summer of the same year. Although contemporaries in the South linked Garrison to the massacre, Turner had probably never heard of the northern abolitionist. Furthermore, Garrison, despite his antislavery invective, was a pacifist opposed to the utilization of violence. Nevertheless, the Turner rebellion sparked debate in the Virginia legislature over the future of slavery in the Old Dominion and whether or not to abolish the institution. Proslavery forces emerged from the contest victorious, inspiring Thomas Roderick Dew's seminal proslavery essay "Abolition of Negro Slavery," a work that dismissed plans to colonize blacks abroad and enumerated the horrific consequences of emancipation.

On the whole, however, the rise of radical abolitionism caught slavery's supporters off guard. Abolitionists, a small but very vocal minority concentrated most heavily in the northeastern states, busied themselves in pursuit of immediate emancipation, laboring under the conviction that slavery was morally wrong. Garrison was involved in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and the following year joined brothers and New York merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan to establish the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a national organization dedicated to the abolitionist cause. The AASS was founded shortly after a notable abolitionist success overseas, as Parliament in 1833 freed slaves in the British West Indies through a program of compensated emancipation. At the instigation of Lewis Tappan, abolitionists in 1835 launched a mass mailing campaign that inundated the South with antislavery pamphlets. In Charleston, South Carolina, and other locations, crowds of angry southerners seized from the post office bags of undelivered abolitionist literature and set them ablaze. Although historians estimate that fewer than 10 percent of all slaves could read, the arrival in the U.S. mail of abolitionist propaganda posed a real threat to southern slaveholding interests.

The abolitionists' postal campaign roused slavery's defenders to action. Despite the rise of Garrison and radical abolitionism in 1831, proslavery voices remained remarkably silent for the next few years, seemingly stunned by the sudden assault upon the "peculiar institution." Although South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun proclaimed slavery a "positive good" by 1837, the southern white masses after the Turner revolt did not instantly spurn past characterizations of slavery as a "necessary evil." Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of the founding generation, they continued to look forward to slavery's eventual demise. Most southern whites between 1831 and 1835 continued to lament the presence of slavery, describing it as a burden and regrettable inheritance from their ancestors, and willingly discussed plans of gradual abolition and black colonization abroad. Only in 1835 did the antislavery mailings mobilize a more concerted effort to defend slavery. That year, the number of proslavery works began to mount. With time, their initially inchoate arguments coalesced into a distinctive proslavery ideology.

Religion featured prominently in the developing proslavery and antislavery arguments of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Biblical justifications and refutations of American slavery were nothing new, having appeared early in the 1700s. More recently, pro- and antislavery biblical references surfaced occasionally during both the congressional debates over Missouri's admission into the Union and the Virginia legislature's deliberations over the abolition of slavery. The antebellum decades therefore witnessed an elaboration of existing arguments that demonstrated continuity with the past rather than a sharp break from it. But while antebellum Americans did not invent biblical pro- and antislavery arguments, the debate did enter a new phase after 1831. The rise of the radical abolitionist movement placed a new emphasis on the morality—or, rather, the immorality—of slavery. Garrison and his colleagues condemned slaveholding as sinful, a moral evil to be eradicated. "If Slavery is ever abolished from the world," wrote Methodist minister LaRoy Sunderland, "it will be done by the influence of the Christian Religion. Men never will abandon slave-holding, till they feel it to be a sin against God."1 Abolitionist critiques of slavery's immorality forced slaveholders to articulate more thorough and sophisticated proslavery defenses, and debate over slavery's morality therefore grew more pronounced. An examination of scripture became central to the project of determining the justice or injustice of American slavery. The respective theological allies of slaveholders and abolitionists reached contradictory answers to the question, Was the Bible proslavery?

Argument that the Bible Was Proslavery

By 1841, proslavery forces were prepared to skillfully use the Bible to defend the peculiar institution from abolitionist attacks. More than any other individual, Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister in Culpeper County, Virginia, made the Bible a centerpiece in the defense of slavery, scouring the good book for scriptural evidence in support of bondage. Other southern clergymen, including South Carolina Baptist Richard Fuller, Kentucky-born Episcopalian Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and Presbyterian Fred A. Ross in Alabama, lent their voices to the chorus of religious proslavery arguments. Southerners were not alone, however, in insisting that slavery was divinely ordained. Many northern-born ministers such as Charles Hodge, the moderate head of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Samuel Blanchard How, pastor of the First Reformed Dutch Church of New Brunswick, New Jersey, also agreed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. They were joined by northern Congregational ministers Nathan Lord and Moses Stuart and the Irish-born Episcopal bishop John Henry Hopkins. Together, the writings of clerics South and North informed the more secular proslavery tracts of southern intellectuals James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. Despite their denominational differences, Stringfellow and other pastors located frequent references amenable to slavery in scripture. They argued that they maintained complete fidelity to the Bible, unlike their antislavery opponents, who deviated from the Bible's plain language creatively but erroneously to pervert the true meaning of God's word.

Much of the religious proslavery argument was rooted in the Old Testament, especially in the books of Genesis and Exodus. Some proslavery clerics viewed enslavement as the by-product of the curse of Cain. After Cain murdered his brother Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis, God angrily cursed Cain, but, to prevent others from killing him, placed a mark upon Cain, which some assumed to be black skin. Many other clergymen traced the origins of slavery to the so-called curse of Ham, or, more accurately, the curse of Canaan, explained in Genesis 9:18–27. The story centered on Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. After the great flood, Noah planted a vineyard. On one occasion, he drank too much of his wine, became intoxicated, and passed out naked inside his tent. Ham stared at his father's immodesty and reported it to his two brothers. To avoid seeing Noah nude, Shem and Japheth walked backward into their father's tent and covered his body with a robe. When Noah awakened and learned what Ham had done, he cursed Ham's son Canaan and made him a slave to Shem and Japheth. According to many supporters of slavery, Shem's progeny migrated to Asia and Japheth's to Europe; Africans were the descendants of Ham and Canaan. For Thornton Stringfellow and others, then, blacks were condemned to perpetual bondage as punishment for their ancestor's biblical wrongdoing. The subordination of one race to another was divinely ordained. As Stringfellow put it, "God decreed slavery."2

God not only sanctioned slavery but showed favor to those who held others in bondage. Many of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, Stringfellow noted, were slave owners. Slavery "did exist in the patriarchal age, and . . . the persons most extensively involved . . . are the very persons who have been singled out by the Almighty, as the objects of his special regard—whose character and conduct he has caused to be held up as models for future generations." Central to this argument was the figure of Abraham. According to Albert Taylor Bledsoe's 1857 Essay on Liberty and Slavery, "Abraham himself . . . was the owner and holder of more than a thousand slaves," and the Lord never expressed disapproval of him. The book of Genesis reported that Abraham purchased servants with money and promptly had them circumcised, bringing them into covenant with God and demonstrating the authority he exercised over them. Abraham bequeathed his slaves to his son Isaac, who in turn passed them on to his son Jacob. "How, then," Bledsoe asked, "could . . . professing Christians proceed to condemn and excommunicate a poor brother for having merely approved what Abraham had practiced?" Job, too, was a wealthy slaveholder when God tested his faith. Concluded Stringfellow, "from the fact that he has singled out the greatest slaveholders of that age, as the objects of his special favor, it would seem that the institution was one furnishing great opportunities to exercise grace and glorify God, as it still does, where its duties are faithfully discharged."3

Proslavery ministers insisted that God would never sanction an institution that was an unmitigated moral evil or countenance a practice he deemed sinful. Slavery, then, was not innately immoral, as the abolitionists supposed. Bledsoe argued that "slavery among the Hebrews . . . was not wrong, because there it received the sanction of the Almighty. . . . We affirm that since slavery has been ordained by him, it cannot be always and everywhere wrong." In Slavery Ordained of God (1857), the Reverend Fred A. Ross added that since "Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly the same in nature with that in the South," then it was also appropriate for "the Southern master in the present day."4 Baptist minister Richard Fuller made an appeal to moral consistency over time. If God looked favorably upon slavery in the Old Testament, it could not have somehow devolved into a great wrong by the 19th century. To argue otherwise suggested that God had once withheld a spiritual truth from his people.

Many proslavery clergymen observed that Mosaic law permitted slaves to be held as property. That Moses made laws governing slavery and slave treatment implied God's approbation of bondage. "Our argument from this acknowledged fact," remarked Charles Hodge, "is, that if God allowed slavery to exist, if he directed how slaves might be lawfully acquired, and how they were to be treated, it is in vain to contend that slaveholding is a sin, and yet profess reverence for the Scriptures." One biblical passage recurring in proslavery ministers' defense of bondage was Leviticus 25:44–46: "Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bond-men forever." As Ross explained, "I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command his people to buy slaves. . . . The passage has no other meaning." Mosaic law permitted God's chosen people to hold foreigners as slaves who could be bought, owned, sold, or bequeathed to the next generation in perpetual bondage. The 21st chapter of Exodus completed the objectification and commodification of the slave, describing servants and maids as "money." According to the law of Moses, a master who struck his slave faced certain punishment if the bond person died immediately. If, however, the servant lingered a day or two before succumbing to death, the master escaped penalty because he intended only to correct, not to kill, the slave. The slaveholder, explained Samuel Blanchard How, avoided prosecution "because the servant or maid was his property, and he had the right suitably and not cruelly to chastise them when they, by their improper conduct, merited it."5

Proslavery writers found evidence in the New Testament as compelling as that in the Old. Even though he lived in a slaveholding region and would have been familiar with the practice, Jesus never took the opportunity to refute the law of Moses and explicitly condemn the institution of slavery. No New Testament figure either denounced or abolished it. Albert Taylor Bledsoe marveled that "the most profound silence reigns through the whole word of God with respect to the sinfulness of slavery," and he was not alone in making the point.6 In contrast, Jesus did single out for rebuke polygamy and divorce, both practices formerly permitted under Old Testament law. His failure likewise to censure slavery in the new covenant underscored his acceptance of the institution.

Rather than assail bondage, the New Testament repeatedly implored slaves to obey their masters. Paul's letters to the Ephesians 6:5 and the Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, the letter to Titus 2:9, and 1 Peter 2:18 all instructed bond people to respect and serve their owners. In Paul's brief letter to the slaveholder Philemon, Paul explained that he had converted Onesimus, a fugitive slave belonging to Philemon, to Christianity but then ordered him to return to his master. The apostle's instructions mirrored those of the Old Testament's Book of Genesis, in which an angel told the runaway bondwoman Hagar to return and submit to her mistress Sarah, Abraham's wife. Both the Old and New Testaments demanded that slaves fulfill their duties to their masters.

Proslavery churchmen also countered the abolitionists' claim that Jesus ushered in a new moral principle antithetical to slavery, the Golden Rule: "Do to others as you would they should do to you." Thornton Stringfellow contended that the Golden Rule introduced nothing unique to the New Testament. He viewed it, rather, as merely a rewording of the Old Testament command in Leviticus 19:18 to love your neighbor as yourself. If the underlying principle was identical, as Stringfellow supposed, and slavery was sanctioned by God in the Old Testament, Jesus' teaching of the Golden Rule in the New provided no impetus for the prohibition of slavery. For proslavery clergymen, the Golden Rule implied only that masters should treat slaves as they would wish to be treated if they, too, were enslaved.

Many southern theologians upheld the model of the Christian slaveholder. They considered slaveholders in the South divinely chosen masters who mitigated the possible ill effects of slavery through their own Christian character. In conformity with the golden rule, they insisted, masters treated slaves well, as members of an extended family, civilizing and Christianizing heathen slaves and guiding their moral improvement. When benevolent masters fulfilled their obligations to their slaves, they made slavery acceptable as an institution. Nothing about slavery was inherently immoral; it was quite possible for good Christians to own slaves, assuming they executed their duty to serve as guardians of their bondpeople.

Proslavery clergymen and their secular allies viewed antislavery northerners as stunningly ignorant of God's word. The South adhered loyally to the letter of the Bible, whereas the North betrayed it. "With men from the North," Thornton Stringfellow scoffed, "I have observed for many years a palpable ignorance of the Divine will, in reference to the institution of slavery. . . . How can any man, who believes the Bible, admit for a moment that God intended to teach mankind by the Bible, that all are born free and equal?" Some proslavery theologians acknowledged that God may someday choose to eradicate slavery, but in seeking to dismantle the institution prematurely, abolitionists were interfering with God's divine plan, which embraced the master-slave relationship no less than that between husband and wife or parent and child. Any potential disappearance of slavery must occur in its own time, consistent with God's will. In the meantime, Stringfellow concluded, "The moral precepts of the Old or New Testament cannot make that wrong which God ordained to be his will, as he has slavery."7

Argument that the Bible Was Antislavery

Although proslavery forces laid claim to a biblical argument, abolitionists had no intention of surrendering the Good Book to their rivals. For them, slaveholding was unquestionably a sin, "a heinous crime in the sight of God," and only a tortured reading of the Bible could conclude otherwise. Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Albert Barnes declared the biblical proslavery argument "among the most remarkable instances of mistaken interpretation and unfounded reasoning furnished by the perversities of the human mind." Northern and foreign-born abolitionist preachers such as Barnes and his fellow Presbyterian George Bourne; Baptists Nathaniel Colver and Elon Galusha; Methodists Charles Elliott, William Hosmer, and LaRoy Sunderland; Congregationalist Charles Beecher; and William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian, joined unordained allies, including Francis Wayland and Theodore Dwight Weld, among others, to marshal biblical evidence in condemnation of slavery. As one contemporary observed, "The Abolitionists have quoted Scripture quite as much as their opponents, but . . . on the side of right and justice."8

Antislavery theologians distinguished between biblical slavery and the form practiced in the Old South. Their arguments took different tacks. According to Albert Barnes, Theodore Dwight Weld, and others, the complicated task of translating the Bible had obscured the original meaning of several passages purported to endorse slavery. The linguistic confusion between Greek and Hebrew and English had resulted in the mistaken belief that 19th-century southern masters and the patriarchs of the Old Testament understood slavery in the same way. What modern readers thought was slavery in the Bible, however, actually referred to various other forms of servitude or apprenticeship less oppressive than American slavery. Other antislavery ministers such as LaRoy Sunderland acknowledged slavery in the Bible but agreed that "it differed radically from the system of slave-holding, which prevails now in these United States." Bondage in the Old Testament, concurred the Methodist William Hosmer, "has scarcely any resemblance to American Slavery."9

Clergymen such as Barnes, Sunderland, and Charles Beecher highlighted the brutality of the American brand of slavery compared to the various labor regimes employed in biblical times. For instance, unlike in the American South, slaves in the Old Testament enjoyed legal recourse if maltreated. And whereas southern slavery was perpetual and hereditary, the Mosaic law outlined in the book of Exodus clearly stated that Hebrew servants would serve six years and be freed on the seventh, a point repeated in the 15th chapter of Deuteronomy. Non-Hebrews could be held in servitude only until Jubilee, every 50 years. Such regulations appeared in the Old Testament not because God sanctioned slavery but because the institution antedated Mosaic law. The major point that antislavery churchmen stressed was that the nature of bondage practiced in the Old Testament was unique to its time, without parallel in the 19th-century South.

Francis Wayland contended that although God had indeed allowed slavery in the Old Testament, he restricted the institution to a people at a particular moment in history. Through a process of progressive revelation, Christianity had evolved over time to shun bondage. Many antislavery voices—those of Wayland, William Ellery Channing, LaRoy Sunderland, and Albert Barnes, for example—dismissed the proslavery argument that God must have approved of bondage since it existed in biblical times. "It should be understood in the outset," William Hosmer indicated, "that the Old Testament is not, in all respects, a standard of morals for the present day. The New Testament has revised the ethical code of the Old, and several things, once allowed, are now prohibited," such as polygamy. Like slavery, polygamy occurred in the Old Testament. Sunderland observed that "Abraham has two wives, David had two, and. . . . Solomon had seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines."10 That did not imply, however, that God either commanded or sanctioned the practice. Moreover, as Barnes observed, modern-day Christians had since rejected polygamy, despite its presence in the Bible. The same could be said of divorce. Therefore, how could slavery's advocates, with any consistency, invoke the existence of biblical slavery in support of the enslavement of blacks in the American South? Proslavery forces were conveniently cherry-picking biblical evidence in favor of bondage while ignoring facts that contradicted their logic.

Scanning the Old Testament itself, some clergymen detected an obvious antislavery message in the book of Exodus. With his demand to pharaoh to "let my people go," Moses delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. God, then, must have advocated freedom from the oppression of slavery. "God regarded their groanings," Sunderland wrote of the Hebrew slaves, "and when they cried unto him, he saved them from the power of their oppressors." English-born Presbyterian George Bourne agreed that scripture resoundingly condemned "the great sin of human oppression, including of course [slavery] the most oppressive practice in the world." It followed that God would support the liberation of bond people from the yoke of their southern masters.11

Nor could Jesus' silence on the subject of slavery in the New Testament be contorted into support for the institution. Sunderland and Channing again applied the polygamy example. According to Sunderland, "if any kind of slavery may be tolerated now, under the gospel dispensation, because a certain species of it existed among the Jews anciently, or because Christ and his Apostles did not say in just so many words, that 'slave-holding under all circumstances of the case, is a sin against God,' then it follows by the same rules of interpretation . . . that polygamy is justifiable now, by the Bible, for some of the patriarchs were polygamists, and they carried out their views by their practice." Jesus may have remained mum on the slavery issue, Sunderland conceded, but "by this same silence, we may justify the making[,] selling and drinking of ardent spirits; if Christ never condemned slavery, then neither did he condemn . . . polygamy, nor lotteries, nor theatres, nor offensive wars, nor tyranny of any kind, nor gladiatorial exhibitions," all of which 19th-century Christians recognized as moral offenses against God. Jesus neglected to enumerate a whole host of activities now regarded as sinful, but the lack of explicit denunciation made them no more acceptable.12

Despite Jesus' failure to target slavery by name as evil, his teachings fundamentally attacked slaveholding. By the Golden Rule, Jesus implored people to treat others as they would like to be treated themselves. "It is impossible for any person to practise human slavery an hour without violating the law of Love, the Golden Rule," wrote George Bourne. "The common pro-slavery pretence, therefore, that Christ and his apostles did not condemn human slavery, is a naked and obvious untruth. They did in various other ways indirectly condemn such slavery, as by their denunciations of oppression." Barnes, Channing, and others agreed. Jesus also repeated the imperative from the Old Testament's book of Leviticus to "love thy neighbor as thyself." In John 15:12, Jesus offered a similar piece of advice, to "love one another, as I have loved you." These instructions, wrote LaRoy Sunderland, implicitly condemned slavery. In holding slaves, no master could obey the greatest commandments in the moral law of Christ.13

For antislavery preachers, the New Testament espoused a message of equality inimical to slavery. Albert Barnes urged his audience to "look more closely at the very precepts which the apostles gave to 'masters,' and on which reliance is placed to justify them in holding their fellow-men in bondage." The apostle Paul's letter to the Ephesians 6:9, Barnes explained, "enjoins it on masters to 'do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that they had a master in heaven, and that there is no respect of persons with him.'" God, in short, drew no distinction between master and slave. Likewise, in his letter to the Colossians 4:1, Paul wrote, "Masters, render unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a master in heaven." Moreover, when Paul sent Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, he returned him "not as a servant, but as a brother beloved." Onesimus "was not now to be received as a slave," LaRoy Sunderland emphasized, "but above a slave." As Irish-born Methodist Charles Elliott put it, "Onesimus is now the brother of his master."14

Taken in its totality, the Bible embraced a fundamentally antislavery stance. As Presbyterian abolitionist John Rankin explained, "The whole Bible is opposed to slavery. The sacred volume is one grand scheme of benevolence. Beams of love and mercy emanate from every page, while the voice of justice denounces the oppressor, and speaks to his awful doom." Great theological principles superseded specific words and passages that seemingly sanctioned bondage. In one of the Bible's recurring themes, for instance, the Lord championed the cause of the lowly and heard the cries of the poor. Biblical denunciations of oppression, the advocacy of the meek and humble, and injunctions to provide aid and relief for those suffering and in distress all conveyed a broad message of fairness, justice, and righteousness. In the New Testament especially, God condemned those features that together composed the reality of slavery. Even "if the New Testament has left no precept justifying, and no prohibition forbidding slavery," wrote Francis Wayland, "the Saviour and his apostles . . . promulgat[ed] such truths concerning the nature and destiny of man, his relations and obligations both to man and to his Maker, as should render the slavery of a human being a manifest moral absurdity." Slavery, in short, violated the entire spirit of the New Testament. "It is a solemn fact," affirmed abolitionist minister LaRoy Sunderland, "that there is scarcely any one sin described in the inspired writings, in all its parts, features and consequences, so clearly and explicitly, as is the sin of holding property in man; and scarcely any other sin has been so frequently denounced in the Bible."15

Outcome and Impact

The impasse between proslavery and antislavery theologians defied resolution. Neither side intended to compromise its moral position. Many clergymen in the South as well as in the North found abundant and incontrovertible evidence in the Bible of the divine sanction of slavery. In contrast, abolitionists, certain of the sinfulness of bondage, continued to denounce slavery as an immoral institution and persisted in their goal of effecting immediate emancipation. Abolitionists in the 1830s hoped to transform the nation's churches into instruments of the antislavery cause. In the North, ministers could persuade congregants of abolitionism's righteousness, while southern ministers could coerce slaveholding members to liberate their slaves or risk church disciplinary action or expulsion. The exclusion of slaveholding congregants seemed to abolitionists a small sacrifice for the maintenance of moral principle. To the frustration of such abolitionists as Boston's Charles K. Whipple, however, their appeals to the churches were largely unheeded. The abolitionists gained little ecclesiastical or popular support for their program of immediate emancipation. Scoffed Whipple, "the clergy should have taken the lead in preaching and enforcing it. They have not done this; they have constantly maligned and obstructed the Abolitionists, who did do it."16

Churches' failure to meet abolitionists' expectations conformed to historical precedent. Of the nation's major denominations, only the Quakers and Mennonites had distinguished themselves as genuine and consistent opponents of slavery. Some evangelical churches such as the Baptists and Methodists initially opposed the peculiar institution but, in a drive for respectability in southern slaveholding circles, tamed their early antislavery impulses to make evangelical religion more palatable to the southern gentry. The vast majority of all denominations avoided entering the highly charged debate and neglected to offer a clear, forceful statement of slavery's immorality. By 1830, almost all churches tolerated bondage. According to Whipple, "The great majority of ministers, of every denomination, remained utterly indifferent . . . concerning slavery."17

Garrisonians grew disillusioned with the nation's religious institutions and the clergy's failure in their duty to convert the masses of American churchgoers to abolitionism. Although some ordained Garrisonian ministers still labored to reform their own denominations through moral suasion, others lost faith in the power of churches to effect change. By contrast, a developing and more moderate non-Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement emphasized reform from within the church and continued to appeal to churches for moral leadership on the slavery issue. This so-called "Christian abolitionist" faction included Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and former slaveholder James G. Birney. Garrisonians and non-Garrisonians also disagreed over the proper scope of social reform. Garrisonians argued that decay permeated American society. Their commitment to social perfection led them to embrace reform in all its guises, including not only the abolitionist but also the temperance and women's rights movements. Non-Garrisonians preferred an exclusively antislavery focus, fearing that the simultaneous pursuit of a variety of social reforms—especially the unpopular feminist agenda—would dilute or even derail the abolitionist cause. Finally, Garrisonians demonstrated outright hostility toward the U.S. government, the allegedly proslavery U.S. Constitution, and voting or participating in American politics. Non-Garrisonians ventured into the American political system and supported the creation of a third party built around an abolitionist platform. In both 1840 and 1844, they nominated James G. Birney, a onetime southern slaveholder converted to the abolitionist cause, as the presidential candidate of the abolitionist Liberty Party. The Liberty Party met with little success, but Birney garnered far more votes in 1844 than in 1840.

Never a monolithic group, abolitionists succumbed to their internal differences. Disputes over attitudes toward churches, women's rights, and the propriety of participation in politics created unbearable pressures. The pervasive strife and factionalism under the abolitionist umbrella ultimately splintered the abolitionist movement in 1840. Led by the Tappan brothers, non-Garrisonians founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS), an organization distinct from its parent, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). AFASS members tended to be churchgoers, more religiously orthodox than their counterparts in the Garrisonian-controlled AASS. After the 1840 schism, the AASS grew increasingly radicalized. Longtime critics of church complicity in buttressing slavery, more and more Garrisonians began to view churches as hopelessly corrupt institutions. Deeming them beyond possibility of reform, they severed their ties to them. That Garrisonians publicly questioned the authority of the Bible at various religious conventions in the 1840s and 1850s because scripture could be used to insulate slaveholders from criticism further contributed to the Garrisonians' reputation for outright hostility toward organized religion.

If the abolitionist movement fractured, so did a number of evangelical churches. Divergent views toward slavery in the North and South prompted sectional schisms of the Methodist Church in 1844 and the Baptist Church the following year, resulting in the creation, respectively, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The Methodists' dispute originated in a debate over the permissibility of allowing Bishop James Andrew to remain in his post after he became a slaveholder through marriage. The rift among the Baptists primarily concerned the employment of slaveholding missionaries. The Presbyterians divided in 1837 into Old and New Schools, but the separation did not occur neatly along sectional lines. New School Presbyterians subsequently split into northern and southern factions in 1857, Old School Presbyterians in 1861. More than northern antislavery agitation, southern commitment to slavery forced the denominational schisms of the antebellum period. The regional schisms freed southern clergymen to pursue proslavery policies and to preach proslavery sermons unapologetically to slaveholding audiences. The separations exerted less influence in the North. Even after the splintering of the evangelical churches and the defection of their southern halves, most northern churches refused to embrace the abolitionist cause, disappointing the non-Garrisonians, who hoped to use the churches to advance their antislavery agenda. Northern Methodists and Baptists did not condemn slaveholding outright as sinful or initiate disciplinary actions against proslavery churchgoers. Their antislavery credentials derived instead from the northern Methodists' repudiation of slaveholding bishops, the northern Baptists' rejection of slaveholding missionaries, and both denominations' calls for gradual, but not immediate abolition. The moderate antislavery sentiments of many northerners dismayed the radical abolitionists, who bemoaned what they considered the North's lackadaisical toleration of slavery. Northern churches adopted a stronger antislavery stance only when the sectional politics of the 1850s swelled popular antislavery sentiment and galvanized the North against the institution. Nevertheless, historian John R. McKivigan observed, "before the Civil War no major denomination endorsed immediate emancipation." For its part, the South marched to war in 1861 confident in the righteousness of its cause. As John Patrick Daly explained, "Moral and biblical justifications of slaveholding constituted the first, and remained the most widely disseminated, foundation of southern proslavery."18

What if the Bible had unequivocally condemned or endorsed slavery?

Beginning in the 1830s, abolitionists injected morality into debates over slavery to an unprecedented extent, and biblical proslavery counterarguments followed within a few years. Abolitionist and proslavery clergymen each mined the Bible to uncover relevant truths buried in scripture. Rather than supplying clear answers, however, their efforts merely heightened resolve on both sides. Vying for public opinion, they published tracts and sermons continuously through the end of the Civil War, although with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, they focused their attention increasingly on the Bible's instructions for dealing with runaways.

Had the Bible unequivocally condemned slavery, radical abolitionists would have been validated in their moral stand. Slaveholders would have had to justify enslavement in other ways. The Bible undergirded the proslavery defense of the antebellum decades, but southern whites did not rely solely on the Good Book to rationalize the perpetuation of slavery. Proslavery thinkers such as Virginia's George Fitzhugh were prepared to offer secular defenses of the institution. Author of Sociology for the South; or, The Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857), Fitzhugh touted the benefits of slavery. For slaves, bondage offered protection. Masters cared for their chattel, even during old age and infirmity, Fitzhugh argued. Bondage thus provided a social welfare network for the slaves that no northern white wage worker similarly enjoyed. Lacking the same protections as southern slaves, white laborers in the North toiled long hours, horribly exploited during their most productive years by the factory system and a callous market economy, only to be cast into the streets and left to their own devices when their productivity decreased. A harsher, more brutal system Fitzhugh could hardly imagine. Moreover, slavery was valuable economically. Slaves produced southern cotton, the United States' leading export. Even divested of their biblical cudgels, proslavery writers could still argue that slavery benefited the slave, the South as a region, and the nation as a whole.

If the Bible indisputably endorsed slavery, theology would have continued to figure prominently in the defense of slavery, but the radical abolitionist movement might have been eviscerated. William Lloyd Garrison and other radical abolitionists predicated their antislavery views upon the moral certainty that slavery was wrong and an abomination in the eyes of God. If the Bible denied them support, they would have had to unite against and debate slavery on other terms. Although abolitionists were certainly capable intellectually of contesting the notions that slavery was profitable both socially and economically, it is not clear whether debates organized along those lines could have generated the same passion that motivated abolitionists infused with religious zeal. Stripped of its moral imperative, abolitionism might have had greater difficulty attracting support and attacking slavery.

Bibliography

Boles, John B., ed. Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. A collection of essays that document black and white religious life in the American South.

Daly, John Patrick. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Argues that evangelicals in the North and the South shared common beliefs and values. Chapters 2 and 3 chart the emergence of religious proslavery arguments.

Faust, Drew Gilpin, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. An anthology whose selections sample the many strains of proslavery thought.

Genovese, Eugene D. A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Explores theological defenses of slavery as well as proslavery reformers' efforts to respond to northern critics and ameliorate the ugliest realities of slaveholding.

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Focuses on one biblical proslavery argument, the curse that Noah placed on Ham's son, Canaan. Also mentions Ham's grandson, Nimrod.

Irons, Charles F. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Contends that white evangelicals' interactions with black churchgoers shaped white views about slavery and helped construct their proslavery arguments.

McKivigan, John R. The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Studies abolitionists' attempts to enlist the aid of northern churches in the antislavery cause.

Snay, Mitchell. Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Explores the role of religion in the approach of the Civil War. Includes a discussion of the biblical justification of slavery.

Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. A thorough examination of the history of proslavery thought. It explodes many myths surrounding the subject.

Footnotes

1 LaRoy Sunderland, The Testimony of God Against Slavery, or a Collection of Passages from the Bible, Which Show the Sin of Holding Property in Man; with Notes (Boston: Webster & Southard, 1835; reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970), v.

2 Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, 4th ed. (Richmond, Va.: J. W. Randolph, 1856), 9.

3 Thornton Stringfellow, A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery, in an Essay, First Published in the Religious Herald, and Republished by Request: With Remarks on a Letter of Elder Galusha, of New York, to Dr. R. Fuller, of South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 2, 6–7; Albert Taylor Bledsoe, “Liberty and Slavery: or, Slavery in the Light of Moral and Political Philosophy,” in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on This Important Subject, ed. E. N. Elliott (1860; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 339.

4 Bledsoe, “Liberty and Slavery,” 337–338; Fred A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (1857; reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), 153.

5 Charles Hodge, “The Bible Argument on Slavery,” in Cotton Is King, 860; Leviticus quoted in Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views, 29; Ross, Slavery Ordained of God, 63; Samuel Blanchard How, Slaveholding Not Sinful: Slavery, the Punishment of Man’s Sin, Its Remedy, the Gospel of Christ (1855; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 114.

6 Bledsoe, “Liberty and Slavery,” 347.

7 Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views, 6, 75, 70.

8 The American Anti-Slavery Society described slavery as “a heinous crime,” quoted in Charles K. Whipple, Relations of Anti-Slavery to Religion (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1856), 1; Albert Barnes, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (1846; Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1857), 381; Whipple, Relations of Anti-Slavery to Religion, 2.

9 Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 10; William Hosmer, Slavery and the Church (Auburn: William J. Moses, 1853; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 51.

10 Hosmer, Slavery and the Church, 44; Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 10–11.

11 Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 32; George Bourne, A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument; By a Citizen of Virginia (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1845), 54.

12 Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 10, 11.

13 Bourne, Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument, 64–65, 67; Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 71, 72, 74, 75.

14 Barnes, Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery, 316; Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, 92; Charles Elliott, The Bible and Slavery: In Which the Abrahamic and Mosaic Discipline Is Considered in Connection with the Most Ancient Forms of Slavery; and the Pauline Code on Slavery as Related to Roman Slavery and the Discipline of the Apostolic Churches (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt & A. Poe, 1857), 328.

15 John Rankin quoted in John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 31; Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution: In a Correspondence between the Rev. Richard Fuller, of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R.I., rev. ed. (1845; reprint, New York: Sheldon & Co., 1860), 89–90; Sunderland, Testimony of God Against Slavery, v.

16 Whipple, Relations of Anti-Slavery to Religion, 19.

17 Whipple, Relations of Anti-Slavery to Religion, 1.

18 McKivigan, War Against Proslavery Religion, 15; John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 31.

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