The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  2. Eric Weiner, “Coming to America: Who Was First?,” interview with Russell Freedman, NPR Books, October 8, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15040888.

  3. Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (during His First Voyage, 1492–93) and Documents Relating the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 109. Available from the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

  4. Columbus, “October 11, 1492,” in The Journal of Christopher Columbus, 38.

  5. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, 20th anniv. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), loc. 491, Kindle.

  6. The difference between slavery as practiced among tribes in Africa and that which was practiced in North America cannot be overstated. When African tribes took prisoners of war and enslaved them, they often used them as household servants. Although they were ripped from their home and family, they had considerably more freedom than the enslaved in America. They performed chores alongside other members of the household and were allowed to marry. Nor was slavery in Africa based on skin color or race. For a summary, see “Catherine Ancholou on the difference between African slavery and American slavery,” in Africa in the Americas, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1i3018.html.

  7. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African American Odyssey, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2016), 33–46.

  8. Some historians now think it is possible that Equiano was born in North America and gathered memories of the middle passage from other slaves who actually made the journey. In either case, his description of the conditions is accurate.

  9. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Public Domain Books, 2006), 29–30, Kindle.

  10. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 77.

  11. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 32.

  12. John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (London: J. Buckland, 1788), 2.

  13. Hine, Hine, and Harrold, African American Odyssey, 47.

  14. Hine, Hine, and Harrold, African American Odyssey, 48–49.

  15. Christians today can easily romanticize or overemphasize the role Christians had in abolition. Very few Christians actively opposed slavery, and they did so amid sharp resistance from other Christians.

  16. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010), 152.

  17. Michael Guasco notes the dangers of overemphasizing the 1619 date for the arrival of African slaves. He writes, “The most poisonous consequence of raising the curtain with 1619 is that it casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American.” Guasco, “The Fallacy of 1619: Rethinking the History of Africans in Early America,” Black Perspectives (blog), September 4, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/the-fallacy-of-1619-rethinking-the-history-of-africans-in-early-america/.

  18. Gregory O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 88.

  19. Hine, Hine, and Harrold, African American Odyssey, 31–32.

  20. Steven Mintz, “Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” in The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: History Now, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective.

  21. Joseph B. Ingle, Slouching Toward Tyranny: Mass Incarceration, Death Sentences, and Racism (New York: Algora, 2015), 17.

  22. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (repr., New York: Norton, 2003), 155.

  23. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 299–301.

  24. Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Modern Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 3.

  25. Goetz, The Baptism of Early Modern Virginia, 162.

  26. For a notable exception in the eighteenth century, see the Shekomeko Mohicans, who converted to Christianity through the ministry of the Moravians. The Shekomeko Mohicans differentiated between the Moravians and the British colonists because the former “generally shied away from associating particular cultural traits with the Christian life.” See Rachel Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

  27. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16. See also Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010).

  28. Travis Glasson, “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” Oxford Bibliography, May 29. 2015, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0067.xml.

  29. Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717, University of California Publications in History 53 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).

  30. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24.

  31. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech, Washington DC, August 28, 1963, during the “March on Washington.”

  CHAPTER 3: UNDERSTANDING LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION AND REVIVAL

  1. Mitch Kachun, The First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3.

  2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: Whitmore and Fenn, and C. Brown, 1821), 191.

  3. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 317.

  4. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African American Odyssey, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2016), 93.

  5. Hine, Hine, and Harrold, African American Odyssey, 97.

  6. By contrast, Jon Butler contends that in Africa slaves experienced “an African spiritual holocaust that forever destroyed African religious systems as systems in North America and that left slaves remarkably bereft of traditional collective religious practice before 1760” (Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 132). For a helpful overview and other viewpoints see Jason Young, “African Religions in the Early South,” Journal of Southern Religion 14 (2012), http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol14/young.html.

  7. Allan Gallay, “The Origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South,” Journal of Southern History 53, no. 3 (August 1987): 377.

  8. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 133.

  9. Paul Harvey, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 32.

  10. Thabiti Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), 18.

  11. Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher, 43.

  12. “Slave Code of South Carolina, Articles 34–37 (1740),” Duhaime Law Museum, http://www.duhaime.org/LawMuseum/LawArticle-1501/1740-Slave-Code-of-South-Carolina-Articles-34-37.aspx.

  13. Heath Carter and Laura Romniger Porter, eds., Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 6.

  14. Gallay, “The Origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism,” 381.

  15. Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 42.

  16. Stephen J. Stein, “George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence,” Church
History 42, no. 2 (June 1973), 245.

  17. Kidd, George Whitefield, 209.

  18. Stein, “George Whitefield on Slavery,” 246.

  19. George Whitefield, A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from His Arrival at Savannah, to His Return to London, vol. 2 (London: Strahan, 1740), 78.

  20. Harry Stout, “What Made the Great Awakening Great?,” in Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, ed. Carter and Porter, 10.

  21. Jonathan Edwards, Edwards on Revivals: Containing a Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, Massachusetts, A.D. 1735: Also Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, 1742, and the Way in Which It Ought to Be Acknowledged and Promoted (New York: Dunning & Spalding, 1832), 38, Kindle.

  22. Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4, Religion in Early America (October 1997): 823–34.

  23. Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (repr., Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 254.

  24. Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout. “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865,” The Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (June 2005): 47–74.

  25. Monica Najar, “ ‘Meddling with Emancipation’: Baptists, Authority, and the Rift over Slavery in the Upper South,” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 163.

  26. Najar, “Meddling with Emancipation,” 163.

  27. Najar, “Meddling with Emancipation,” 165.

  28. “Richard Allen, Bishop, AME’s First Leader,” African American Registry, https://aaregistry.org/story/richard-allen-bishop-ames-first-leader/.

  29. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, To Which is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793: With an Address to the People of Colour in the United States Written by Himself (Philadelphia: Martin & Boden, 1833), 13.

  30. Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 13.

  31. “It was Rev. Richard Allen (1760–1831) who founded the first permanent black denomination in the country, the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church of 1816.” Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 121.

  32. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 294.

  CHAPTER 4: INSTITUTIONALIZING RACE IN THE ANTEBELLUM ERA

  1. Craig D. Townsend, Faith in Their Own Color: Black Episcopalians in Antebellum New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1–3.

  2. Townsend, Faith in Their Own Color, 132.

  3. David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 3.

  4. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 19.

  5. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 25.

  6. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 22.

  7. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Public Domain Books, 2006), 23, Kindle.

  8. See Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave: A True Story of Violence and Retribution in Antebellum Missouri (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

  9. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston, 1861), 83.

  10. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Did African-American Slaves Rebel?,” PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/.

  11. “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Africans in America, PBS.org, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h500.html.

  12. Justin Fornal, “Inside the Quest to Return Nat Turner’s Skull to His Family,” National Geographic, October 7, 2016, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/nat-turner-skull-slave-rebellion-uprising/.

  13. Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 1.

  14. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African American Odyssey, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2016), 248.

  15. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, 97–98.

  16. Henry Noble Sherwood, “The Formation of the American Colonization Society,” Journal of Negro History 2, no. 3 (July 1917): 214.

  17. Roger Joseph Green, “Charles Grandison Finney: The Social Implications of His Ministry,” Asbury Theological Journal 48, no. 2 (Fall 1993), 17.

  18. Charles G. Finney and James Harris Fairchild, Charles G. Finney’s Systematic Theology (repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), 312.

  CHAPTER 5: DEFENDING SLAVERY AT THE ONSET OF THE CIVIL WAR

  1. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  2. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 89–90.

  3. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Washington DC, May 4, 1865.

  4. J. David. Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–48.

  5. “Civil War Casualties,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties.

  6. Roger Taney, “The Dred Scott Decision,” Library of Congress, 1857, https://www.loc.gov/item/17001543/.

  7. Abraham Lincoln, “Fourth Debate,” presidential debate with Stephen Douglas, September 18, 1858, Charleston, IL. For a transcript of the debate, see https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm.

  8. Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Was Lincoln a Racist?,” The Root, February 12, 2009, https://www.theroot.com/was-lincoln-a-racist-1790868802.

  9. Confederate States of America, “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” adopted December 24, 1860. Available at the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.

  10. Confederate States of America, “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” adopted January 9, 1861, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy.

  11. John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London: Joseph Crukshank, 1778), 56, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/wesley/wesley.html.

  12. Benjamin Hill, quoted in the “Minutes of the Meetings of the American Baptist Home Mission Society and of Its Executive Committee,” October 7, 1844, in Joseph Early, Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008), 101.

  13. Daniel Sharp, Baptist Missionary Magazine, vol. 25, August 1845, p. 220, as cited by Joseph Early Jr., Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008), 103.

  14. Joseph Early Jr., Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents (Nashville: B&H, 2008), 115.

  15. “Obituary: Re. Gardiner Spring, D.D.,” New York Times, August 20, 1873, p. 4.

  16. Bradley J. Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 106.

  17. Frank J. Smith, The History of the Presbyterian Church in America: The Continuing Church Movement (Manassas, VA: Reformation Educational Foundation, 1985), 3.

  18. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 19.

  19. Robert Lewis Dabney, A Defence of Virginia (and through Her, of the South) in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (New York: E. J. Hale, 1867), 281.

  20. Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 281.

  21. Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 281.

  22. George D. Armstrong, The Christian
Doctrine of Slavery (New York: Scribner, 1857), 111.

  23. Alexander H. Stephens, “Doc. 48—Speech of A. H. Stephens,” in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, ed. Frank Moore (New York: Putnam, 1861), 46.

  24. Dabney, A Defence of Virginia, 104.

  25. Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), loc. 2737, Kindle.

  26. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 40–41.

  27. James Henley Thornwell, “Relation to the Church on Slavery,” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, vol. 4, Ecclesiastical (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1873), 383.

  28. Thornwell, “Relation to the Church on Slavery,” 381.

  29. Sean Michael Lucas, “Own Our Past: The Spirituality of the Church in History, Failure, and Hope,” Reformed Faith and Practice 1, no. 1 (May 2016): 25–38.

  CHAPTER 6: RECONSTRUCTING WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE JIM CROW ERA

  1. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 31.

  2. Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 166.

  3. “Reconstruction,” The American Yawp, http://www.americanyawp.com/text/15-reconstruction/#identifier_10_92.

  4. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 111–13.

  5. Charles Regan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

  6. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 16.

  7. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 49.

  8. “Whose Heritage: Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, updated 2016, pp. 4–7, 9–10, 14, https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/com_whose_heritage.pdf