Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery by John R. McKivigan; Mitchell SnayReview by: James Brewer StewartJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 571-575Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125264 .

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between the theory and practice of labor relations, North and South, during the nineteenth century.

Joseph P. Reidy teaches history at Howard University, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Author of From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (1992), he is presently working on a study of black sailors in the United States Navy during the Civil War.

Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay. (London and Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pp vii, 391. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $25.00.)

A dozen scholars contribute original essays to this volume, with results that leave its expansive title and comparatively restricted contents working in less-than-perfect harmony. A title such as Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery might lead readers to expect discussions of how slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists reworked religious visions into emancipatory theologies, or of northern abolitionism and southern slave resistence as expressions of spiritual purpose. But since abolitionist and African-American religiosity are given little substantial attention in this collection, what it actually comprises would be more fully conveyed were it renamed "White Protestant Denominationalists and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery"-a more accurate description of a work largely devoted to struggles by moderate and conservative Anglo-American Protestants, North and South, with the moral implications of slaveholding.

This is not to suggest that essays in this collection lack high academic quality or value to historians seeking to understand the influences of denominational struggles over slavery on regional and national political cultures. Judged by these standards, as discussed below, quite the opposite is true. Yet when demonstrating how potentially subversive to slavery the religious legacies of the American Revolution proved to be, the two excellent essays by Robert Forbes and Douglas Ambrose that open this volume raise issues concerning abolitionists and African Americans that the rest of the collection might well have been expected to consider.

When, for example, Forbes locates eighteenth-century connections between the origins of religious antislavery and the transatlantic influences of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, he offers valuable insight into some of the deeper roots of the immediate abolitionist movement of the

between the theory and practice of labor relations, North and South, during the nineteenth century.

Joseph P. Reidy teaches history at Howard University, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Author of From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (1992), he is presently working on a study of black sailors in the United States Navy during the Civil War.

Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay. (London and Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pp vii, 391. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $25.00.)

A dozen scholars contribute original essays to this volume, with results that leave its expansive title and comparatively restricted contents working in less-than-perfect harmony. A title such as Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery might lead readers to expect discussions of how slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists reworked religious visions into emancipatory theologies, or of northern abolitionism and southern slave resistence as expressions of spiritual purpose. But since abolitionist and African-American religiosity are given little substantial attention in this collection, what it actually comprises would be more fully conveyed were it renamed "White Protestant Denominationalists and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery"-a more accurate description of a work largely devoted to struggles by moderate and conservative Anglo-American Protestants, North and South, with the moral implications of slaveholding.

This is not to suggest that essays in this collection lack high academic quality or value to historians seeking to understand the influences of denominational struggles over slavery on regional and national political cultures. Judged by these standards, as discussed below, quite the opposite is true. Yet when demonstrating how potentially subversive to slavery the religious legacies of the American Revolution proved to be, the two excellent essays by Robert Forbes and Douglas Ambrose that open this volume raise issues concerning abolitionists and African Americans that the rest of the collection might well have been expected to consider.

When, for example, Forbes locates eighteenth-century connections between the origins of religious antislavery and the transatlantic influences of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, he offers valuable insight into some of the deeper roots of the immediate abolitionist movement of the

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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

1830s. While questioning the distinction historians often draw between "rationalistic" and "religious" views of social change, and the conclusions of others that the Revolution's spiritual consequences mostly benefitted white exploiters, Forbes argues persuasively that philosophical rationalism and evangelical spirituality fused in the later eighteenth century into a mutually reinforcing "Evangelical Enlightenment," an antislavery synthesis with portentous long-term effects. It fortified the Federalist party's abolitionist leanings, stimulated proslavery southern republican thought, and helped to determine why (as it seems are this essay's implications) the first generation of radical abolitionists, black and white alike, harbored such strong initial attachments to a potent mixture of neo-Federalist politics, evangelical spirituality, and "uplifting" Paineite social thought.

Equally rich with long-term implications for African-American and abolitionist religious history, Douglas Ambrose's essay on "Proslavery Christianity in Early National Virginia" counterpoints nicely with Forbes's. Ambrose links the mounting conservatism of Virginia's clerical establish- ment in the early 1800s to its frightened responses to the Revolution's democratizing effects on social relations generally, but especially on attitudes toward slavery. As the author describes how Virginia's clerics suppressed this egalitarianism by stressing the enforcement of Godly paternalism-the exercise of custodial familial authority not only over one's slaves, but also over all of one's "dependent relations," one's wife, one's children, and those less well-off-Ambrose, like Forbes, opens broader issues that connect to the religious experiences of abolitionists and enslaved African Americans. As Ambrose implies, the historical view of an Upper South "middle -ground" open to slavery's eventual termination must be questioned when whites throughout that region are shown as having embraced proslavery Christianity decades before northern immediatists had even begun their crusades. And in the longer term, pious whites' commitments to "ameliorating" the slaves' conditions and saving their souls, not to manumission, raise equally portentous questions for historians of the 1840s and 1850s, when, simultaneously, abolitionists trafficked in "Bible politics," religious "come-outerism," and righteous violence. Further still, one wonders what the impact of this crusade on behalf of paternalism might have been on the spiritual lives of slaves, and on their efforts to promote religious autonomy and resistence. Although Ambrose's fine essay is not designed to address these points, it does lead a reader to anticipate encountering them more substantially in some of the remaining chapters.

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First expectations aside, however, it is clear that the essays that follow Forbes's and Ambrose's do offer much to historians of religion and sectional conflicts, not only because of their generally high quality, but also because they clarify two fundamental and closely related questions: first, why serious abolitionists felt so compelled to condemn and undermine mainstream Protestantism denominationalism, and second, why clerical moderates so often proved ineffectual in sustaining a middle-ground position against polarizing opinions within and between their particular sections. Two excellent biographical treatments of prominent clerics speak usefully to these concerns by addressing the perils of moderation from Yankee points of view, while two other studies revealingly examine similar concerns on southern grounds. Deborah Von Broekhoven's study of the Baptist theologian Frances Wayland, and Hugh Davis's of the Congrega- tional luminary Leonard Bacon portray leading New Englanders who labored long and effectively to protect their denominations from sectional zealots of any persuasion, but who both ultimately failed as personal mediators and doctrinal reconcilers in the later 1850s, once compelled by proslavery crusaders to part company with their southern brethren. In Virginia, by contrast, moderation suffered an earlier, quieter death, as Elizabeth Varon demonstrates in a finely rendered account of how upper- class women from slaveholding families, persistent proponents of colonization, were reduced to near-silence by their husbands in the aftermath of the Turner rebellion and the rise of Yankee immediatism. And among Georgia's Methodists, as Christopher Owen explains, proslavery militance elicited responses of "neutrality" that preserved consistency with the denomination's worldwide stance, placated poorer whites, and left open possibilities of evangelizing the slaves. The same posture, however, also rendered these Methodists all but ineffectual in the face of mounting proslavery pressures within their state.

When moderates fail, ideologues rejoice, and several contributors to this collection explain the specifics of extremists' triumphs particularly well. Yet according to the general impression created in this volume, it seems that proslavery ideologues were the only serious contenders in either section, a further illustration of the imbalances created by the lack of attention to abolitionists and African Americans. What, for example, of John Brown and his associates, of ministerially led vigilance committees, and of Yankee "come-outerism"? Yet it surely must be granted that the victories of proslavery religion in the South are cogently presented in three usefully compatible essays. Randy Sparks explains how Mississippi's Baptist and Methodist denominations were reshaped during the 1830s by

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aggressively "modernizing" pastors who shed their local duties in order to forge new ties with cosmopolitan planter elites, in part by elaborating compelling ideological defenses of slavery. In a similar manner, in Virginia, according to Beth Barton Schweiger, national schisms over slavery among Baptists and Methodists marked a fundamental turning point for ministers, who increasingly favored bureaucratic denomination-building over serving humble parishioners, sought to magnify clerical influences in political discussion, and therefore began formulating compelling apologies for slavery. Finally, Edward Crowther chronicles how, in the aftermath of the schisms, southern clergy and laity increasingly associated all northern- ers with abolitionism, embraced defenses of slavery with increasing fervor, and finally endorsed secessionism as Christian duty. When read together, these three essays combine to offer a truly rewarding account of proslavery Christianity's role in reshaping antebellum southern political culture.

No similar coalescence results from essays which explore religious conflicts provoked by antislavery feeling in the North, which instead address quite varied topics with equally varied approaches while never directly addressing abolitionism in and of itself. Christopher Padgett's examination of the shattering of the Presbyterian/ Congregational "Plan of Union" in Ohio's Western Reserve during the 1830s is unique in the volume for attending to the roles of immediatists. Yet consistent with its intentions, his essay explains much more rewardingly the complex political and religious responses to abolitionism in this hotbed of Yankee sectionalism than it does the religious outlook of abolitionism in its own right. Laurel Mitchell's essay takes a formal theological approach when contrasting the ways in which certain pro- and antislavery ministers interpreted key biblical texts to define the nature of Christian obligation to one' s "community" when justifying compliance or noncompliance with the 1850 fugitive slave law. Though excellent as an example of exegetical analysis, one would never suspect, having read this essay, just how profoundly divided over the use of "righteous violence" pious Yankees actually became when struggling with this question, or that some influential abolitionist ministers recommended picking up guns. John McKivigan's essay ably concludes the volume by explaining why abolitionists remained alienated from northern Baptists and Methodists even after they and their southern co-religionists had parted company over slavery questions. Here again, however, the focus is not on abolitionism, but on denominational responses to pro- and antislavery pressures. Following their schisms, northern Baptists and Methodists lamented the "peculiar institution" in the abstract and abolitionist agitators quite specifically, thereby creating,

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McKivigan concludes, a legacy of moral obfuscation that ill-prepared them, or the nation, for the impending responsibilities of civil war and slave emancipation.

Introduced by a valuable historiographical essay by editors McKivigan and Mitchell Snay on "Religion and the Problem of Slavery in Antebellum America," this excellent collection has much to offer those who study conflicts over slavery within as well as between the North and the South. How it enriches an understanding of abolitionist and African-American religious activism is left for the reader to determine.

James Brewer Stewart, James Wallace Professor, Macalester College, is co-author with George Price of To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (1999).

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