Teaching American Abolitionism and Religion

The religious affiliation of politicians and the religious makeup of voting constituencies are much in the news these days. So it was,too, in the years before the Civil War broke out. Then—and now—evangelical Christians were most influential when pressing their moral issues forward into the public arena. Nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants were inspired less by earlier Calvinistic doom and gloom theology than by concepts of human betterment under God's grace and His gift of free will. Out of this religious doctrine grew a movement that included the plea for the freedom of all of God's human creatures, especially the southern slaves. Eventually the antislavery cause, with its strong religious support, helped to create the Republican Party in the 1850s.This development led directly to the sectional crisis of 1860 and the war that followed.

Most students probably assume that the antislavery crusade that culminated in the Civil War was largely an outgrowth of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed, "All men are created equal." Some southern slaveholders, including George Washington, recognized the discrepancy between the ideal of equality and its violation via slavery. Most Americans failed to see such a discrepancy. Northerners did not want to interfere with slavery in the South. Seldom questioning its morality, Southerners were used to a system of labor that had been away of life since early colonial days. Even those slaveholders who felt a twinge of conscience feared that insurrection might emerge from any massive effort at manumission.

The cause of immediate emancipation, as the abolitionists came to define it, was not inspired by those Enlightenment ideals that Jefferson had articulated, but by the rise of a fervent religious reawakening just as the new republic was being created. That impulse sprang from two main sources: the theology and practice of the Quakers and the emergence of an aggressive, interdenominational evangelicalism. Both movements arose in England and America during the Age of Enlightenment—the 18th century. The pietism of the Quakers, a radically egalitarian Protestant sect, asserted the love of God for every human being, regardless of color, sex, or station in life. Even before the American Revolution, the most famous of the mid-and late 18th-century Quaker reformers, John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Lay, and later Benjamin Lundy, began to publish their opinions and raise the issue of human bondage at Quaker meetings, largely in Pennsylvania. In southern states, where a greater number in the faith held slaves, their activities led to increased manumissions. Benjamin Lay proved the most dramatic of the early Quaker advocates. A hunchback, he sympathized with the lowly and despised and denounced slavery as the greatest sin against God's will. As early as 1738 he addressed the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia wearing a long cloak that he threw off to reveal a military outfit. He then cried out to the startled worshipers,"Ohall you negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery during life . . . you might as well throw off the plain coat as I do." He drew out a sword and plunged it into a book in which he had hidden a bladder of red berry juice. It spilled over those seated nearby.1 Yet Quaker exertions were successful only within their own ranks, although they persevered with citizens' petitions to the newly formed Congress to free the slaves.To be sure, the Methodists under the leadership of John Wesley and some Baptist churches proclaimed slave holding an evil. But the expansion of these faiths in the southern states during the cotton boom of the early 19th century gradually stifled their antislavery convictions.

A collection box for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, ca. 1850. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Much more dynamic than the Quaker movement was another undertaking, which began in Great Britain. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, the Rev. John Newton, a London vicar, preached fiery sermons against the horrors of the slave trade and his own participation in it. A former sailor on slave ships,he called himself the...