by Melvyn Bragg
Another pseudo-scholarly but nonetheless accepted as authentic reading of the story of Cain declared that black people were descended from Cain when God punished Cain for killing Abel, his brother. The ‘mark of Cain’ was to be black. This baseless scholarship was a boon to the Christian and Muslim slave trade. These interpretations were to be lethal.
So began the battle of the verses. Every bit as deadly as the verses used in the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars in the British Isles and the verses to be used with just as much fatal effect in the American Civil War.
A useful starting point in the American experience occurred in the public apology of Judge Samuel Sewall who had behaved disgracefully and unforgivably. When he was in authority during the Salem Witches trial innocent citizens were persecuted and sentenced to death on the hysterical evidence of adolescent girls whose murderous ‘visions’ were taken to be from God.
The Christian judge took a course of action since widely followed and sought forgiveness or public favour in a belated apology. However, in his self-serving grovelling, he brought up a line from Exodus which became an important rallying cry for the abolitionists in America. ‘He that stealeth a man and selleth him,’ it read, ‘or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.’ In short, anyone enslaving anyone else ought himself to be punished by death.
That would seem to be a clinching argument. But the grip of slavery was so deep in the minds and customs of people that the argument would not be settled anything like as easily as by a single quotation from Exodus, however faithfully the words of Moses (who it was thought had written Exodus) might be revered. There were others. Timothy lists ‘men-stealers’ with the ‘lawless and the disobedient’. In Colossians ‘Masters: give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a master in heaven.’ Jesus condemned the withholding of wages from hired workers. In Galatians ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’
The Enlightenment project in Europe in its eager and passionate pursuit of knowledge through scientific investigation began to study different ‘races’ and, in the prevailing intellectual climate, found some inferior to others. That this contradicted the Old Testament declaration that there was a fundamental equality in humankind because all of it was necessarily descended from Adam and Eve was thought to be all to the good. But there was a party in the Enlightenment which wanted to contradict the Bible at every turn.
The Bible-loving Quakers in America were the first organised religious group to petition against slavery, which they did in 1688, a century before Wilberforce brought his bill into the House of Commons. A movement grew – small, probably unnoticed by the majority of people and thought of no consequence by the minority who kept track of these matters: but it grew. Correspondence and pamphlets sailed to and fro across the Atlantic. There was a chipping away at the monolith of received and ingrained opinion that slavery was God-sanctioned. A few white individuals were united in conscience and in determination. All this while at the same time among the slaves themselves, organised opposition and acts of great courage built up what would become the ready army of the oppressed.
In England, Granville Sharp, an Anglican gentleman, nurtured a great hatred of slavery informed by his correspondence with a Pennsylvanian Quaker. He scoured the Bible for anti-slavery evidence. His landmark success, however, was to support an English lawsuit in 1772, Somersett’s Case. McCulloch explains: ‘In his judgement of this case, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield found in favour of an escaped slave, James Somersett, against his master, a customs officer of Boston, Massachusetts. Mansfield refused to accept that the institution of slavery existing in 18th century England could be linked to the legal status of serfdom . . . recognised in English common law: logically, therefore, slavery had no legal existence in England.’ Therefore only a decision in Parliament could legalise it: therefore a decision in Parliament could ban the trade in it. The scene was set for one of Sharp’s fellow evangelicals, William Wilberforce.
There was some room, thanks to Somersett’s Case, for what proved to be a helpful though hypocritical dimension to the argument in Britain. It was a country which would not tolerate slavery on its own land: there were 20 – 30,000 blacks in the country at the end of the eighteenth century. It was also a country which in all but legal form was ‘enslaving’ in its first-stage Industrial Revolution, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the bondage of factories and mines. It was also a country that shipped scores of thousands of slaves from Africa to America every year.
Yet out of that came a phrase which the descendants of enslaved Africans are surely tired of hearing: the judgement of the Victorian historian W.E.H. Lecky. He wrote that ‘the unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.’
But for all that, the real battleground for the abolition of slavery itself was to be America. The battle was fought with Bibles on the plantations in small churches built by the slaves, with bullets on the battlefield and finally on the streets of twentieth-century America.
Slavery began in North America with indentured white slaves. In the 1660s, the demand for labour grew and the English tobacco growers in the southern states followed the South American and Caribbean example and began to ship in men, women and children from Africa.
In the first hundred years, there was little effort to convert the slaves to Christianity. The chief task was to control many different tribes and tongues with their many beliefs which were barely comprehended by the whites and feared as the possible seeds of rebellion. This control was exercised by cruelty, by torture, confinement and the imposition of inhuman divisions in families and in tribes. In the early years the unquestioned notion was that slavery was a natural part of the way in which society was organised.
The words of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America in the nineteenth century, reached back across two centuries of belief in the South that ‘slavery was established by decree of Almighty God . . . it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments from Genesis to Revelations . . . it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilisation and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.’
In the slave-owning, slavery-dependent southern states, education was organised through the Bible. The formal school system was patchy. It was the Sunday schools and home Bible reading that educated the people. They were guided, in the churches, by preachers who from their pulpits taught the inevitability and the righteousness of slavery. It was difficult for those thus directed to assume anything else. That view was always shored up by references to the King James Bible, where people were sold into slavery, captured as slaves, used as slaves. That those references were open to challenges would become part of the later war over the Word, but for generations of slave owners there was no guilt and no doubt.
Eventually two streams of history merged into each other to start the flow of what was initially called ‘slave religion’. The Great Awakenings, especially the Second Great Awakening, reached out to the slaves. Methodism was particularly effective. The Quakers were stern in their anti-slavery stance; other evangelicals began to carry the message across the races – to Indians as well as to Africans. And individuals, English and in increasing numbers Americans, began to see the slaves as potential converts. They could be redeemed. Their colour was immaterial, it was their souls the evangelicals wanted to capture. You could argue that it was the determination of the revivalists to leave no soul untouched that helped set off a conversion process which eventually grew into a coherent political force.
Alongside this the ‘slave religion’ developed its own internal dynamic, its own teachers and preachers and its effective organisational skills. In the face of barbaric and imprisoning opposition from the white Christian masters, there g
rew up a black Christianity which absorbed many African beliefs and practices. Common faith and community were expressed in gospel songs and spirituals; visions Christian and African were intense. There were physical expressions of exaltation and hope. The King James Bible was a source for language as well as for faith but above all it was a source for the stories around which the African-American slaves created their own new culture. These stories fed the imagination and portrayed other possible worlds. This religion drew deeply on two cultures, transplanting the traditional African spirituality and transforming the traditional Christian. Eventually it became central to the unique identity of America.
It was the stories that gave the black religion its spine. Daniel in the lions’ den; Moses rescuing the Israelites; Jonah, David, Mary, Jesus: and the stories were turned into songs that steeled the resolution of what became a new nation within the United States. For years it was invisible to most of the whites. They ignored its churches which flourished beside the swamps and in the dark forbidding ghettoes. But the slaves had found a way, a footing, and the story of their long stony march to liberty was to be voiced in their own King James Version.
There were, then, three different versions of the same 1611 Book of Books in America. One which was claimed by the abolitionists to support their cause; one which was claimed by the pro-slavery South to support theirs; and the Bible as claimed by the slaves. It has always been a book for all seasons but rarely as dramatically as in what would become a bitter civil war shot through with racism, idealism, religious prejudice and zeal and widespread biblical literacy. Going into that war the American peoples, whatever their background, were already predisposed to strong religious passions. Coming out of it they were, as in part they still are, even more tightly sealed in their compact with God through His Word in the Bible.
It took time for the sides to assemble their forces. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were many small signs. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, (known as SPG) was formed in London in 1701 after a report that the Anglican Church in America had ‘little spiritual vitality’. The fact that the SPG itself got much of its funding from the Codrington Plantation in Barbados – which employed slaves – was characteristic of the muddle and the confusion over this issue. The roots of slavery were so deep that to tear them out was to rip open the ground on which you stood. The SPG did not give up its slave holdings until after the 1833 Act in the British Parliament which abolished slavery.
Despite attempts at conversion it is vital to acknowledge that it was the slaves themselves who reached out, through the Bible, for a religion which in some profound way satisfied their past, dignified their present and gave them both hope and a goal. For example, there was, from the beginning, an intense identification not only with Jesus Christ but also with the Hebrew slaves.
This had two crucial elements. They read the Bible as history and saw that the Hebrew slaves had eventually been liberated by God. Why should God not do the same for them? Second: God was now their master, not the plantation owner. Just as the Presbyterians in the British Civil Wars in the middle of the seventeenth century had found in the Bible that God was superior to any king and therefore a king could be overthrown with God’s blessing, so the slaves found an intellectual and emotional wedge to prise away the authority of their ‘masters’. They could see them not as masters but subjects of the same God as they were – and equal in the eyes of that God. They were just as vulnerable to being dislodged by the One who sat in judgement over everyone. This realisation was, as it was for the Presbyterians who tried and executed a king, a decisive and seminal first step on the road to freedom.
It was the black preachers of black Baptist and Methodist Churches (such as the African Methodist Episcopal) who brought not only Christianity but also education and social services to the slaves. The black Christians were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, alongside the evangelical whites. There were also secular and humanistic reformers who were just as profoundly opposed to slavery on moral grounds.
But the battering rams in the very early days came from evangelicals like Wesley and Whitefield, Wilberforce and others, like Charles Spurgeon (1834 – 92), an English Particular Baptist preacher. His sermons were burned in America because of their vehemence. He called slavery ‘the foulest blot’ which ‘may have to be washed out in blood . . . a crime of crimes, a soul-destroying sin, and an iniquity which cries aloud for vengeance’. Spurgeon had been converted to Christianity by reading part of the King James Bible when, aged fifteen, he took refuge in a Primitive Methodist church in a snowstorm. The text of that day read: ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no one else.’ He was to write: ‘Bible hearers, when they hear indeed, come to be Bible lovers.’ In his lifetime it is estimated he preached to about 10 million people and his sermons were translated into many languages.
Then there is George Bourne whose many books, but most influentially A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument (1845) dissected the biblical pro-slavery arguments. His chapter headings included ‘Pro-Slavery Perversions of the Old Testament’ and ‘Pro-Slavery Perversions of the New Testament’. He was also inflamed at the treatment of women slaves and published Slavery Illustrated in its Efects upon Women.
But these were voices crying in the wilderness as far as the epicentre of the problem was concerned. The slave-owning southerners saw no reason to yield their ground and though there were some inroads, these books and sermons and pamphlets had more influence in the North. However, the issue of slavery and behind that the ownership of the truth of the Bible became a serious factor in the growing rift between North and South which would lead to the Civil War.
Meanwhile the slaves were building up their own position through the unexpected but inspiring medium of songs. The early white Methodist preachers gave some encouragement and Methodism was one of the main sources of the early songs. Methodism was renowned for its rousing hymns and notorious in Anglican England for the participation and enthusiasm of its congregations. The Africans took to that, but soon they preferred to find their own way.
We read of secret ‘bush’ meetings, hidden in the swamps and woods, which could attract thousands of slaves to listen to passionate itinerant preachers. And to sing. As these songs emerged, they became the voice of the slaves, spirituals. From these beginnings, by an alchemy of liberation, talent and the profound seduction of the music and the words, they became three centuries later, through soul and jazz and rock ’n’ roll, the voice of America, America’s priceless gift to the culture of the world.
The Bible was their Great Book and their unique source. A favourite song was ‘Go Down Moses’ – also known as ‘Let My People Go’. This was rooted in Exodus viii, 26: ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses: Go unto Pharaoh and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.’
That was translated into the spiritual:When Israel was in Egypt’s land: let my people go.
Oppress’d so hard they could not stand: let my people go.
Go down Moses
Way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go.
The effect today even on white Anglo-Saxon Englishmen can be to release that surge of emotion which somehow detonates both hope and joy the way that only music and lyrics can do when they send a depth charge into feelings.
Many of the songs talked of home: heading home to ‘Sweet Canaan, the Promised Land’ or ‘Bound for Canaan Land’.
Wher’re you bound?
Bound for Canaan land.
O, you must not lie
You must not steal
You must not take God’s name in vain.
I’m bound for Canaan’s land.
It is to be marvelled at that people who had known very little but inhumanity were singing songs not only of home but also of a morality so far above that of their slave holders. To combat the brutality they endured
they turned to the Ten Commandments. In other songs, it was the words of Jesus which inspired them.
There were political songs, referring to the ‘Underground Railway’ – the route taken by those slaves who made a break for freedom and struck north, moving from ‘station’ to ‘station’ as helpers, at great risk to themselves, harboured them for a while before seeing them on to the next stage of that epic journey. There’s ‘The Gospel Train’ and ‘Wade in the Water’, referring to the dangerous Ohio River, the boundary seen as the final passage to the North and to freedom. ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, refers to a specific place where fugitive slaves were welcomed.
The fashion for spirituals has waxed and waned but they are always there, the foundation music. This music was grafted on to the biblically inspired lyrics from the King James Version. Together they made a rallying cry and a soundtrack for those who fought their way out of slavery. The Black Renaissance in the twentieth century saw the spirituals bloom again.
Paul Robeson gave hugely popular public performances as did Mahalia Jackson. Choirs and choruses took the gospel songs on tours across the United States. In the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s they reappeared at full volume to play their part with ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho’ where the words were changed to ‘Marching Round Selma’. You could argue that when Elvis Presley changed popular music through his version of rock ’n’ roll one reason for the transforming power of it was that Presley, the southern choral boy, had grown up on the gospel music and spirituals which are still vibrant in hundreds of choirs today.