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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
This essay offers an interpretation of certain sections of the American abolitionist movement before the Civil War. It posits that many antebellum opponents of slavery and enslaved people alike subscribed to a theory of Christianity that, following Scottish common-sense theology and the experiential, liberation-oriented Christianity of the enslaved, maintained that morality and immorality were equally comprehensible and perceivable to all humanity. When, therefore, reports of physical violence and oppression wreaked upon enslaved people in the South began circulating in the North, the conclusion that slavers must be atheists who were not truly practicing Christianity united both black Christians and white Unitarians in a common critique of slavery. The accusation that slaveholding was a form of atheism lent weight to common fears that slavery was a form of tyranny undermining the potential of American democracy among Northern Americans.
1 On this tense history, see Mathews, Donald G., Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McKivigan, John R., The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 36–56Google Scholar.
2 McCarter, James Mayland, Border Methodism and Border Slavery: Being a Statement and Review of the Action of the Philadelphia Annual Conference Concerning Slavery (Philadelphia: Collins, 1858), 39, 42, 82Google Scholar.
3 Long, J. D., Pictures of Slavery in Church and State (Philadelphia: J. D. Long, 1857), 127–128Google Scholar, 379.
4 McCarter, Border Methodism and Border Slavery, 84.
5 On antebellum anxiety about atheism, see Porterfield, Amanda, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 14–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schlereth, Eric, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), esp. 2–3, 147–149CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Grasso, Christopher, Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2–5Google Scholar.
6 Sinha, Manisha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 28Google Scholar. The interpretation goes back at least to Gilbert Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933). See also Strong, Douglas, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Walters, Ronald, American Reformers: 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997)Google Scholar; and Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Mark Noll explores the influence of Scottish common-sense philosophy in America's God: Edwards to Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
7 See Noll, Mark, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar, esp. 31–51. For a counterpoint, see Anne Loveland, “Evangelicalism and Immediate Emancipation in American Antislavery Thought,” in Abolitionism and American Religion, ed. John R. McKivigan (New York: Garland, 1999), 2–19, which emphasizes the importance of evangelical notions of conversion and repentance upon abolitionism. As McKivigan has noted in The War Against Proslavery Religion, esp. 111–127, the emergence of activist interdenominational evangelical organizations—the so-called “benevolent empire”—worked symbiotically with abolitionists impatient with established denominations’ general wariness of abolitionism.
8 Thurman, Howard, Deep River (New York: Harpers, 1945), 36Google Scholar. See, for instance, Albert Raboteau, “The Blood of the Martyrs is the Seed of the Faith,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Cornel West and Quinton Hosford Dixie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 22–40; Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: the invisible institution in the antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 284; Dwight Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Philadelphia: Augsburg, 2011), 128–134; and Beth Barton Schweiger's discussion of the conflation of theology and history in “Max Weber in Mount Airy, or Revivals and Social Theory in the Antebellum South,” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, ed. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald Matthews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 40–44.
9 For arguments to this end, see Raboteau, “The Blood of the Martyrs is the Seed of the Faith,” 22–40; John Ernest, “Traumatic Theology in the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written By Himself,” African American Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 19–31; Dan McKanan, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford, 2002), 127–157; and Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Knopf, 2011), 252–262. Frances Foster Smith's classic, Antebellum Slave Narratives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), deals somewhat with religion's role in shaping slave narratives, as does William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The first century of Afro-American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 34–46; Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Christianity in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 134–141; Randolph Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); and Makingu Akinyela, “Battling the Serpent: Nat Turner, Africanized Christianity, and a Black Ethos,” Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 3 (January 2003): 255–280.
10 Katherine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 1–12. See also Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
11 Frederick Douglass, The Complete Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass (Radford, Va.: Wilder, 2008), 158–159.
12 Douglass, The Complete Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, 158, 138.
13 These arguments have been observed before: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 70–72, discusses the reduction of the person to a thing and is critical of Christianity's role in the process; and Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 18–24, describes the phenomenon of the rejection of Christianity among enslaved black people, though I think he too often conflates criticism of Christianity with rejection of it.
14 Schlereth, An Age of Infidels, 5–6.
15 James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: St. Martins, 2006), 69–70.
16 William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the president's daughter (London: Partridge & Oakley, 1853), 43.
17 Brown, Clotel, 97, 99.
18 Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1851), 35–38.
19 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: the author, 1860), 36. See the discussion in Cameron, Black Freethinkers, 21–22.
20 Thomas Johnson, Africa for Christ (London: Yates, Alexander, and Shepheard, 1882), 15.
21 Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 27.
22 William Meade, On the Duty of Affording Religious Instruction to Those in Bondage (Richmond, Va.: H. K. Ellyson, 1853) 12–13.
23 Johnson, Africa for Christ, 16.
24 Johnson, Africa for Christ, 18, 17.
25 Johnson, Africa for Christ, 13.
26 Thomas Jones, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years (Worcester, Mass.: Henry J. Howland, 1857), 23. For commentary, see William L. Andrews and David A. Davis, eds., North Carolina Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 189–200.
27 David Walker, An Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Boston: Walker, 1830), 43.
28 Douglass, The Complete Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, 158–159. Mark Noll discusses the way antislavery Christians often read the Bible for “principle” rather than for particular citation in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 31–51.
29 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, an American Slave (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849), 34–35.
30 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Bantam, 1981), 311–312. See also McKanan, Identifying the Image of God, 159–163. As Alfred Kazin wrote of the novel, it was difficult to confuse this “servant of the Lord” with “the type of sycophant wheedling before the white oppressor that we now dismiss as an Uncle Tom.” For Kazin, Tom stood as a prefiguration of the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement. Alfred Kazin, introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Bantam, 1981), vi. John B. Boles makes a similar argument in Religion in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2005) 92–99; as does Raboteau, Slave Religion, 301–302.
31 Bethany Vennay, Aunt Betty's Story: The Narrative of Bethany Vennay (Boston: George Ellis, 1889), 16.
32 Ezra Styles Ely, The Journal of the Stated Preacher to the Hospital and Almshouse (New York: Whiting and Watson, 1812), 42–44; and Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith, 198, who links this story to Ely's particular moderate brand of Calvinism, taking from it the point that Ely believed deism to be a delusion.
33 Ely, Journal of the Stated Preacher, 262.
34 Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelica Grimke, and Sarah Grimke, American Slavery as it Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 7.
35 Cited in Strong, Perfectionist Politics, 70.
36 On the moral sense and its career in American intellectual history, see Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 12–15; and Noll, America's God, 106–113. On Bushnell, see David Torbett, Theology and Slavery: Charles Hodge and Horace Bushnell (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006), 139–145; and Horace Bushnell, A Discourse on the Slavery Question (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Tiffany, 1839), 31.
37 Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, (New York: Leavitt, Lord, 1835), 85, 265–266. On the course of Finney's beliefs about slavery, see James David Essig, “The Lord's Free Man: Charles G. Finney and His Abolitionism,” in Abolitionism and American Religion, ed. John R. McKivigan (New York: Garland, 1999), 319–341.
38 William Ellery Channing, The Moral Argument Against Calvinism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Unitarian Library, 1845), 7. See also Noll, America's God, 284–286; and Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 44–47, 56–62.
39 Theodore Parker, The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. F. P. Cobb, vol. 6 (London: Truebner and Company, 1864), 132, 257–258.
40 Thomas Pearson, Infidelity: Its Aspects, Causes, and Agencies (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1854), 303.
41 On the British origins of the term, see Diana Hochsteadt Butler, Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford, 1995), 28–41.
42 On “practical” versus “speculative” atheism, see David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: from Hobbes to Russell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 16–21, 173–178; and Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Political Atheism and Kindred Subjects (1829; repr., Boston: Jewett, 1852), 98–99.
43 Beecher, Lectures on Practical Atheism, 19.
44 Theodore Parker, Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology (London: Paternoster, 1867), 24, 50. On Parker's ideas about atheism, see Elisabeth Hurth, Between Faith and Unbelief: American Transcendentalists and the Challenge of Atheism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2–3, 129–130.
45 Parker, Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology, 25.
46 Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 348.
47 James Duncan, A Treatise on Slavery (1824; repr., New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1840), 65, 74.
48 William Patton, Slavery and Infidelity (Cincinnati: American Tract Society, 1856), 4, 19, 56, 59.
49 J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career and Probable Designs (New York: Carleton, 1862), 88–89.
50 William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches (Boston: B. F. Wallcut, 1852), 380.
51 John Joliffe, Chattanooga (Cincinnati: Anderson, Gate, and Wright, 1858), 233–234.
52 On this reading of the slave power, I have used David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 73–102. On the abolitionists’ tormented relationship with democracy, I have used W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), esp. 1–21.
53 Parker, Theodore, The Trial of Theodore Parker (Boston: Allen and Farnham, 1855), 198, 132Google Scholar. On Parker's abolitionist circles in 1850s Boston, see Teed, Paul E., A Revolutionary Conscience: Theodore Parker and Antebellum America (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 133–147Google Scholar; and Fellman, Michael, “Theodore Parker and the Abolitionist Role in the 1850s,” in Abolitionism and American Politics and Government, ed. McKivigan, John R. (Westport, Conn.: Garland Press, 1999) 344–363Google Scholar.
54 Parker, Sermons of Theism, Atheism and the Popular Theology, 46, 269–270.
55 Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Skepticism (Cincinnati: Corey and Webster, 1835), 85, 15.
56 Carey, Patrick, “Political Atheism: Dred Scott, Roger Brooke Taney, and Orestes A. Brownson,” Catholic Historical Review 88, no. 2 (April 2002): 207–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 215; and Brownson, Orestes A., Civilization (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1884), 382, 388–389Google Scholar.
57 “Wednesday Morning Session,” Thirteenth Annual Report Presented to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1850), 66.
58 Fitzhugh, George, Sociology for the South (Richmond, Va.: Morris, 1854), 305Google Scholar; and cited in W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1909), 372. On comparisons with Cromwell, see Reynolds, David, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2005), 230–233Google Scholar. See also McKanan, Identifying the Image of God, 195–197.
59 Cheever, George, The Curse of God Against Political Atheism: With Some of the Lessons of the Tragedy at Harper's Ferry (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Company, 1859), 22Google Scholar. On Cheever, see Mackey, Philip, “Reverend George Barrell Cheever: Yankee Reformer as Champion of the Gallows,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 82 (1972), 323–342Google Scholar.
60 Cheever, The Curse of God Against Political Atheism, 13, 9, 23.
61 Cheever, The Curse of God Against Political Atheism, 23.