No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2020
Historians of American religion generally agree that religious debates over slavery were characterized by a reliance on the plain meaning of the Bible. According to the conventional wisdom, antebellum Americans were uninterested in or even overtly hostile to tradition and church history. However, a close study of pro- and antislavery literature complicates this picture of ahistorical biblicism. For some defenders of slavery, not merely the Bible but also Christian tradition supported their position, and these Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists mined the past for examples of Christian slaveholding. On the other hand, both white and Black antislavery authors used religious history to bolster their cases against the peculiar institution, with African Americans leading the way in developing an antislavery account of the Christian past. The previously unnoticed historical dimensions of religious arguments over slavery prove central to understanding why these debates failed, while also modifying how we conceive of scripture, tradition, and religious authority in nineteenth-century America. Arguments over slavery show that religious Americans—even many who claimed to be biblicists—did not read the Bible alone but always alongside and in relation to other texts, traditions, and interpreters.
1 Fletcher, John, Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons: Compiled into Eight Studies, and Subdivided into Short Lessons for the Convenience of Readers (Natchez: Jackson Warner, 1852), 256, 276–277, 422Google Scholar.
2 Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese show that some slaveholders argued that Christian acceptance of slavery continued in varying forms from the patristic period throughout the Middle Ages: Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder's Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 306–307, 324CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the importance of history for Southern thinkers, see O'Brien, Michael, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Larry Tise notes that some proslavery authors appealed to traditional Christian arguments regarding slavery but does not analyze this use of religious tradition: Tise, Larry E., Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 118Google Scholar. Conversely, William Jason Wallace highlights the use of church history by Northern evangelicals to portray both slaveholders and Catholics as un-American: Wallace, William Jason, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010)Google Scholar, chap. 2.
3 A distinction must be made between rejecting tradition—refusing to accept as authoritative the theology, structures, and practices of Christian denominations throughout the past—and being disinterested in or ignorant of Christian history. In his work, Noll recognizes that American anti-traditionalism often implied a historical sensibility, especially in the case of the Restorationists, and does not argue that anti-traditionalist groups ignored the history of Christianity. Nonetheless, his analysis lends itself to the impression that the Christian past was unimportant to those arguing over slavery. See Noll, Mark A., America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Noll, Mark A., The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar, chap. 3. Contra Noll, Fox-Genovese and Genovese argue that an antislavery argument from the Bible required departing from Protestant orthodoxy, not just the commonsense literal hermeneutic: Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, 527.
4 Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 496Google Scholar. Holifield concludes that the proslavery argument was defined by “biblical literalism and the Baconian habit of assembling proof-texts.” George Rable follows Noll and Holifield, concluding that the debate remained dictated by biblical literalism: Rable, George C., God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 14Google Scholar. Molly Oshatz argues that Noll misses how a biblical argument against slavery “required an enormous departure not just from antebellum literal hermeneutics, but from the entire Protestant understanding of revelation”: Oshatz, Molly, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10, 58Google Scholar. John Patrick Daly argues that straightforward biblical interpretation guided both Southern and Northern evangelical arguments: Daly, John Patrick, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 31–56Google Scholar.
5 Arguments over Christian tradition do not appear in most works on religion and slavery, including: Mathews, Donald G., Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Carwardine, Richard J., Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKivigan, John R. and Snay, Mitchell, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998)Google Scholar; McKivigan, John R., ed., Abolitionism and American Religion (New York: Garland, 1999)Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Schweiger, Beth Barton and Mathews, Donald G., eds., Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Irons, Charles F., The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Brown, Christopher Leslie, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Harlow, Luke E., Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Exceptions only prove the rule. Margaret Abruzzo notes that anti-slavery Quakers employed historical narratives about persecution, worldly power, and martyrdom: Abruzzo, Margaret, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 37–38Google Scholar. Katherine Gerbner traces the long history of Christianity and slaveholding, but does not address how nineteenth-century Protestants interacted with this tradition: Gerbner, Katharine, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 14–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One noteworthy exception is a study of anti-slavery uses of martyrology: Jablonski, Heike, John Foxe in America: Discourses of Martyrdom in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century United States (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 For slavery in medieval Europe, see Muldoon, James, “Spiritual Freedom—Physical Slavery: The Medieval Church and Slavery,” Ave Maria Law Review 3, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 69–93Google Scholar. For early Christian teaching on slavery, see de Wet, Chris L., Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mary, Margaret, “Slavery in the Writings of St. Augustine,” Classical Journal 49, no. 8 (May 1954): 363–369Google Scholar; Leemans, Johan, Matz, Brian J., and Verstraeten, Johan, eds., Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for Twenty-First-Century Christian Social Thought (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)Google Scholar, chap. 6. For a collection of Catholic teachings on slavery, from St. Augustine to Pope Gregory XVI, see Zanca, Kenneth J., ed., American Catholics and Slavery, 1789–1866: An Anthology of Primary Documents (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994)Google Scholar.
7 Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9Google Scholar. I'm grateful to Tal Howard for introducing me to Assmann in Howard, Thomas Albert, Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Perry, Seth, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 5–8Google Scholar.
9 Mosheim did not deal with the question of slavery, while Milner simply noted that by the fifth century Christian principles led to an improvement in the conditions of slavery: Milner, Joseph, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. 2, Containing the Fourth and Fifth Centuries (Cambridge: J. Burges, 1795), 560Google Scholar.
10 Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Cowie, 1825)Google Scholar, 4:478 note d; and Robertson, William, History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V: With a view of the progress of society in Europe, from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century (London: Cadell and Davies, 1812), 1:322Google Scholar.
11 For a survey of the historiography of the day on this question, see the prize-winning Cambridge thesis Churchill Babington, The Influence of Christianity in Promoting the Abolition of Slavery in Europe (Cambridge: Deighton, 1846), 40–41n1. Elizabeth Clark points out that prominent professors of church history opposed slavery but were not active in the abolition movement: Clark, Elizabeth A., Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 292, 430n55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 This underscores Manisha Sinha's argument that African Americans, both in their resistance and their sophisticated arguments, represented the cutting edge of American abolitionism: Sinha, Manisha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 2Google Scholar. For eighteenth-century Black Christianity, see Sensbach, Jon F., Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
13 See Saillant, John, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ernest, John, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 255Google Scholar. For the sources of Haynes's historical mindset, see Hall, Stephen G., A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 21–22Google Scholar.
14 See Hall, Faithful Account of the Race, 24. For Marrant's conversion under the preaching of Whitefield, see Sidbury, James, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 [John] Marrant, A Sermon Preached on the 24th Day of June 1789 [. . .] (Boston: Bible and Hart, [1798]; Evans Early American Imprint Collection Text Creation Partnership), 20, 20n, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N17016.0001.001.
16 For the political disenfranchisement of Northern African Americans, see Litwack, Leon F., North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Rothman, Adam, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), xiGoogle Scholar.
17 See Nash, Gary B., Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Waldstreicher, David, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Riordan, Liam, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 272;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Burin, Eric, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2005)Google Scholar.
18 See Malamud, Margaret, “Black Miverna: Antiquity in Antebellum African American History,” in African Athena: New Agendas, ed. Orrells, Daniel, Bhambra, Gurminder K., and Roynon, Tessa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77–78Google Scholar; and Hinks, Peter P., To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 181–182Google Scholar.
19 When James Forten (1766–1842) founded a school for African Americans in 1818, he named it the Augustine Education Society: Winch, Julie, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 212Google Scholar. For Cyprian as a “racial saint,” see Hickman, Jared, “The Recanonization of Saint Cyprian: A Deep History of Black Religion and Racialism,” in Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh, ed. Bassett, Molly H. and Lloyd, Vincent W. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 75–81Google Scholar. See also Sinha, Slave's Cause, 44.
20 Oson, Jacob, A Search for Truth; Or, an Inquiry for the Origin of the African Nation [. . .] (New York: Christopher Rush, 1817), 7Google Scholar. See also Hall, Stephen G., “‘A Search for Truth’: Jacob Oson and the Beginnings of African American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 2007): 139–148Google Scholar.
21 “For the Freedom's Journal,” Freedom's Journal, 31 August 1827, 98.
22 “Mutability of Human Affairs,” Freedom's Journal, 20 April 1827, 23.
23 See Clarkson, Thomas, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 1:88Google Scholar.
24 For this, see Newman, Richard S., The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
25 Child, David Lee, The Despotism of Freedom; or the Tyranny and Cruelty of American Republican Slave-Masters, Shown to be the Worst in the World [. . .] (Boston: Boston Young Men's Anti-Slavery Association, 1833), 17Google Scholar.
26 See Catherine Teets-Parzynski, “Child, Lydia Maria Francis,” in American National Biography, February 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1500127. For Child's sources, see Karcher, Carolyn L., The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 221Google Scholar.
27 Child, L. Maria, The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages (New York: C. S. Francis, 1855), 3:183–189Google Scholar.
28 Douglas A. Sweeney, “Edwards, Bela Bates,” in American National Biography, February 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0800426.
29 Edwards, B. B., “Roman Slavery in the Early Centuries of the Christian Era,” Biblical Repository and Quarterly Observer 6, no. 20 (October 1835): 436Google Scholar; and Edwards, B. B., “Slavery in the Middle Ages,” Biblical Repository 7, no. 21 (January 1836): 39Google Scholar.
30 Edwards, “Roman Slavery,” 432–433, 434–435.
31 Edwards, “Slavery in the Middle Ages,” 39, 44.
32 For excerpts of his work, see “Slavery in the Middle Ages,” Boston Recorder, 8 January 1836; and “Slavery in the Middle Ages,” Connecticut Observer, 16 January 1836. Barnes quoted Edwards's article in Barnes, Albert, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: Perkins and Purves, 1846), 368, 371–372Google Scholar. Fee used Edwards's material to defend his separation from the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky in the 1840s after refusing to extend fellowship to slaveholders: Fee, John G., An Anti-Slavery Manual; Being an Examination, in Light of the Bible, and of Facts, into the Moral and Social Wrongs of American Slavery, with a Remedy for the Evil (Maysville, Ky.: Herald, 1848), 124–125Google Scholar. For Wayland, see Wayland, Francis, “Letter VII: The Method of Prohibiting Slavery in the New Testament—Principle and Permission,” in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution [. . .], Wayland, Francis and Fuller, Richard (New York: L. Colby, 1845), 102Google Scholar. See Blanchard, J. and Rice, N. L., A Debate on Slavery [. . .] (Cincinnati: Wm. H. Moore, 1846), 22Google Scholar; and Elliott, Charles, 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: Poe and Hitchcock, 1863), 281Google Scholar.
33 Campbell, Alexander, “Weekly Herald and Philanthropist,” Millennial Harbinger, 3rd ser., 2, no. 6 (June 1845): 269Google Scholar.
34 The encyclical is given in John Forsyth, Address to the People of Georgia (s.n., 1840), 6–7.
35 See, for example, Pennsylvania Freeman, 5 March 1840; and Massachusetts Abolitionist, 19 March 1840, 20. The encyclical was reproduced by the Quaker Benjamin Lundy in an abolitionist pamphlet, in which Pope Gregory also appeared on a list of “prominent apostles, champions and martyrs” of the antislavery cause. See [Lundy, Benjamin, ed.], The Legion of Liberty! and Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds of Some Prominent Apostles, Champions and Martyrs (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1842), 5, 196–198Google Scholar. An 1858 Quaker publication also quoted Pope Gregory XVI: Benezet, Anthony and Wesley, John, Views of American Slavery: Taken a Century Ago (Philadelphia: Association of Friends for the Diffusion of Religious and Useful Knowledge, 1858), 125–126Google Scholar.
36 “Bull of Pope Gregory XVI., for the Abolition of the Negro Slave,” Liberator, 13 March 1840, 42; and Garrison, William Lloyd, No Compromise with Slavery (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1854), 13Google Scholar.
37 Speech of Mr. Slade, of Vermont, on the Right of Petition; The Power of Congress to Abolish Slavery and the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia; The Implied Faith of the North and the South to each other in Forming the Constitution; and the Principles, Purposes, and Prospects of Abolition (Washington D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1840), 37.
38 By the late 1830s, the domestic slave trade was increasingly under attack from Northern abolitionists. See Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014)Google Scholar.
39 Forsyth, Address to the People of Georgia, 3, 4.
40 For example, see “Pope Gregory's Bull,” Philanthropist (Ohio), 24 March 1840.
41 Patrick W. Carey, “England, John,” American National Biography, February 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0800441.
42 For Bishop England's republicanism, see Carey, Patrick W., An Immigrant Bishop: John England's Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (Yonkers, N.Y.: U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Dolan, Jay P., In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22, 35–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the struggle Catholics faced to disarm Protestant suspicions, see Gjerde, Jon, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
43 Tellingly, Bishop England was silent in regard to the ongoing trade of slaves in and between Southern states. As Walter Johnson documents, 1,000,000 slaves were sold between the upper and lower South from 1790 to 1860, with another 2,000,000 sold locally: Johnson, Walter, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 5, 17Google Scholar.
44 For Bishop England's views on slavery, see Carey, “England, John.”
45 England, John, Letters of the Late Bishop England to the Hon. John Forsyth on the Subject of Domestic Slavery [. . .] (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1844), 23–24, 41, 44, 47–48Google Scholar.
46 “Review: Letters of the Late Bishop England,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 28 March 1844.
47 John Fletcher, whose Studies on Slavery opened this chapter, closely followed Bishop England's reasoning on spiritual freedom, and copied his patristic quotations. See Fletcher, Studies on Slavery, 266–267. John C. Hurd's legal treatise (see note 89) also relied on Bishop England. Thomas Cobb cited Bishop England's study throughout his treatise: Cobb, Thomas R. R., An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America: To Which Is Prefixed, an Historical Sketch of Slavery (Philadelphia: T. and J. W. Johnson, 1858), c, cix, 16, 115, 230Google Scholar. See also Sawyer, George S., Southern Institutes; Or, An Inquiry into the Origin and Early Prevalence of Slavery and the Slave-Trade [. . .] (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1858), 124Google Scholar.
48 As Sean Wilentz argues, slavery was the driving force behind the political fracturing of the two party system by the mid-1850s: Wilentz, Sean, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Varon, Elizabeth R., Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
49 The standard account is Goen, C. C., Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
50 Robert D. Cross, “Wayland, Francis,” American National Biography, February 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0801625.
51 Noll argues that “this exchange was one of the United States’ last serious one-on-one debates” over slavery: Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 36–37.
52 Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery.
53 Wayland, “Letter VII,” in Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery, 98–100, 101–102.
54 Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 19.
55 Philip Schaff and Charles Hodge sided with reformed exegesis over Chrysostom's interpretation. See Schaff, Philip, Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg, Pa.: M. Kieffer, 1861), 25–26Google Scholar; and Hodge, Charles, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1860), 123–124Google Scholar.
56 See De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 109.
57 See Babington, Influence of Christianity, 26–28.
58 Richard Fuller, “Letter Slavery is not to be Confounded with the Abuses of Slavery,” in Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery, 140; and Richard Fuller “Letter V: The Argument from the New Testament—Argument, Inference, Proof, Demonstration,” in Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery, 190–191. The Rev. Ebenezer W. Warren (b. 1820), pastor of First Baptist of Macon, Georgia, quoted Chrysostom's commentary in a 1864 narrative. Warren, E. W., Nellie Norton: Or, Southern Slavery and the Bible [. . .] (Macon, Ga.: Burke, Boykin, 1864), 169Google Scholar: “The early Fathers . . . believed this passage favored slavery.”
59 Richard Fuller, “Letter VI: The Mode of Teaching by Principle in this Case at Variance with the Character of God—The Practice of the Primitive Church,” in Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery, 219–220.
60 By the 1920s, Barnes's commentaries had sold over one million copies: Olbricht, T. H., “Barnes, Albert (1798–1870),” in Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. McKim, Donald K. (Westmont, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
61 Barnes drew on B. B. Edwards's research to show that the “tendency to emancipation was much increased by the influence of Christianity.” See also Barnes, Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery, 367–371.
62 Douglass, Frederick, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Foner, Philip S. and Branham, Robert James (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 263Google Scholar.
63 Fee, Anti-Slavery Manual, 124–125.
64 Graham, William, The Contrast; Or The Bible and Abolitionism: An Exegetical Argument (Cincinnati: Daily Cincinnati Atlas Office, 1844), 33–35Google Scholar.
65 See Willey, Larry G., “John Rankin, Antislavery Prophet, and the Free Presbyterian Church,” American Presbyterians 72, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 165–166Google Scholar.
66 Bascom, Henry Bidleman, Methodism and Slavery: With Other Matters in Controversy between the North and the South [. . .] (Frankfort, Ky.: Hodges, Todd, and Pruett, 1845), 62, 65Google Scholar.
67 See McKenzie, Robert Tracy, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, during the war, Brownlow changed sides again and called for emancipation.
68 See Brownlow, William Gannaway, A Sermon on Slavery: A Vindication of the Methodist Church, South: Her Position Stated (Knoxville, Tenn.: Kinsloe and Rice, 1857), 21Google Scholar; and Brownlow, [William Gannaway] and Pryne, [Abram], Ought American Slavery to Be Perpetuated? A Debate between Rev. W. G. Brownlow and Rev. A. Pryne (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1858), 85Google Scholar.
69 This was an argument repeated by proslavery authors in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. For example, see the work of Maine Congregationalist Nathan Lord who argued that abolitionism had its origins “back in subtle heresies of an early period of Christianity”: Lord, Nathan, A Letter of Inquiry to Ministers of the Gospel of All Denominations, on Slavery (Boston: Fetridge, 1854), 13–14Google Scholar.
70 See Dain, Bruce, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Genovese, Eugene D. and Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Fletcher, Studies on Slavery, 268, 276–277.
72 In a list of literary Africans throughout history, Lewis included Cyprian, Origen, Eusebius of Casarea, and—above all—Augustine, whose writings Lewis extracted at length: Lewis, Robert Benjamin, Light and Truth; Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History [. . .] (Boston: A Committee of Colored Gentlemen, 1844), 315–325Google Scholar. For Lewis's life and writing, see Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, “Coloring Universal History: Robert Benjamin Lewis's Light and Truth (1843) and William Wells Brown's The Black Man (1863),” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (March 2009): 107–114Google Scholar.
73 Garnet, Henry Highland, The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race [. . .] (Troy, N.Y.: J. C. Kneeland, 1848), 11–12Google Scholar.
74 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England (London: John Snow, 1855), 87Google Scholar.
75 See Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 123.
76 “Facts for Colored Americans,” Colored American, 6 May 1837.
77 For an example, see Dalcho, Frederick [A South-Carolinian, pseud.], Practical Considerations Founded on the Scriptures, Relative to the Slave Population of South-Carolina (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1823), 13Google Scholar. For the history of this interpretation, see Whitford, David M., The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 “Prejudice against Color in the Light of History,” Colored American, 18 March 1837.
79 For Pennington's work, see Hall, Faithful Account of the Race; and Ernest, Liberation Historiography.
80 Clifton H. Johnson, “Pennington, James William Charles” American National Biography, December 1999, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0801167.
81 Pennington, James W. C., A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People (Hartford, Conn.: L. Skinner, 1841), 43Google Scholar.
82 See Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-century America, 1–6. Pennington picked up on general anti-Catholicism and eighteenth-century accounts of the “Black Legend.” See Hall, Faithful Account of the Race, 76–77.
83 Pennington, Text Book of the Origin and History, 43.
84 For example, in his apology for enacting church discipline on slaveholders, the Presbyterian John Fee argued that the history of Christianity proved that Africans were not inferior to Europeans: Fee, Anti-Slavery Manual, 211–212.
85 Giltner, John H., “Moses Stuart: 1780–1852,” Church History 25, no. 3 (September 1956): 265–265Google Scholar.
86 Stuart, M., Conscience and the Constitution [. . .] (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1850), 54, 103, 112–113Google Scholar.
87 Hurd, John Codman, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1858), 1:156–157, 159–160, 164Google Scholar.
88 Rogers, Edward Coit [Freeman, O. S., pseud.], Letters on Slavery, Addressed to the Pro-Slavery Men of America [. . .] (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), 28–33, 42–46Google Scholar.
89 Historians of the Civil War generally concur that the question of slavery's expansion into the West was what precipitated the secession crisis. See, for example, McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Morrison, Michael A., Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Burton, Orville Vernon, The Age of Lincoln (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007)Google Scholar.
90 Schaff, Philip, History of the Apostolic Church; With a General Introduction to Church History, trans. Yeomans, Edward D. (New York: C. Scribner, 1854), 460Google Scholar.
91 [Schaff, Philip], “The Influence of the Early Church on the Institution of Slavery,” Mercersburg Review 10 (October 1858): 616Google Scholar; and Schaff, Philip, Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg, Pa.: M. Kieffer, 1861), 30–31Google Scholar.
92 Barnes, Albert, The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1857), 44, 26Google Scholar.
93 For example, see Gurowski, Adam, Slavery in History (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1860), 165–166Google Scholar.
94 See Ernest, Liberation Historiography, 309; and Pennington, J. W. C., “A Review of Slavery and the Slave-Trade,” Anglo-African Magazine 1, no. 5 (May 1859): 156Google Scholar.
95 One discussion of slavery in the South Carolina assembly cited Bishop England's interpretation of Catholic tradition: Report of the Minority of the Special Committee of Seven, to whom was Referred so much of Gov. Adams’ Message, No. 1, as Relates to Slavery and the Slave Trade (Columbia, S.C.: Steam Power Press Carolina Times, 1857), 8.
96 So argues Brophy, Alfred L., University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
97 Cobb, Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, cvi–cix.
98 See Brophy, University, Court, and Slave, 251–253.
99 Sawyer, Southern Institutes, 122–124, 147.
100 See Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, 80.
101 For Fitzhugh's thought, see O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, 251–252; and Schneider, Thomas E., “George Fitzhugh: The Turn to History,” in Lincoln's Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis Over Slavery (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 54–72Google Scholar.
102 Fitzhugh, George, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857), 158Google Scholar.
103 For examples, see Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 139.
104 Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 194, 196–199.
105 In 1864, Presbyterian minister William A. Hall argued that the South was ultimately fighting against the Reformation's emphasis on personal conscience. See Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 102.
106 Boyden, Ebenezer, The Epidemic of the Nineteenth Century (Richmond: Chas. H. Wynne, 1860), 14, 16–18Google Scholar.
107 MacMahon, T. W., Cause and Contrast: An Essay on the American Crisis (Richmond: West and Johnston, 1862), ix–x, 4, 21, 25Google Scholar.
108 Gleeson, David T., The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 115–117Google Scholar.
109 For Hopkins's developing views on Christianity and slavery, see Levy, Ronald, “Bishop Hopkins and the Dilemma of Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91, no. 1 (January 1967): 56–71Google Scholar.
110 Marsh, Leonard [Vermonter, A, pseud.], preface to Review of a Letter from the Right Rev. John H. Hopkins, D.D. LL.D., Bishop of Vermont, on the Bible View of Slavery (Burlington, Vt.: Free Press Print, 1861)Google Scholar; and Goodwin, Daniel R., Southern Slavery in its Present Aspects: Containing a Reply to a Late Work of the Bishop of Vermont on Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864), 13Google Scholar.
111 One article noted that Henry VIII was more enlightened than Bishop Hopkins: “Slavery in England,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 27 August 1864. Several publications printed a satirical letter that reproduced Hopkins's argument but replaced “slavery” with “polygamy”: “A Bishop Basted,” Harper's Weekly, 5 December 1863, 770; and “A Bishop Basted,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 11 June 1864. For a list of others, see Levy, “Bishop Hopkins,” 56–57.
112 Goodwin, Southern Slavery, 16–17. For Northern support of slavery, see Weber, Jennifer L., Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
113 Marsh, Review of a Letter, 4–5.
114 See also Atkins, Thomas, American Slavery: Just Published: A Reply to the Letter of Bishop Hopkins of Vermont, on this Important Subject (New York: W. G. Green et al. , 1861)Google Scholar; and Stroud, George, The Views of Judge Woodward and Bishop Hopkins on Negro Slavery at the South, Illustrated from the Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (Philadelphia: s.n., [1863?])Google Scholar.
115 Hopkins, John Henry, A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery, from the Days of the Patriarch Abraham, to the Nineteenth Century [. . .] (New York: W. I. Pooley, 1864), 211, 100–02, 115–16Google Scholar.
116 See Review of A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery, from the Days of the Patriarch Abraham, to the Nineteenth Century [. . .], by John Henry Hopkins, North American Review 99, no. 205 (October 1864): 619–620.
117 De Wolfe Howe, M. A., A Reply to the Letter of Bishop Hopkins, Addressed to Dr. Howe, in the Print Called “The Age” of December 8th, 1863 (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1864), 18Google Scholar.
118 Goodwin, Southern Slavery, 70–73, 123–29, 142, 144–146, 149–151.
119 In this sense, uses of tradition and history mirror what Molly Oshatz argues about biblical exegesis—namely, that antislavery activists focused on the “spirit” of the text while proslavery authors insisted on the “letter”: Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 59–60.
120 Hopkins's grandson addressed this when he wrote that his grandfather's defense of slavery “increased his popularity in the South, [but] made for him many influential enemies . . . throughout the North”: John Henry Hopkins III, “John Henry Hopkins, First Bishop of Vermont,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 6, no. 2 (June 1937): 201.
121 Thompson, Joseph P., Christianity and Emancipation; Or, The Teachings and the Influence of the Bible Against Slavery (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1863), 14, 41, 51–52Google Scholar. Thompson traced anti-slavery sentiments throughout the Middle Ages and quoted from a number of fathers, councils, and popes: Thompson, Christianity and Emancipation, 53–56, 58–59.
122 See Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 2.
123 For Dabney's life and thought, see Wilson, Charles Reagan, “Robert Lewis Dabney: Religion and the Southern Holocaust,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 1 (January 1981): 79–89Google Scholar; and Lucas, Sean Michael, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P and R, 2005)Google Scholar.
124 Dabney, Robert L., A Defence of Virginia, [And Through Her, of the South,] in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party (New York: E. J. Hale and Son, 1867), 6, 186, 204Google Scholar.
125 Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 8.
126 Perry, Bible Culture and Authority, 2.
127 For example, see Noll's arguments about white supremacy in Noll, Civil War as Theological Crisis, 57, or Holifield's discussion of biblicism and common sense philosophy in part 2 of Holifield, Theology in America. This study further challenges the Protestant ideal of biblicism which relied on a sharp contrast between scripture's authority and human authorities, including history and tradition.