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1. Preachers, Slavery, and Antebellum Politics
- Louisiana State University Press
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preachers, slavery, and antebellum politics 9 by any number of motivations, including partisanship, a reverence for denominational tradition, a fear of the over-secularization of the ministry, and an earnest belief that the gospel of Christ deserved no less than 100 percent of a minister’s efforts. Whatever their reasons, many northerners disparaged partisan preachers with scalding orations and acerbic prose, not at all ready to concede the growing political predilections of the clergy. Meanwhile, Old Southern ministers conflated religion and politics as a matter of course. By the mid-1850s, the culturally unifying southern gospel proffered by clergymen was essentially a proslavery campaign— complete with what historian Mitchell Snay has called an elaborate and systematic “scriptural defense of human bondage”—and ministerial attacks on northern secular and political leaders were standard fare on southern Sunday mornings.2 But those same southern preachers habitually harangued against mixing politics and religion. With impressive rhetorical acumen, discoursers in Dixie simultaneously defended slavery and attacked partisan preachers by assigning southern slavery to the domestic sphere, rendering it apolitical even as they repeatedly sounded its praises and indicted its foes.3 Especially reprobate, in the estimation of southern proslavery proselytizers, were northern clerical adversaries of slavery. According to the Old South gospel, antislavery preachers in the North both violated their sacred charge (by introducing debauched politics into their sermonic considerations) and wrongfully attacked the venerated southern “way of life.” On the peripheries of southern slavery, where the hegemonic authority of the planter was less pronounced, preachers sometimes found room to challenge slavery’s power. Even there, however, the prescriptive and unifying influence of the southern proslavery gospel proved determinative as the antebellum age waned. The rise of political preachers and the controversy they engendered during the prewar years sets the stage for everything that follows in my study. By chronicling the debate over slavery and the closely related but separate debate over political preachers, I seek to assess the divisiveness of the late 1840s and especially the 1850s, a period scholars already refer to as the “Decade of Disunion.”4 Of course Christians in the North continued to argue over slavery long after America’s leading Protestant denominations split along sectional lines (Presbyterians in 1837 and both Methodists and Baptists in 1845). But in the late 1840s and 1850s, heated disputes over the propriety of political clergymen were added to that volatile mix. Political historian Michael Holt has examined the ways in which debates over slavery polarized the memberships [3.14.132.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:08 GMT) 10 the politics of faith during the civil war of antebellum political parties, a polarization that brought about the ruination of the Second Party system. Similarly, religious historians must begin to assess the degree to which arguments among churchpeople over both slavery and the political nature of preachers—for preachers were sometimes political about other issues as well as slavery—divided Christians and thus hastened the great theological crisis that was the American Civil War.5 I Throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century, churchpeople in the North thought of political preachers in absolute terms. The majority of them agreed that abolitionist and proslavery sermons, no matter how restrained, were alike political exercises. Their consensus on the meaning of political preachers did not denote, however, agreement on the properness of partisan parsons. Some believed that the church and state must complement each other but not intermingle. Politics was the “counterpart in the corporeal of what religion is in the spiritual,” a Christian communitarian offered in 1844, and the distinctive yet “universal harmony of Religion and Politics, is the anchor of hope for humanity, because it secures the enthronement of wisdom and love.”6 Other northern churchpeople, conversely, welcomed a politically integrated clergy. Hadn’t there always been political preachers of a kind in New England, for instance, where so-called “occasional sermons” on topics of political interest to the community emanated even from colonial and Revolutionary War–era pulpits?7 Certainly George Washington, esteemed by most antebellum Americans as the greatest of all the presidents, routinely called upon the clergy to oversee days of fasting and prayer, and preachers, in response, had expressed few qualms about incorporating the nation’s political well-being into their efforts.8 While differences of opinion over political preachers existed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the comparative pluralism of northern Christianity ensured those of all camps a fairly civil coexistence prior to...