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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Among nineteenth-century North American Lutherans the only corporate body to take an early, serious, and vigorous stand on behalf of the abolition of human slavery was a small group in upper New York State called the Franckean Evangelic Synod.1 On 25 May 1837, at a meeting held in a small country chapel in Minden township, Montgomery County, four Lutheran clergymen and twenty-seven lay delegates broke with the Hartwick Synod and formed the new association. It was named after the German Lutheran Pietist cleric and humanitarian August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). The abolitionist convictions of the Franckean Synod were embedded in the main body of its constitution. No minister who was a slaveholder or engaged in the traffic of human beings or advocated the system of slavery then existing in the United States could be accepted into the synod nor could a layperson practicing any of the above serve as a delegate to synodical meetings.2 By 1848 these restrictions were increased to include laity who “justified the sin of slavery” and clergy “who did not oppose” it.3 Such precise constitutional requirements in opposition to human slavery remain without precedent in the history of the Lutheran church.
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