Baptist Southerners’ Accommodation with Slavery: A Study in Economics and Southern Notions of Honor (original) (raw)

Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870

Journal of the Early Republic, 1989

This page intentionally left blank 'Niggers' had our meetin' in de white fo'ks Baptist Church in de town 0' Tuskegee. Dere's a place up in de loft dere now dat dey built fer de 'Nigger' slaves to 'tend church wid de white fo'ks. White preacher he preach to de white fo'ks an' when he git thu' wid dem he preach some to de 'N iggers. ' Tell' em to mind dere Marster an' b'have deyself an' dey'll go to Hebben when dey die. "7 Slaves saw through these words and felt contempt for the self-serving attention they received. More important to them was the remainder of the service that they heard and participated in with the rest of the congregation. Here the slaves heard a more complete version of the gospel, and despite whatever social-control uses some ministers tried to put religion to in a portion of the Sunday service, most slaves found grounds for hope and a degree of spiritual liberation through their participation in these biracial churches. As Blassingame concluded, "Generally the ministers tried to expose the slaves to the major tenets of Christianity .... [And] only 15 percent of the Georgia slaves who had heard antebellum whites preach recalled admonitions to obedience. "8 Slaves worshiped apart from whites on some occasions, often with the knowledge of their owners and often without the white supervision the law called for. Some black churches were adjuncts to white churches, and completely independent and autonomous black churches existed in southern cities. Blacks worshiped privately and often secretly in their cabins and in the fields. Sometimes, and especially when their owner was irreligious, slaves had to slip away to hidden "brush arbors" deep in the woods to preach, shout, sing, and worship. But such practices should not lead us to forget that the normative worship experience of blacks in the antebellum South was in a biracial church. "Including black Sunday School scholars and catechumens," Blassingame writes, "there were probably 1,000,000 slaves under the regular tutelage of Southern churches in 1860. "9 When David T. Bailey examined some 40 autobiographies of blacks and 637 interviews of slaves on the subject of religion, he discovered that 32 percent of the autobiographers who mentioned Planters and Slaves in the Great Awakening ALAN GALLAY Almost four decades before the American Revolution, evangelicals in Georgia and South Carolina advocated an ethos that reconciled the enslavement of their fellowman with the heartfelt hope of elevating the "wretched Race" with Christianity. This essay will argue that one of the sources of slaveholders' paternalism can be found in the evangelical attempt to reform the institution of slavery in the First Great Awakening. This attempt, led by George Whitefield and the Bryan family, shaped the response of several evangelical slaveholders to the peculiar institution in Georgia and South Carolina. The evangelicals' accommodation to slavery in the 1740s and 17 50s led to the development of a paternalistic ethos and created a legacy for future generations. The relationship between the First Great Awakening and slavery and its attendant ideologies has not been explored because the Awakening in the Carolinas and Georgia has received scant attention from historians. Alan Heimert's seminal work, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the American Revolution, made virtually no mention of religion in South Carolina and Georgia. Subsequent studies have noticed the Awakening in South Carolina but have focused almost exclusively on George Whitefield's celebrated visits to Charleston from 1738 to 1741. The consensus of historians is that the Awakening had little effect in the southernmost colonies beyond the brief but effusive reaction to Whitefield's preachings in Charleston and his theological dispute with Alexander Garden. According to Jon Butler, Whitefield's visits "produced no new congregations in Charleston and had no documented effect on the general patterns of religious adherence elsewhere in the colony."1 This essay challenges the notion that Whitefield's influence was ephemeral and confined to Charleston and that evangelical fervor waned in 2

The Effects of the Civil War on Southern Baptist Beliefs

The American Civil War was fought to settle, once and for all time, the question of freedom for all people in the United States. The Southern Baptist Convention came into existence because Baptists in the South wanted to have the ability to serve as missionaries and, at the same time, own slaves at the same time. When war finally came, the Southern Baptist Convention became an enthusiastic supporter of the Confederate nation and the institution of slavery. At the start of the war, Southern Baptists were adamant in their beliefs. But the war was a crisis that tested them. America was a different nation at the end of the war than it was at the beginning. This study determines how Southern Baptist beliefs were changed by the war. The method used was to establish what Southern Baptists believed at the beginning of the Civil War. Afterwards, the beliefs before the War will be compared with Southern Baptist beliefs at the end of the war. This was done by examining sermons, speeches, Baptist newspapers and other sources to see what Southern Baptists were saying and how they were applying their beliefs to the issues of their day. The study shows that, while Southern Baptist confessional beliefs did not change, the application of those beliefs to the issues facing Southern Baptists as the United States experienced schism, and in the ending and aftermath of the war, changed dramatically. The study demonstrates that religion is belief lived out in a material world. It concludes that, even though confessional beliefs may remain steadfast, the application and articulation of those beliefs can be forced to evolve by traumatic historical events.

"Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment"

It is a truism that evangelical Christianity and enlightenment liberalism have constituted two of the most influential movements in America. For much of the nation's history, the two forces have existed in a state of tension or outright conflict, each checking the most extreme tendencies and thwarting the ultimate goals of the other. To many participants, American history itself has been viewed as a struggle between these two poles-interpreted as the clash between righteousness and infidelity, in the eyes of one set of combatants; between the growth of knowledge and the persistence of ignorance and superstition, in the perception of the other.

The Preacher and Missionary War: The Political Role of Race and Christianity in the 1831 Baptist War

2021

Abolitionists from the Eighteenth Century to the mid-Nineteenth Century tended to be remembered by William Wilberforce, Joseph Soul, Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Bowly, and William Lloyd Garrison. All of these men have been extremely well represented throughout scholarship and the archives. The voices that are often left out of the archives are the men and women who fought on the frontlines for their freedom. Enslaved men and women fought to the death for their freedom and are often overshadowed by White missionaries and abolitionists in the archives. Black leaders often have less representation throughout history and scholarship due to the lack of archival sources on these men and women. The Baptist War of 1831 was credited to having started because of the inspirations of Black religious leaders such as Samuel Sharpe and George Taylor; however, the historiography on the Baptist War has an overwhelming amount of information on British missionaries such as William Knibb, Thomas Burchell, ...

Obedient to God: Christian Justifications For Slavery in the Antebellum South

This project aims to help answer the question of "How did Christians in the Antebellum South support such an institution as chattel slavery?" To do so it offers a survey of the scriptural, moral, economical, and theological defenses of the system used by Christians in the Antebellum South. It also gives attention to the role clergy played in promoting slavery. It relies heavily on secondary sources, but also incorporates significant primary sources from the time period. This project hopes to provide in one place a concise survey of the defenses for slavery used by Southern Antebellum Christians. This research reveals not only "how" Christians defended the institution of slavery, but also that they believed by doing so they were being obedient to God.

Legitimating Slavery in the Old South: The Effect of Political Institutions on Ideology

Studies in American Political Development, 1990

Any basic interpretation of American history," one pr contends, "will have to account for ... the coming of the two basic interpretations that have dominated the s politics, the progressive and consensus paradigms,2 have s unsatisfactory explanations for what is arguably the most American past. After briefly analyzing the insights and l approaches to the Civil War, we propose an alternative p theory. The progressive paradigm posits a bipolar conflict pivoting on economic interests. Probably the most influential application of this approach to the Civil War was Charles Beard's interpretation of the war as the "Second American Revolution." Beard explained the Civil War in terms of an "inexorable clash" between the agrarian South and the expanding, industrializing North. Political conflict between capitalists and planters was fueled by a desire to control the federal government on behalf of narrowly defined material interests-protective tariffs for industry, land grants for railroads, subsidies for shipping. Claims by contemporary participants that they were attacking and defending slavery are dismissed as rationalizations for underlying economic motives.3 Dissatisfaction with Beard's reductionist conception of interests and de-We wish to thank Lawrence Friedman, Eric Foner, Eugene Genovese, Michael Rogin, and Kenneth Stampp for their critical comments.

'Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce', ANVIL, 24 (2007)

Evangelical Christians were prominent in the campaign to bring about the end of the British slave trade in 1807. However, John Coffey here shows how, in the mid-eighteenth century, evangelical Christians on both sides of the Atlantic acquiesced in the slave trade and slavery. By the 1770s to 1780s their ideas underwent a dramatic change and it was evangelicals, mainly Quakers and a few Anglicans, who established the Committee to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Coffey shows how, over the next 20 years, with various set-backs, they took a dominant role in the first mass extra-parliamentary campaign in British history that successfully restricted the British slave trade and then brought in the Act to abolish it.