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² Douglas M. Strong points to abolitionist William Goodell's social understanding of sin. Goodell described slavery as a web of evils that demanded “national along with individual reform.” However, Goodell's aim was to convince reformers to use political methods and to broaden their attack beyond abolition. Unlike the antislavery moderates or the practitioners of the Social Gospel, he did not point to the social origins of sin or salvation. Strong, , Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 132Google Scholar.

³ Essig, James, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 118Google Scholar.

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⁶ Channing, Slavery, 11–12, 55, 58.

⁷ Proceedings of a Public Meeting of the Citizens of Providence, Held in the Beneficent Congregational Church, March 7, 1854, to Protest Against Slavery in Nebraska; with the addresses of the Speakers (Providence: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1854), 13.

⁸ Wayland, Francis, The Limitations of Human Responsibility (Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, 1838), 189Google Scholar.

⁹ Bacon, Leonard, The Jugglers Detected: A Discourse Delivered by Request in the Chapel Street Church, New Haven, December 30, 1860 (New Haven, Conn.: Thomas H. Pease, 1861), 17Google Scholar; Barrows, E. P., A View of the American Slavery Question (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836), 16–18Google Scholar; Barrows, E. P., “The Bible and Slavery,” Bibliotheca Sacra 19 (July 1862), 563–606Google Scholar, here 580–81; Barrows, E. P., “The State and Slavery,” Bibliotheca Sacra 19 (October 1862), 749–801Google Scholar, here 776–77; Bushnell, Horace, The Census and Slavery (Hartford, Conn.: Lucius E. Hunt, 1860), 17–21Google Scholar. For other examples of the development of the distinction between a sinful system of slavery and the possible innocence of particular slaveholders, see Stuart, Moses, Conscience and the Constitution, with Remarks on the Recent Speech of the Hon. Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United States on the Subject of Slavery (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1850), 34Google Scholar; and Thurston, R. B., “The Error and the Duty in Regard to Slavery,” in Liberty or Slavery: The Great National Question. Three Prize Essays on American Slavery (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1857), 1–38, here 25–26Google Scholar.

¹⁰ On the ABCFM debate, see Lewit, Robert T., “Indian Missions and Antislavery Sentiment: A Conflict of Evangelical and Humanitarian Ideals,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50 (June 1963), 39–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perdue, Theda, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 119–25Google Scholar; Phillips, Clifton Jackson, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1969), 226–32Google Scholar; Robert Cholerton Senior, “New England Congregationalists and the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830–1860” (Ph.D.diss., Yale University, 1954), 308–26; and Strong, William E., The Story of the American Board: An Account of the First Hundred Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: Pilgrim, 1910), 52–55, 186–87Google Scholar. On missions to the Cherokee, see also McLoughlin, William G., Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Similar debates occurred within the Northern Baptist Mission Board (later the American Baptist Missionary Union) and the American Home Missionary Society. On Leonard Bacon's role in the American Home Missionary Society debate, see Davis, Hugh, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 157–59Google Scholar. On the Northern Baptist debate, see McLoughlin, William G., Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting, Held in Boston, Massachusetts, September 9–12, 1845 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1845), 58. On the development of slavery in the Cherokee Nation, see Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 50–69.

¹² Cyrus Byington to David Greene, January 28, 1845, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers (Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library), Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.4, Vol. 6, No. 213A.

¹³ Jacob Hitchcock to David Greene, April 10, 1845, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.1, Vol. 11, No. 69. There is no evidence to suggest that guilt over or even concern about the treatment of Native Americans affected the attitude of the ABCFM missionaries toward the Native American practice of slavery. Despite his evocative description of their experience, Hitchcock evidenced little actual sympathy for the plight of the Cherokee. In the same sentence quoted above, he also referred to the Cherokee as a “half-civilized people, who are, or at least have been, very ignorant and superstitious.” In spite of his past advocacy for the Cherokees, Worcester's letters on the subject of slavery never mentioned their suffering.

¹⁴ McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees, 279.

¹⁵ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting, Held in Worcester, Massachusetts, September 10–13, 1844 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1844), 66–67. At the 1840 and 1842 meetings, memorialists asked the Board to dedicate itself to the abolition of slavery, to cease soliciting funds from slaveholders, and to remove from service a missionary to West Africa who owned several slaves. Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-First Annual Meeting, Held in the City of Providence, Rhode Island, September 9, 10, 11^th, 1840 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1840); Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting, Held in the City of Norwich, Connecticut, September 13, 14, 15, and 16^th, 1842 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1842).

¹⁶ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 56.

¹⁷ Shepperson, George, “Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church of Scotland, and the South,” The Journal of Southern History 17 (November 1951), 517–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Noll, Mark A., “Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) in North America (Ca. 1830–1917),” Church History 66, no. 4 (December 1977), 762–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Chalmers quoted in Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 59–60.

¹⁹ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 56–60.

²⁰ Ibid., 56–62.

²¹ “Thirty Sixth Anniversary of the American Board,” New York Evangelist 16 (September 1845), 149.

²² Ibid., 150.

²³ Ibid., 150. While serving as the president of Illinois College between 1830 and 1844, Beecher had been one of the founding members of the first antislavery society in Illinois. A personal friend of murdered abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, Beecher was closer to the abolitionist camp than most moderates. Beecher, Edward, Narrative of Riots at Alton: In Connection with the Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (Alton, Ill.: George Holton, 1838)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Beecher's formulation differed from that of his father, Lyman Beecher. In the midst of the ABCFM debate, Lyman wrote to his son Thomas that he wished Edward would “stop all this flummery” and admit that by organic sin he meant “national sin.” Lyman's formulation harkened back to more traditional understandings of the sinfulness of society, specifically to covenant theology. Like Edward, Lyman wanted to avoid the abolitionists' unsparing attacks on slaveholders, but he did not believe that one needed to invent new moral categories in order to point to the shared responsibility of all Americans to rid their nation of slavery. Edward did not accept his father's suggestion. While the category of “national sin” served to draw attention to shared moral responsibility, Beecher's “organic sin” served the more specific purpose of maintaining the sinfulness of slavery without calling all slaveholders sinners. March Maxine Arkin, “Edward Beecher: The Development of an Ecclesiastical Career, 1803–1844,” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1983), 446–47.

²⁵ “Thirty Sixth Anniversary of the American Board,” 150.

²⁶ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting, Held in Buffalo, New York, September 8–10, 1847 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1847), 59; Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, Held in Boston, Massachusetts, September 12–15, 1848 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1848), 80.

²⁷ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, 81–92.

²⁸ Ibid., 92–102.

²⁹ “The Mission Among the Choctaws,” Independent I (April 12, 1849), 4; Copy of a letter from the Choctaw Mission to the Prudential Committee, prepared about the time of Rev. Treat's visit and departure, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.4, Vol. 6, No. 74; “The Mission Among the Choctaws,” Independent I (April 26, 1849), front page. On the Independent, see Hugh Davis, 141–64.

³⁰ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, 102–10.

³¹ S. A. Worcester to S. B. Treat, August 17, 1848, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.1, Vol. 13, No. 204. In 1853, Worcester wrote to Treat to describe the way in which Evan Jones of the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU) dealt with slavery. Beginning in 1821, Jones and his son John established a ministry among Cherokee “full-bloods,” meaning those whose primary language was Cherokee rather than English. Few full-bloods owned slaves, and there were only four slaveholding Choctaw converts in the ABMU's mission churches. In 1850, Jones's Union threatened to withhold financial support unless the missionaries removed all slaveholders from the churches. Jones did not believe that the slaveholding church members were sinners and was reluctant to carry out the Union's wishes. Nevertheless, he capitulated and, in complete violation of the Baptist Churches' congregational autonomy, presented the four slaveholders with letters of dismission. Such letters were usually granted by pastors to church members who wished to leave one church and join another elsewhere in the same denomination. The four slaveholders, who did not wish to leave the church and had no other church to turn to, were livid. Jones's failure to stand up to his Union appalled Worcester, who worried that Jones's actions would give the ABCFM the impression that it was possible for the mission churches to affect a complete separation from slavery. Worcester asked Treat if he would have the ABCFM missionaries do as Jones did, and excommunicate slaveholders. S. A. Worcester to S. B. Treat, August 8, 1853, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.1, Vol. 13, No. 274. On Jones, see McLoughlin, Champions of the Cherokees.

³² Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, 102–11; Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Fortieth Annual Meeting, Held in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, September 11–14, 1849 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1849), 73–78; “Letter from the Choctaw Mission,” The Puritan Recorder 34 (September 1849), 153.

³³ Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Fortieth Annual Meeting, 76–77; “Letter from the Choctaw Mission,” 153. Bacon wondered why the mission could not find Indians to serve as free laborers: “Here is a mystery to us. Can not the Indians work? Or will they not work? Are they all too rich to work? Or are they all too proud to work?” The apparent absence of any Indian labor might have had something to do with the fact that mission converts tended to be either slaves or Indian elites. [Bacon], “The American Board and Slavery,” 284.

³⁴ Charles Hodge agreed with Kingsbury on this point. By claiming that hiring slaves was wrong because it gave encouragement to slavery, he wrote, the Board was “straining at a gnat, while swallowing a camel.” Hodge continued, “The encouragement given to slavery by the missions in hiring a few slaves, much to their own benefit, is as nothing, compared with that afforded by the wholesale use of the products of slave labour, by the good people of Boston.” Hodge, , “Article I,” The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 21 (January 1849), 1–42, here 27Google Scholar.

³⁵ Report of the American Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting, Held in Hartford, Connecticut, September 12–15, 1854 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1854), 23; Report of the American Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Presented at the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting, Held in Utica, New York, September 11–14, 1855 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1855), 18–31; “Meeting of the American Board,” The Puritan Recorder 39 (September 1854), 151; “Meeting of the American Board,” The Puritan Recorder 40 (September 1855), 150.

³⁶ Prudential Committee to the Choctaw Mission, October 5, 1858, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.4, Vol. 6, No. 82; Copy, C. Kingsbury to the Rev. S. B. Treat, December 24, 1858, ABCFM Papers, Film Manuscript No. 32, Series 18.3.4, Vol. 6, No. 82; “The Mission Among the Choctaws,” Independent I (April 12, 1849), 4. In January, 1860, Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church debated the question of funding the ABCFM. Henry Ward Beecher supported the ABCFM. In the end, the church decided to continue funding the organization, against the vociferous objection of Theodore Tilton. Tilton, at the time a close friend of Beecher's, would later accuse Beecher of committing adultery with Tilton's wife. Tilton, then twenty-four years old, delivered a two-hour speech in which he argued that the real issue was not the question of slavery's being a sin per se, but the right of the Church to set moral standards and its need to avoid the appearance of tolerating evil. Tilton appealed to the claim of Albert Barnes that without the support of the church, slavery could not continue to exist. If the Board, with its wide influence and power, had chosen to act against slavery in the beginning, Tilton argued, then it would have “been like a battering-ram against the bulwark of oppression.” Tilton ended his speech with theatrics. He pulled out one of the Sharpe's rifles that Beecher's church had sent to Kansas in 1856 to arm antislavery settlers against the slavery supporters pouring into Kansas from Missouri. Once, Tilton continued, Beecher had supported liberty with arms—could he not do so now with words? Burr, William Henry, Speech of Theodore Tilton, Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, January 5, 1860 (New York: John A. Gray, 1860), 43Google Scholar. On the place of this debate within the Beecher–Tilton scandal, see Fox, Richard Wightman, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher–Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³⁷ “The Late Meeting of the American Board,” Boston Recorder 30 (October 1845), 166.

³⁸ Garrison, William Lloyd, Thoughts on African Colonization (New York: Arno, 1969), 66Google Scholar.

³⁹ The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Rev. Dr. Chalmers, on Christian Fellowship with Slaveholders: An Address, by the Glasgow Emancipation Society, To Christians of All Denominations, but Especially to Members of the Free Church of Scotland (Glasgow: David Russell, 1845), 1–11.

⁴⁰ Phelps, Amos, “Prof. Stowe's Bible Method Examined,” Boston Recorder 30 (December 1845), 194Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Hodge, “Article I,” 36.

⁴² Ibid., 35–36, 40–41.

⁴³ Southern slaveholders did not necessarily appreciate the attempts of the moderates to limit individual moral responsibility for slavery. In 1856, proslavery Protestant William A. Smith, a professor of moral and intellectual philosophy and president of Randolph-Macon College, wrote on behalf of his fellow slaveholders: “We ask no mere apology on the score of necessity, and we can certainly claim none on the ground of ignorance.” Smith agreed with the abolitionists that if slavery was wrong in the abstract, it was wrong in all cases; to call slavery a sin meant that every slaveholder was a sinner. “To say, as some are accustomed to do, that ‘slavery is certainly wrong in the abstract,’ that is, in plain terms, in itself sinful, but that they cannot help themselves, appears to me to be wholly unfounded. It assumes that a man may be absolutely compelled to commit sin. This certainly cannot be true.” Smith was offended by the idea of organic sin, which he understood to imply that southern slaveholders lacked the moral or intellectual resources necessary to possess full moral responsibility. Smith, William A., Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (Nashville: Stevenson and Evans, 1856), 12–14Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Beecher, “Dr. Beecher on Organic Sins – No. III,” 174. Condescension could produce a very different perspective; Theodore Tilton concluded that if slavery under white Americans was brutal, slavery under barbaric Indians must be horrid beyond belief. Burr, Speech of Theodore Tilton, 17.

⁴⁵ “The Late Meeting of the American Board,” 166.

⁴⁶ Beecher, “Dr. Beecher on Organic Sins – No. II,” 170; Beecher, “Dr. Beecher on Organic Sins – No. 9,” 201.

⁴⁷ On antislavery and the idea of moral progress, see Oshatz, Molly, “The Problem of Moral Progress: The Slavery Debates and the Development of Liberal Protestantism in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 5 (August 2008): 225–250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁹ Edward's more famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, blamed “great organic laws” for the South's treason: “Why was the North valid, healthful? Because her laws and institutions promoted freedom and the doctrines of liberty. It was not because we were by nature more virtuous than the people of the South; but we were under the influence of great organic laws that were inciting us to conduct which was wiser and better than we individually knew or purposed… . And they of the South, on the other hand, were unconsciously under the influence of the great organic laws which sprang from radically vicious institutions… . The people of the South were what they were, not by reason of voluntary wickedness, but by reason of the institutions that were behind them, and that pushed them forward, as tides push ships; and our excellence was attributable not so much to ourselves as to the pressure of the great laws and institutions under which we were acting.” A proponent of Herbert Spencer, Beecher believed in the progressive development of society. Like Spencer, and unlike the followers of the Social Gospel, he did not believe that this progress depended on the Christian reform of social and economic institutions. Beecher, Henry Ward, “Conditions of a Restored Union,” Patriotic Addresses in America and England, from 1850 to 1885, on Slavery, the Civil War, and the Development of Civil Liberty in the United States, ed. Howard, John R. (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1887), 713–35, here 717–18Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Gladden, Washington, Working Men and their Employers (Boston: Lockwood, Brooks, 1876), 3Google Scholar. Aside from the first historian of the Social Gospel, Charles Howard Hopkins, who discussed a few examples of earlier interest in social salvation, Timothy L. Smith has been the only historian to argue for a direct relationship between the antebellum era and the Social Gospel. In his 1957 study, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Abingdon), Smith argued that the perfectionism, ecumenism, and millennialism issuing from antebellum evangelical revivalism made Protestant a strong social force before the Civil War (161). On the theology of the Social Gospel, see King, William McGuire, “‘History as Revelation’ in the Theology of the Social Gospel,” The Harvard Theological Review 76 (January 1983), 109–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵² Washington Gladden, “Comprehension,” October, 1886, Washington Gladden Papers (Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library), Film Manuscript No. 65, Roll 19, No. 290.

⁵³ Washington Gladden, “The Installation of a New Pastor, Toledo,” September 21, 1899, Washington Gladden Papers, Film Manuscript No. 65, Roll 31, No. 774.

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