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114 5 The Spiritual Slave [The Church] found that, by trying to release the bodies of the slaves, she was hindered from using the means to save their souls, and that instead of removing their burdens, she was made the occasion of increasing them. —Henry Bidleman Bascom, Methodism and Slavery, 1845 I n 1845, Henry Bascom published a lengthy apologia on Methodism and slavery. Soon to become a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Bascom sought to justify the sectional schism of 1844 and, specifically, to defend the southern Methodist faction. Like his extradenominational and secular counterparts , Bascom argued that slavery benefited the slave in many ways—materially , intellectually, and spiritually—provided that both master and slave followed God’s commandments. By this time, southern Methodists had preached this message for many years, emphasizing obedience in slaves and kindness in masters. According to the New Testament, Bascom contended, a slave should “render service to his master ‘as unto Christ.’” Conversely, a master was responsible for the slave’s well-being and just as accountable for following biblical commands. After explaining these points, the venerable southern preacher offered a very Methodist, and very complex, analysis of masters and slaves that had paradoxical implications. “The cruel, unjust, and even unkind master,” Bascom claimed, “should be disowned by the Church, as also the faithless slave. The humane and considerate master and the faithful slave, have as good a right . . . to membership in the Church of God, other things being equal, as any class of mankind whatever.”1 Bascom defended the inequalities of the slave system while still proclaiming the religious equality of masters and slaves. Although the southern Methodist preacher supported the very institution that kept Christians in bondage, he also professed a belief in the equality of all souls. Bascom’s position increasingly defined that of the Methodist Episcopal • 115 The Spiritual Slave Church, South, but Bascom himself did not own slaves nor was he a native southerner. Born in 1796 to a poor, hardworking family in New York, he did not come into contact with slavery until he joined the Methodist Church as a traveling preacher. He first attended a Methodist conference at sixteen after his family moved to Maysville, Kentucky, where he decided to become a minister. He was young, inexperienced, and broke, but he had a talent for exhorting. Seeing Bascom’s potential, an established preacher offered him a place on his circuit until he could prove himself worthy of full membership in the connection. At the same time he served as a junior minister, Bascom formed his ideas about slavery. He was most impressed by Francis Asbury’s argument on slavery and incorporated the bishop’s stance into this own position. In 1812, he heard Bishop Asbury speak on slavery, which, his biographer insisted, “settled Bascom’s principles, on that subject, for life.” Asbury and Bascom both considered slavery a civil institution outside of the Church’s jurisdiction. Any criticism of slavery, they argued, would hamper the Church’s work and perhaps even taint it with abolitionism. In other words, it was impractical for a minister to both condemn slavery and preach to slaves.2 Bascom’s views made him a target for antislavery Methodists. Many of them already disliked the young minister because he appeared “proud,” a “clerical fop,” and “ambitious and aspiring,” all traits that the clergy despised . His first solo preaching assignment was in Botany Bay, Virginia, an area rife with disease and other dangers, a place most ministers avoided. According to his biographer, the Conference often sent “the refractory or unpromising” ministers there in the hopes that it would either “break them in” or “drive them off.” But Bascom persevered and continued to preach. He also maintained his position on slavery despite extreme opposition. In 1818, his proslavery views almost cost him election into the Conference. He narrowly escaped rejection (winning by a single vote) and became increasingly bitter towards the antislavery brethren and more open about his proslavery beliefs.3 As the national slavery debate heated up in the 1830s and 1840s, Henry Bascom became more strident on the subject. Serving in 1840 on a standing committee on slavery, he presented a report that declared that “the simple holding of slaves, or mere ownership of slave property . . . constitutes no legal barrier to the election or ordination of ministers to the various grades of office, known in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”4 [3.17.128.129] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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