One explanation for the pernicious and ominous character of slavery in the United States, according to Bacon, lay in the blatant contradiction between human bondage and “the primary principles of our republican government.” Although Bacon was hardly a moral relativist, he concludes that slavery was perfectly consistent with the tyrannical systems of government in the Old World and even with the more democratic principles of ancient Greece and Rome. If slavery was a shocking anachronism in the United States, as Bacon indicates, it had become a political evil only in modern times. A similar point extends to stages of economic development. Ignoring the economic benefits of slave labor to the nation as a whole, Bacon likens slaves to “the degraded serfs of a Polish aristocracy” and suggests that Virginia might rival New England’s enterprise and wealth if only her 425,000 slaves were replaced by a free and independent yeomanry who “in blood and complexion, as well as in immunities and enjoyments, should be one with the proudest of her children.”7 Even apart from the desire for racial homogeneity, most American commentators shared this republican conviction that slavery subverted the nation’s prospects for balanced economic growth and prosperity, at least in the longer term.
Much as slavery itself was antithetical to America’s political principles and economic enterprise, Bacon argues, so the black victims of bondage were alien to American society and, unlike the freedmen of Greece, Rome, and most other nations, were “all marked out and stigmatized with the brand which nature has stamped upon them.” As a consequence, they could never be “amalgamated with the rest of the community” and gain open access to wealth, honor, and office. It was this racial aspect of American slavery that Bacon finds particularly alarming, precisely because it appeared to preclude amelioration and gradual emancipation. The individual slave could not reasonably hope for an act of manumission or eventual integration into a homogeneous society.8
Racial difference could help to rationalize hierarchical domination but it also intensified fear. Writing less than a year after the exposure of Denmark Vesey’s alleged but highly publicized conspiracy to seize Charleston, South Carolina, Bacon underscores the terror of slave plots and insurrections, quoting Jefferson’s famous lines about “trembling for his country when he reflects that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” and that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”9 Although Bacon thinks that Jefferson exaggerated a bit when he proclaimed that “the whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other,” he echoes Jefferson’s fears when he predicts that America’s slaves, “surrounded by the memorials of freedom,” will inevitably learn “something of their own power” and “that freedom is the birthright of humanity.”
It is only a matter of time, then, before “that righteous Providence, which never wants instruments to accomplish its designs, whether of mercy, or of vengeance, shall raise up a Touissaint [sic], or a Spartacus, or an African Tecumseh.” While Bacon can envision the destruction of Southern cities and plantations, he feels certain that within the next century any general insurrection would lead to the near extermination of the “ill-fated Africans” by the united efforts of Northern and Southern whites: “there is hardly an enterprize [sic] to which the militia of Vermont or Connecticut would march with more zeal, than to crush a servile rebellion (if such an event should ever take place with all its cruelties and horrors) in Virginia.” Blacks would have to wait a longer time to acquire the numerical force sufficient to win total emancipation and a Haitian-like empire. As a colonizationist writing after the Missouri crisis and eager to find means of uniting slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, Bacon was far more conciliatory toward the South than his Connecticut antislavery predecessors had been in the 1790s.10
The specter of racial warfare, often exemplified by Bacon’s accompanying image of “rivers of blood,” was always a central ingredient of the colonizationist mentality, and the fear led Bacon at times to compromise or restrict the ideal of African American education. He appears to have regarded the political and economic evils of slavery as less iniquitous than the institution’s “moral tendency” and “moral influence” on both blacks and whites. Here he has in mind, in language that verges on abolitionism, the way the presence of slaves silenced and deadened the conscience of most Southerners, who failed to lift up their voices against “a system which permits all the atrocities of the domestic slave-trade, which permits the father to sell his children as he would his cattle—a system which consigns one half of the community to hopeless and utter degradation.” No less shocking, for Bacon, were the laws that “exist in nearly all the slaveholding States, prohibiting [the blacks’] instruction, and even driving them from Sunday schools, because it is supposed that the public safety requires them to be kept in perfect ignorance.”11 As we shall see, nothing could be more disturbing to the New England evangelical mind than such barriers to the instruments of divine grace. Yet the version of Bacon’s “Report” reprinted in the Christian Spectator and the ACS Annual Report of 1824 contained a new passage that sharply curtailed the activities of any national movement “for the benefit of the blacks”:
Nor may it aim directly at the instruction of the great body of the blacks.… [T]he prejudices and terrors of the slave-holding States would be excited in a moment; and with reason too, for it is a well-established point, that the public safety forbids either the emancipation or the general instruction of the slaves. It requires no great skill to see that the moment you raise this degraded community to an intellectual existence, their chains will burst asunder like the fetters of Sampson [sic], and they will stand forth in the might and dignity of manhood, and in all the terrors of a long injured people, thirsting for vengeance.12
The image of Samson, we should note, affirmed the capacity of the most “degraded” slaves to recover the source of their strength, honor, and human dignity, but only at the cost of pulling down the temple, of bringing “down the same ruin on the master and the slave.”13
For Bacon, who preached on “the vast designs of that Eternal Providence which will rescue humanity from darkness and misery and death, and renovate our world in the image of heaven,” nothing could blight America’s hopes more decisively than the predicament that allowed a fear for public safety to convince white Americans that blacks must be kept “in perfect ignorance.” Unlike George Bourne and a few other early radical abolitionists, Bacon did not denounce slaveholding as a personal sin or as an inexcusable evil in itself. He did not rail against the master’s usurpation of God’s authority or the sin of defining a human being as chattel property. Bacon’s attention focused on the subjective effects of slavery’s “degradation,” particularly within a cosmic framework of redemptive theology.14 In “A Plea for Africa,” delivered in 1824 as the annual Fourth of July address at Park Street Church in Boston and repeated the following year in New Haven, Bacon posed the question “And what is it to be a slave? We know what it is to be free. We know what it is to walk forth in the consciousness of independence and to act with the feeling that we are responsible only to our God and to the community of which we are equal members.… But we know not what it is to be a slave.” One could picture, he continued, the whippings, the toil, the physical captivity. These would correspond, in his theology, to partial constraints on man’s natural ability to choose virtue and justice. But try to imagine, he asked his listeners, what it would be like to have your spirit broken, your intellect dulled, your moral sense blinded:
[A]nd you may thus be able faintly to imagine the degradation of the slave, whose mind has scarcely been enlightened by one ray of knowledge, whose soul has never been expanded by one adequate conception of his moral dignity and moral relations, and in whose heart hardly one of those affections that soften our character, or those hopes that animate and bless our being, has been allowed to germinate.
In this image of a ravaged
mind and withered soul, of a human being rendered incapable of moral choice or benevolent feeling, Bacon constructed a concrete exemplification of original sin, a helpless victim of an evil system who, paradoxically, has become the sinner.15
While Bacon could not explore these connections in any manifest way, his concern with the “moral influence of the system on the blacks” reflected his struggle with a central theological issue that preoccupied the Congregationalist followers of Jonathan Edwards. The issue, quite simply, was how to reconcile the basic doctrines of Calvinism with the evangelical methods needed to Christianize America and the world. Although Bacon and his famous mentors Lyman Beecher and Nathaniel W. Taylor thought of themselves as Calvinists, they could not believe that God had brought sinners into the world in order to condemn them for Adam’s fall or for predetermined actions they could not help taking. A parallel issue, which was beginning to attract increasing attention in the secular sphere, was whether victims of oppression could be held accountable for criminal, immoral, or socially dysfunctional behavior that was the direct result of their oppression. From the time of the American Revolution, the evangelical clergy, both Calvinist and Arminian, had searched for social correlates for sin, repentance, and redemption, in part to dramatize the meaning and urgency of religious issues to a populace preoccupied with politics and skeptical of traditional authority. The sudden outburst of evangelical attacks on the sin of slaveholding, in the Revolutionary era, typified the shifting boundaries between sacred and secular concerns and also suggested that denunciations of black slavery could be a means of testing and objectifying changing concepts of original sin.16 Ironically, as Orlando Patterson has shown, the Pauline and Augustinian conceptions of original sin and spiritual freedom had been modeled on actual experiences with Roman slavery and manumission. A large number of early Christian leaders were either freedmen or the children of liberated slaves who understood the literal meaning of redemption. According to Patterson, “Paul’s theology miraculously transposed this secular experience of slavery-into-freedom, or the intense expectation of a rebirth into social life, into a doctrine of spiritual freedom from which the Western mind would never be released.”
Augustine, who presented himself as a “disillusioned freedman,” depreciated the value of personal liberty and magnified the importance of spiritual liberty as the unmerited gift of a totally free and sovereign master. Ideas derived from ancient slavery and Roman slave law were “encoded” in Christian theology, which became for future centuries, as Patterson puts it, “a cultural memory bank of ancient knowledge.”17 Obviously there was much diversity and complexity in Christian views of slavery and sin. But a brief summary of some of the linkages between slavery and sin, which were deeply embedded in Western culture, will help to clarify the intellectual framework that Bacon applied to the evils of slavery and racial prejudice.
From the time of the Stoics and early Christians, the institution of slavery had been associated with the regrettable but unavoidable imperfections of the world, eventually epitomized in the doctrine of original sin. Christian authorities, particularly Augustine, viewed human bondage as one of the penalties for man’s fall from grace and as part of a system of hierarchical discipline and governance made necessary by human sin. The need to punish and control the species as a whole, however, did not imply any correlation between an individual’s outward condition and his inward spiritual state. The conventional dualism of body and soul meant that a particular slave, no matter how degraded, might be spiritually free and even a Christian saint; a master or a king might be “enslaved” to greed, pride, sensuality, or to sin in general. Nevertheless, secular bondage inevitably took on a burden of guilt by association as Christians repeatedly described spiritual salvation as a redemption from bondage to sin, a liberation that drew on and transmogrified the Hebrews’ journey out of Egypt.18
This use of slavery and emancipation as a paradigm for the central religious experience went well beyond analogies and figures of speech. Experience with chattel slavery was a precondition for the idea of physical and spiritual freedom; for devout Christians, sin was not only genuine slavery but slavery in the profoundest sense—slavery viewed, indeed, from eternity. Like chattel servitude, original sin was innate and hereditary, subjecting each victim to the absolute dominion of law, death, or Satan’s will. Binding and constricting, it deprived the individual, at least in the Calvinist version, of any ability to choose the good, just, or honest. It therefore alienated its victims from their fellows and brethren by promoting deception, self-indulgence, envy, and violence. Like slavery, sin degraded and dishonored human beings, rendering them contemptible in God’s eyes. Sin, to expand a point made by Orlando Patterson, was both a condition that contained no seeds for transformation and a master whose resistance could only be overcome by divine grace. Such a state of social and spiritual death could be sublated only by “the death of death,” the negation of death itself as the sinner-slave partook in the death and resurrection of Jesus.19
In the eighteenth century, Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards confronted a broad movement to repudiate the traditional doctrine of original sin. They struggled to find ways to reinforce belief in the absolute sovereignty of God and to combat the widespread tendency to exalt the powers and moral ability of individuals, as if human destiny were determined by human valuations of merit. Edwards, who was much esteemed by William Wilberforce and the British Evangelicals as well as by his New England disciples, drew a crucial distinction between the natural and moral ability of unregenerate humans. Edwards and his followers rejected the notion of a natural or physically innate depravity—analogous to the belief in inherent racial inferiority—that prevented the unregenerate from choosing the good, just, and honest. For the Edwardseans it was not natural inability but a moral inability—the inability of the unregenerate will to break free from self-serving inclinations that led to sin. This subtle shift in emphasis reaffirmed human dependence on divine grace while also opening a window of incentive as Christians searched for the stirrings of grace in their own subjective inclinations.20
Samuel Hopkins, Edwards’s most influential disciple and one of New England’s earliest champions of slave emancipation and African colonization, took further steps to vindicate God’s justice and equate virtue with “disinterested benevolence,” later epitomized, for Hopkins’s followers at Andover Seminary, by Christian missionaries in Asia and Africa.21 At Yale and Andover, Leonard Bacon was exposed to repeated efforts on the part of “New Divinity” theologians to expand the limits of human moral ability without abandoning the need for divine grace. No one went further in this project than Nathaniel W. Taylor, whom Bacon replaced as minister at New Haven’s Center Church when Taylor was appointed Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology at the new Yale Divinity School. Drawing particularly on Scottish commonsense philosophy, Taylor held that depravity always consists of sinful actions that are freely chosen; depravity should never be thought of as a sinful state of being or as an inherited propensity that is part of God’s creation. “There can be no sin in choosing evil,” Taylor affirmed, “unless there be power to choose good.” However inevitable the choice of sin without the aid of divine grace, individual responsibility was premised, according to Taylor, on a “power to the contrary.” This New Haven theology, of which Bacon became a champion, aroused bitter controversy and eventually contributed to the great Presbyterian schism of 1837. In 1823 and 1824, however, Bacon was still feeling his way toward a more liberating view of sin and moral responsibility.22
THE PARADOX OF SIN AND “IRREMEDIABLE DEGRADATION”
The existence of slavery and the presence in Boston and New Haven of an oppressed race descended from slaves presented Bacon with a tangible model for grappling with the problems of evil and moral responsibility. The moral “inability” of African Americans, as a discrete, identifiable group, conveyed by contrast a presumption of “ability” to white Americans, who could take comfort in their freedom from insurmountable deprivatio
ns. Physically marked off by nature and stamped with what Bacon termed a visible “brand,” blacks had little freedom of choice and appeared to lack any “power to the contrary”; like Jonathan Edwards’s sinners, they were only free to obey their strongest inclinations.
While Bacon did not explicitly apply such moral philosophy to his case study, he made it clear that the African American could not be raised “from the abyss of his degradation.”23 Not in the United States, that is, where as we have seen the force of prejudice was infinitely magnified by the fear of Samson “thirsting for vengeance” and bursting his chains asunder. But as this very fear attested, the psychological damage of slavery, like the debilities of sin, was not irreversible. From the perspective of New Divinity theology, the most alarming aspect of the American dilemma was the way it cut blacks off from all the “means” of grace—from the preaching, Sunday schools, benevolent societies, and what Horace Bushnell would later call “Christian nurture”—that softened the heart, expanded the soul, cultivated the moral sense, and prepared the way for an “active conversion” to spiritual freedom. What inspired Bacon and other missionary types was the realization that the “black cloud” provided white Americans with an opportunity to prove that they could transcend the national evil of slavery by removing its victims to a missionary world where the victim-beneficiaries could save themselves while also Christianizing and saving Africa.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 20