The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  James Andrew’s status as both an enslaver of human beings and a bishop in the church became the focus of the 1844 General Conference. Split largely along sectional lines, the antislavery advocates held the ecclesiastical advantage, and in a 110–69 vote, they resolved to censure the bishop as long as he continued to hold slaves. Refusing to give up his church duties, Andrew and his allies split from the MEC to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), and they allowed their clergy to practice slavery.

  BAPTISTS SPLIT OVER SLAVEHOLDING MISSIONARIES

  A year after the Methodist schism, Baptists followed a similar course. Many religious organizations attempted to circumvent the conflict over slavery by claiming neutrality and letting local congregations decide the matter. Since the 1790s, the Baptist General Convention had taken this approach. These formal pronouncements, however, did little to conceal the growing sectional divide over slavery. Baptists in the South suspected that their denomination had a bias toward abolition, and they wanted to expose it. In 1844, the Georgia Baptist Convention put forth James E. Reeve as a missionary to the Home Mission Society. Like James Andrew of the Methodist church, Reeve enslaved black people.

  Reeve’s status as a slave owner forced members of the society’s executive board to decide: either approve Reeve and tacitly endorse slaveholding for the entire denomination or reject him and demonstrate a bias toward an antislavery stance. Board members viewed the application as an attempt to purposely insert a divisive question into the denomination’s work. So the committee tried to avoid the issue of slavery altogether. In considering Reeve’s application, they wrote, “Resolved, That . . . it is not expedient to introduce the subjects of slavery or anti-slavery into our deliberations, nor to entertain applications to which they are introduced.”12 Instead of accepting or rejecting the slaveholding Reeve as a missionary, the executive board declined to deliberate at all.

  Not to be deterred, other Baptists in the South, this time the Baptist General Convention of Alabama, submitted a resolution demanding that the national convention state plainly whether they viewed slaveholding as a sin. In their view, if Baptists thought enslaving people was truly a matter of ecclesiastic indifference, then they should not object to slaveholders working in foreign or domestic missions. The Alabama Baptists demanded that their brethren acknowledge “the distinct, explicit avowal that slaveholders are eligible, and entitled, equally with non-slaveholders, to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions.” Forced into making a definitive statement about slavery, the Home Mission Society responded with a clear rejection of any slaveholder to office: “If, however, anyone should offer himself as a Missionary, having slaves, and should insist on retaining them as his property, we could not appoint him.” The mission board punctuated its statement by concluding, “One thing is certain, we can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery.”13

  The battle lines between northern and southern Baptists had been drawn, and in May 1845, almost three hundred Baptist leaders representing nearly 400,000 churchgoers from southern states gathered in Augusta, Georgia, to form a new church association, one inclusive of slaveholders, called the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The convention’s first president, William Bullein Johnson, explained the reason for the separation and the new convention. “These [northern] brethren, thus acted upon a sentiment they have failed to prove—That slavery is, in all circumstances sinful.”14 In light of this affront to the southern way of life and the assault on the institution of slavery, Southern Baptists viewed separation as their best option.

  PRESBYTERIANS SPLIT OVER “CHRIST AND CAESAR”

  A split among Presbyterians had already occurred in 1837, but it was primarily over the issues of revivalism and the question of adherence to a theological system outlined in the Westminster Confession of Faith. “New School” Presbyterians, following the thought of Puritans such as Jonathan Edwards, took a positive view of the religious experience of revivals. “Old School” adherents, such as Charles Hodge, preferred a less emotionally expressive and more traditional form of worship. Even though the conflict of the 1830s centered on a different set of theological issues, the slavery question lurked in the background. Tension continued to mount under the surface, and the Presbyterians split shortly after the start of the Civil War.

  Following the story of one Presbyterian minister helps illuminate the Presbyterian denomination’s divide. In 1809, Gardiner Spring had a young wife, a Yale education, and a promising legal career before him. In September, Spring entered College Chapel in New Haven and listened to a preacher from New York named John Mason. The title of Mason’s sermon was “To the Poor the Gospel is Preached.” As Spring listened, tears began to run down his face, and from that moment he committed himself to the ministry. After a year of seminary he gained ordination and became the senior minister of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. Contemporaries described his preaching as “vigorous, simple, and always interesting.”15

  Spring involved himself in the life of the church, but he was also involved in politics and the affairs of the state. As the Civil War approached, he aligned himself with the cause of abolition and the Union. After the start of the war, he presented a set of propositions at the 1861 General Assembly called the “Gardiner Spring Resolutions.” The resolutions stated, “It is the duty of the ministry and churches under its care to do all in their power to promote and perpetuate the integrity of these United States, and to strengthen, uphold, and encourage the Federal Government.”16 Spring intended for his Presbyterian denomination to clearly align with the Union and the antislavery cause. His southern brethren did not view this favorably. They saw the resolutions as a direct attack.

  The Gardiner Spring Resolutions called all Presbyterians to pledge their allegiance to the federal government and, by implication, to its stance on slavery. These were proposed as conditions of Presbyterian membership. According to one historian, “In the 1860s the issue centered on the question of Christ and Caesar, and whether or not the Church could require allegiance to any particular nation as a term of communion.”17 Given this ultimatum, Presbyterians in the South viewed separation as the only option available to them. They formed the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (PCCS), which later changed its name to the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). The forty-eight Presbyteries that separated from the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) were all in southern states that advocated for each state’s right to determine the legality of slavery.

  As northern and southern denominations drifted apart and eventually split, they each hardened their stances toward slavery. Southern Christians devised increasingly complex theological arguments to argue for the existence of slavery, and in the process, southern Christians moved from viewing slavery as something permitted to something positive.

  THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY

  As soldiers in the Civil War waged battles with bullets and bayonets, Christian pastors and theologians fought with the words of the Bible. Southern white Christians, far from viewing slavery as wrong or sinful, generally affirmed that God sanctioned slavery in Scripture and that bondage under white authority was the natural state for people of African descent. To complicate matters, abolitionists and socially moderate Christians struggled to argue against what seemed evident to many people—the Bible never repudiates slavery. Indeed, many of the godliest people in the Bible enslaved others. So the Civil War also sparked a battle over the Bible.

  It may be challenging for modern readers to grasp what was at stake for southern Christians when they considered slavery. Slavery was not just a civil issue; it was a religious one. Christians in the South believed the Bible approved of slavery since the Bible never clearly condemned slavery and even provided instructions for its regulation. Southern theologians challenged their abolitionist opponents to produce the chapter and verse where Jesus, or the Bible generally, condemned slavery. They gave extended treatises o
n the scriptural validity of slavery. Southern Methodist preacher J. W. Tucker said to Confederates in 1862, “Your cause is the cause of God, the cause of Christ, of humanity. It is a conflict of truth with error—-of Bible with northern infidelity—of pure Christianity with northern fanaticism.”18 Even as white southern Christians denounced northerners for making fidelity to the Union a requirement for fellowship, they made acceptance of race-based chattel slavery a requirement of biblical orthodoxy.

  Robert Lewis Dabney, a southern Presbyterian minister and professor, originally opposed secession from the Union. Only after Virginia formally joined the Confederate cause in 1861 did Dabney change his position and become a powerful apologist for the South. During the war Dabney served as a chaplain for the Confederacy, and for a brief time, he was the adjutant, or “chief of staff,” for General Stonewall Jackson. Even though illness forced Dabney out of the war, he and Jackson remained close friends. When Jackson died, his widow asked Dabney to write her husband’s biography. As a Presbyterian minister, Dabney also marshaled his academic training to publish A Defence of Virginia, [and through Her, of the South] in 1867 shortly after the end of the Civil War. The release of this book after the war reveals that the formal end of military conflict did little to change the minds of southerners about slavery. Many remained committed to slavery as orthodox, biblical truth. In his book, Dabney explained in precise detail, quoting from the Old and New Testament and from economics and experience, why the North got it wrong and why the South’s defense of slavery was justified.

  Dabney not only believed that slavery was morally acceptable; he viewed it as a positive for the African: “Was it nothing, that this [black] race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race?”19 Dabney accepted the myth of the moral and intellectual inferiority of enslaved blacks, believing that if they were left to their own devices, they would only tend toward “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, [and] waste.” In Dabney’s theology, it was only through contact with the “nobler race” of white people in a master-slave relationship that there was hope of elevating the ethics of Africans.20

  In addition, Dabney saw introducing Africans to Christianity as one of the most praiseworthy benefits of slavery for black people. Because black people were condemned to perish in their pagan beliefs, Dabney saw white Christian slaveowners as loving people standing between the enslaved and eternal damnation. “And above all, was it nothing that [black slaves] should be brought, by the relation of servitude, under the consciences and Christian zeal of a Christian people?”21 In Dabney’s mind, the gentle ministrations of the whip and the admonition of slaves to obey their masters had the positive effect of commending Christianity to black people. Had Dabney personally experienced the reality of enslavement, perhaps he would have been less confident about its salutary spiritual effects.

  SLAVERY AND THE CURSE OF HAM

  Genesis 9:18–29, sometimes referred to as the curse of Ham, is one of the most cryptic stories in the Old Testament. Subject to a multitude of interpretations, this passage has been widely deployed as the biblical basis for race-based chattel slavery. In the story, Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked in his tent. His son Ham walks in on his sleeping father and sees his father naked. Ham leaves to tell his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, yet they respond differently. Instead of gazing upon their father’s unclothed body, they quickly grab a blanket and walk backwards into his tent to cover him. When Noah wakes up and discovers what Ham has done, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan.

  Cursed be Canaan!

  The lowest of slaves

  will he be to his brothers. (Gen. 9:25)

  Conversely, Noah blesses his other sons and consigns Canaan to serve them:

  Praise be to the LORD, the God of Shem!

  May Canaan be the slave of Shem. (9:26)

  Noah concludes with a final pronouncement: “May Canaan be the slave of Japheth” (9:27). Proslavery advocates used these verses to make a biblical case that black people—as descendants of Ham—belonged in a state of slavery.

  For some, Ham’s transgression provided an understanding of the origin of slavery and where it fit in the Bible’s grand narrative. “It was in consequence of sin . . . that the first slave sentence of which we have any record was pronounced by Noah upon Canaan and his descendants,” wrote Presbyterian minister George D. Armstrong.22 Proslavery theologians taught that slavery had been a regrettable but necessary reality ever since Ham’s transgression.

  This passage from Genesis not only provided a basis for slavery’s existence, but it was an indication for some that God decreed a specific race of people to be cursed and live their days in bondage. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, remarked in his well-known “Cornerstone Speech” that “the negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”23 And Dabney tentatively advanced a claim that many white Christians held as incontrovertible truth: “It may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham.”24 A racial genealogy underlies the racist interpretation of Canaan’s curse. It assumed that the progeny of Shem became the Jewish people, the descendants of Japheth became white people, and these two were the rightful masters of those descended from Ham, the “degraded” black race. In one stroke of dubious demography, slavery became the right and proper place of Africans specifically and exclusively.

  Abolitionists advanced several arguments to refute the curse of Ham as justification for the enslavement of black people. First, they pointed out that Noah pronounced the curse on Canaan, not Ham. Canaan’s curse had been fulfilled, they said, when Israel conquered the Canaanite lands. Thus, there was no perpetual curse that still applied in the nineteenth century. Abolitionists also questioned whether black Africans were the genealogical descendants of Ham at all. And how could white people definitively trace their lineage to that of Shem or Japheth? One abolitionist challenged proslavery advocates by asking, “Where is the sentence [of Scripture] in which God ever appointed you, the Anglo-Saxon race [over another people], you, the mixture of all races under heaven, you, who can not tell whether the blood of S[h]em, Ham, or Japheth mingles in your veins”?25

  But abolitionist claims were mostly met with skepticism because they advanced arguments based on the “spirit” rather than the “letter” of the law. Even when abolitionists made their case from the Bible, they were criticized because they were not able to cite a specific passage that explicitly condemned slavery. Instead, they had to argue from broader principles such as “love of neighbor” and the unity of humankind.26 Southern theologians, by contrast, appealed to a “plain reading” of Scripture which they claimed clearly showed righteous and godly people who enslaved people with apparently no rebuke or accusation of sinfulness. Proslavery advocates grew confident in the Confederate cause because it seemed like the proslavery theological arguments respected the Bible’s authority and employed a straightforward method of scriptural interpretation.

  One of the best biblical cases against American slavery was not to deny that faithful people in the Bible enslaved others but to demonstrate how that form of slavery—the slavery of the ancient Near East—was far different from the slavery practiced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the American South. It was impossible to deny that some form of unpaid labor had characterized the economy of virtually every society for thousands of years. Yet enslaved people in these contexts had endured a different type of bondage. In most cases, they could legally marry and own property, and they worked for a specific term, not a lifetime. Slaves in other cultures were not born into servitude. They might offer their labor in order to pay off a debt, or they were captured in war. Slavery was not exclusively a matter of race or ethnicity in other cultures either. Of course, the point of this was not to suggest that slavery was a favorable way to live. Rather, this argument was used to demonstrate that southern theologians gave virtually no consideration t
o the unique form of slavery that existed in America.

  So, unfortunately, the most potent biblical antislavery argument—demonstrating the differences between slavery in the ancient Near East and that of the American South—also took the most effort to understand. Attempting to list the differences between slavery as practiced in the Bible and race-based chattel slavery required an in-depth grasp of cultures thousands of years removed from the mid-1800s. The argument required a rather sophisticated knowledge of the differences between Old Testament Israel and the New Testament people of God. For most Christians, even those sympathetic to the plight of black people, the southern proslavery advocates seemed to have a clearer and simpler biblical argument, one that did not require sources outside of Scripture or employ unfamiliar interpretations.

  JAMES HENLEY THORNWELL AND “SPIRITUALITY OF THE CHURCH”

  Many southern Christians admired James Henley Thornwell as their most adroit theologian. A respected teacher, a profound preacher, and a prolific writer, Thornwell distinguished himself as one of the most articulate proponents of a doctrine called the “spirituality of the church” in the years leading up to the Civil War.

  Faced with growing pressure from their northern coreligionists to demonstrate allegiance to the Union and to the eradication of slavery within its borders, southern Christians rejected the call to take firm stances on the so-called “political” issue of slavery. In Thornwell’s exposition of the spirituality of the church, he asserted that the church’s one “Constitution” is the Bible, and the church has no jurisdiction over political or social matters. “The power of the Church, accordingly, is only ministerial and declarative.”27 According to Thornwell, the church can merely assert what the Bible teaches and must remain silent on that which the Bible is silent.