Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations

Wages, Sin, and Slavery Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations AMY DRU STANLEY In what ways did the problem of human commodification represent a problem of religion for Americans in the early republic? That question, I shall suggest, ought to become a significant part of the agenda of the future study of commodity relationships. Indeed, it is a line of inquiry that runs against the grain of my own prior work, which has tended more to the secular than the sacred, to political economy rather than theology in exploring the problem of human commodification—its moral ambiguities, ideological complexities, legal boundaries, and cultural legitimacy. Necessarily, therefore, these observations will be quite preliminary. Perhaps, at some level, the daily evidence from across the world of religion’s momentous, often fatal, contemporary sway has evoked these reflections. Or perhaps, at a very different level, they arose from contemplating sin and regeneration while teaching David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture in a graduate history course last autumn.1 My intent here, though, is to think about outcomes not origins—to mark at least some of the value gained by studying the religious dimensions of issues of power and dependence, freedom and unfreedom, virtue and sin at the very heart of the problem of human commodification. The question embraces both chattel slaves and free persons. Amid emergent industrial capitalism in the North and burgeoning plantation slavery in the South, what resources—both spiritual and Amy Dru Stanley is Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998). 1. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966). The course was in U. S. cultural history. 130 • AMY STANLEY intellectual—did new Christian doctrines of personal moral agency afford Americans absorbed in debating what kinds of commodities should be put up for sale? Consider the significance of the propositions set forth by two of the nation’s most influential evangelical ministers, the Yankee Presbyterian critic of slavery, Charles Grandison Finney, and the southern Presbyterian defender of slavery, James Henley Thornwell. An Arminian who celebrated individual free will, Finney rejected the tenets of predestination and human depravity and presided over revivals where multitudes achieved conversion. A Calvinist who deplored northern heresies, Thornwell adhered to the orthodoxy of original sin and echoed the social theory of George Fitzhugh. In 1851 in his Lectures on Systematic Theology Finney wrote that his Christianity rested on two axioms: ‘‘that the will is free, and that sin and holiness are voluntary acts of mind.’’ Free will was the essence of ‘‘moral agency.’’ And of slavery he wrote that it was ‘‘revolting wickedness’’ to deprive an innocent human being ‘‘of liberty . . . rob him of himself—his body—his soul.’’ For Finney, seeking to justify slavery in terms of moral law was the ‘‘greatest absurdity.’’ Conversely, Thornwell lamented the ‘‘dreary night of Arminian darkness .’’ And in an 1850 sermon he declared that slavery was absolutely consistent with Christian morality, for it converted neither individual will nor conscience to property: ‘‘the moral and responsible agency of one person . . . can never be owned by another—it is not an article of barter or exchange.’’ Even the slave retained his or her ‘‘will,’’ and the ‘‘soul’’ was ‘‘beyond all price.’’ For Thornwell, the ‘‘absurdity’’ lay in the notion that slavery degraded ‘‘voluntary agents to the condition of tools or brutes.’’ Although differing over the extent of human ability to achieve grace, on at least one thing the two preachers could agree—some degree of free will was ‘‘a sacred bestowment,’’ and treating the soul as a commodity was blasphemy.2 2. J. H. Fairchild, ed., Lectures on Systematic Theology by Rev. Charles Grandison Finney (New York, 1878), x, 15, 228; ‘‘Antinomianism,’’ in John B. Adger, ed., The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell (2 vols; Richmond, 1889), 2:383; James Henley Thornwell, The Rights and Duties of Masters. A Sermon Preached at the Dedication of a Church, Erected in Charleston, S.C., for the Benefit and Instruction of the Coloured Population (Charleston, 1850), 22, 23. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989), esp. 170–201, 205–09; Daniel Walker Howe, ‘‘Charles Sellers, the Market Revo- WAGES, SIN, AND SLAVERY • 131 The new...