Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America

5. Genres of Redemption: African Americans, the Bible, and Slavery from Lemuel Haynes to Frederick Douglass

69 = 5 Genres of Redemption African Americans, the Bible, and Slavery from Lemuel Haynes to Frederick Douglass Mark A. Noll The very first published work from an African American was a long poem by a slave from Long Island, Jupiter Hammon. It appeared in 1760 and was entitled , “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries.” The very first stanza of this very first published work featured themes, vocabulary, and a fixation on the Bible that remained central to much African American literature from the period of the Civil War and beyond: Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone, The only Son of God; Redemption now to every one, That loves his holy Word.1 Hammon’s intense focus on the drama of Christian salvation marked out in miniature what would be developed at considerable length and with great variety by other African Americans in the decades that followed. In particular, his linking of the term “redemption” with the message of Scripture as God’s “holy word” set out an ambitious agenda. In the mid-eighteenth century, the force of the word “redemption” still depended, as it had in its first-century usage with the Apostle Paul (e.g., Romans 3:24; Colossians 1:14), on the metaphorical application of a physical reality describing human bondage to a spiritual reality describing human salvation. In the context of the Atlantic slave trade, it was a continual struggle to secure the privileges of Christian redemption for African Americans. In the context of majority population biblical interpretation, it was almost as great a struggle for African Americans to “redeem” the Bible. Through developments that look suspiciously 70 Mark A. Noll like divine intervention, African Americans in this era of black chattel slavery did experience Christian redemption. Then, even as the struggle for redemption from slavery went on, they themselves somehow found the energy to set about the task of redeeming the Scriptures as well. 2 Slavery and Scripture in Antebellum America African American Bible believers in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War faced an unusually vigorous challenge as they brought newfound Christian faith to bear on the realities of American life. The great national confusion that bore down upon African Americans with special weight was once well described by David Brion Davis: “In the United States . . . the problem of slavery . . . had become fatally intertwined with the problem of race. Race had become the favored idiom for interpreting the social effects of enslavement and emancipation.”3 Quite apart from its devastating impact in the domains of economics and politics, the confusion spotlighted by Davis between race and slavery profoundly affected Christian interpretations of Scripture during the first decades of nationhood. A steady stream of published writings on the Bible and American slavery, which began in the eighteenth century, became from the early 1830s onward a great flood of works.4 Authors of nearly every denominational stripe labored diligently to interpret the many scriptural passages that seemed simply to take slavery for granted as a natural part of ancient societies. By contrast, far less attention was devoted to what the Bible affirmed, also in many passages, about the equality of all races and peoples before God. As a consequence, by the time of the Civil War, the weight of American biblical interpretation was clearly tipping in favor of slavery as a biblical institution despite some serious opposition to that conclusion and even more uneasiness about the black-only form of chattel slavery that was practiced in the United States. An indication of where this debate stood on the eve of sectional conflict is provided in two sermons preached by prominent religious leaders in the North that were unusual in their thoroughness but typical in their conclusions . For a fast day sermon in early January 1861, Rabbi Morris J. Raphall of New York City painstakingly examined the many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that recorded the practice of slavery by Abraham and other leaders of God’s covenant people. A month before, the Presbyterian Henry Van Dyke, also of New York, did the same with the many New Testament passages that simply accepted Roman slavery as an incontestable fact of life. The conclusions drawn by the Jewish rabbi and the Presbyterian minister spoke for a Genres of Redemption 71 wide swath of American opinion. To Van Dyke, it was obvious that the “tree of Abolitionism is evil...