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III. THORNTON STRINGFELLOW A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery "... we shall be seen cleaving to the Bible and taking all our decisions about this matter from its inspired pages." Thornton Stringfellow was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1788, and except for a brief period of residence in South Carolina lived in Fauquier and nearby Culpeper counties all his life.1 Son of a slaveholder who owned nearly a thousand acres of land, Stringfellow appeared to his contemporaries as "a man of high social position."2 Under the influence of his parents, who were evangelical Baptists,Stringfellow experienced an emotional conversion at the age of twenty-three. In 1814 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and took charge of several congregations in Fauquier County. Viewing himself as God's steward, Stringfellow was active in a host of reform and benevolent activities,including the Sunday School movement, domestic and foreign missions, temperance, and, ultimately, the proslavery crusade. "The guardianship and control of the black race, by the white," he argued, "is an indispensableChristian duty, to which we must yet look, if we would secure the well-beingof both races."' Stringfellow called upon the "Southern section as a whole"4 to serve as missionary for his cause, and thus in 1846 he eagerly supported the separation of the southern Baptist church from its northern counterpart. During the remaining years of the antebellum period, Stringfellowworked to convert 1. On the life of Thornton Stringfellow, see Drew Gilpin Faust, "Evangelicalismand the Meaning of the Proslavery Argument: The Reverend Thornton Stringfellow of Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXV (1977), 3-17. Most of Stringfellow's personal papers were destroyed, but a diary remains in the possession of the family. 2. Richmond Religious Herald, March 18, 1869. 3. Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1856), 105. 4. Richmond Religious Herald, November 6,1856. 136 A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery the slaves in his own congregation and continued to publish tracts on slavery . Moving beyond the somewhat limited scope of his original biblical exegesis , Stringfellow undertook a historical study of the origins of human bondage and an improbably empirical analysis of religious devotion North and South based in comparison of regional church attendance statistics.' When the Civil War broke out, Stringfellow found his two-thousand acre property near Fredericksburg under almost constant military threat. In 1863 he and his wife were held prisoners in their home for several months while Union armies supplied themselves from his plantation. Even when his seventy slaves ran away to the Yankees, however, Stringfellow's faith in the justice and benevolence of human bondage did not falter. But his health began to fail, and he remained almost constantly bedridden until his death in 1869. The selection below originallyappeared in the Richmond Religious Herald in 1841 as a response to a debate over slavery undertaken by two prominent Baptist divines, Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, and Richard Fuller of South Carolina. Reprinted in pamphlet form some years later, A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery set forth the biblical arguments for human bondage more fully and more systematically than had any previous proslavery treatment.' Stringfellow specifically sought to counter the "bitter fruits" and "false doctrines" of abolitionism by setting forth the details of God's response to slavery in both the Old and New Testaments. The Virginian also devoted considerable attention to refuting the abolitionist contention that the "servitude" discussed in the Bible was contractual in nature and thus markedly different from involuntary slavery in the South. Stringfellow intended "to prove the term servant to be identical in the import of its essential particulars with the term slave among us" and to demonstrate as well biblical sanction for the physjcal chastisement of bondsmen. The essay also demonstrated String5 . Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views; Stringfellow, Slavery: Its Origin, Nature and History . . . Considered in the Light of Bible Teachings, Moral Justice, and Political Wisdom (Alexandria: Virginia Sentinel Office, 1860). 6. Richmond Religious Herald, February 25, 1841; Stringfellow, A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery. In an essay first published in the Religious Herald and republished by request; With Remarks on a letter of Elder Galusha of New York to Dr. Richard Fuller of South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850). Only the first section of the pamphlet is included here; the Remarks...

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