To Preach Deliverance to the Captives

Freedom and Slavery in the Protestant Mind of George Bourne, 1780–1845

Ryan C. McIlhenny

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780807173930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

George Bourne was one of the early American republic's first immediate abolitionists, an influential figure who paved the way for the campaign against slavery in the antebellum period. His approach to reform was shaped by a conservative Protestant outlook that became increasingly hostile to Catholicism. In To Preach Deliverance to the Captives, Ryan C. McIlhenny examines the interplay of Bourne's pioneering efforts in abolitionism and his intensely anti­-Catholic views. McIlhenny portrays Bourne as both a radical and a conservative, a reformer who desired to get back to the roots of Christianity for the purpose of completely dismantling slavery. Bourne's commentary on a variety of controversial topics—slavery, race, and citizenship; the role of women; Christianity and republicanism; the importance of the Bible; and the place of the church in civil society—put him at the center of many debates. He remains a complex figure: a polymath situated within the political, social, and cultural possibilities of an early republic that he was eager to play a part in shaping. Bourne's religious radicalism gave rise to his hope for an emerging post-revolutionary republic that would focus mainly on its religious foundations. The strength of the American nation, in Bourne's mind, rested not only on institutions indicative of a republican form of government but also on a pure Christianity, exemplified best in historical Protestantism. To Bourne, the future of the fledgling nation depended not only on principles and institutions but also on the activism of Protestant leaders like himself.

CHAPTER 1

BOURNE, BIOGRAPHY, AND
AMERICAN IDENTITY

Great events always produce extraordinary characters.

—GEORGE BOURNE, The History of Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1804, Bourne, according to a late nineteenth-century writer, “left England for America full of zeal and love for liberty—civil and religious.”1 Recognizing the political and economic conditions transforming England at the turn of the nineteenth century—though distant himself from the cohort of political dissenters and radicals, including those sympathetic to the concerns of an emerging laboring class whose lives were being fundamentally altered by industrialization—Bourne became convinced that in America “greater freedom of conscience and liberty could be enjoyed than in England.”2 Nonetheless, he left the challenges of one country for those roiling another. The young American republic faced challenges that included the ongoing partisanship between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans over the future direction of the nation; the conflicts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in the Northwest and South; the geographical expansion of the United States with the still-fresh purchase of Louisiana and the political and economic consequences of such an acquisition; the success of the Haitians in establishing an independent nation and the specter of revolution-inspired slave uprisings throughout the Americas; the fear that the radicalism of revolution was a threat to traditional faith; and that the United States was caught in the middle of a war between Britain and France, made worse by America’s failed embargoes. The Bourne family relocated to America during a time when there was an “absence of any clear consensus holding Americans together,” Nicole Eustace and Frederika Teute write in Warring for America.3 The social dislocation, political fragility, and economic uncertainties “that split American society from the outset” were considered by Bourne, as for many other Americans, as opportunities for creative nation building. Many American leaders, however, feared that the young republic would be undone by democratic chaos. Bourne never expressed concern over the radical implications of revolutionary democracy, made quite real by the Whiskey Rebellion ten years before his arrival, the slave revolution in Haiti, the Gabriel Prosser conspiracy, or the Haiti-inspired German Coast Uprising, the largest slave uprising in the history of the United States.4

A major concern among American leaders at the time was how to create a socially stable republic. One means of controlling the masses came through the creation of the Constitution in 1787, which gave a modicum of democracy to a few. Yet not even a revolution in government or a limited franchise could assuage the anxiety over the reality of a fuller democratic radicalism, especially among those inspired by revolutionary language but relegated to the margins of society. Events across the Atlantic served to intensify such anxieties. The French Revolution, including its legacy in Haiti and South America, “did the most to touch off,” argues historian Seth Cotlar, “potentially radical conversations about democracy in America.”5 By the time King Louis VXI was executed, transitioning the French Revolution into its period of terror, both England and America became significantly concerned with the populist implications of what was happening in France, fearing that the violent turn of events was, according to Gordon Wood, “capable of dragging the United States into the same kind of popular anarchy.”6 Bourne was not yet a teenager when Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), inspired by a host of transatlantic discussions over the ramifications of revolution, helped to set the markers along the modern political spectrum that have remained to this day. With the violent phase of the French Revolution that included a war between Britain and France, Americans, incessantly harassed by both countries, turned “away in disgust from the European conflagration,” writes Philipp Ziesche, “to appreciate their nation’s exceptional destiny.”7 They realized the “danger that their new and fragile nation would be dragged into a global conflict even as, closer to home, the slave regime on which half of the country’s economy depended threatened collapse.”8 American leaders came to understand that the nation’s immediate future could not be severed from the international conflict between France, England, and the rest of Europe. Factions in England, France, and America, however, were too intense to silence, in an ultimate sense, opposition within each country. Many dissidents sought refuge in the new American republic, where Republicans welcomed them, including the French (much to the disapproval of Federalists). It was not as easy to target those dissenters who escaped their own country: “the French and American governments became convinced either that their opponents would use recent immigrants to seize power or, more ominously, that their opponents were themselves ‘foreigners,’ out to subvert the nation from within.”9

Bourne recognized the popular impulses of the young republic and offered his own contribution to what he thought would lead to national stability.10 At the center of a healthy revolutionary republic was a citizenry radically changed by a “revolution in principles, opinions, and manners,” to borrow from Benjamin Rush. Early in his professional career as a writer, Bourne believed strongly that the strength of a nation rested not so much on structures but on an educated citizenry, a citizenry dedicated not only to the Bible but more importantly to the lives of key historical figures who stood as examples for citizens to emulate. The means of preserving the “unfinished business of the Revolution” had to be established first by modeling the principled character of great individuals. In order to become a morally principled society, in other words, American citizens needed to study and emulate historical figures who exhibited not only principled lives—in both public and private—but also lives that seemed to transcend national, creedal, and geographic boundaries. The era of revolutions demanded universal citizens of the world. For Bourne, biography was a crucial instructional source for establishing a strong citizenry. He focused on those committed to principles beyond the traditions of their respective communities, whether nation or denomination, republican citizens willing to provide order and meaning by courageously applying their virtuous principles to a yet-to-be formed world.

Yet he did not find a worthy enough example from among Americans themselves. Bourne provided examples from outside the republic. The two figures worthy of imitation for the purposes of instilling the principles necessary to create a strong republican nation were John Wesley (1703–1791) and Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). Bourne’s History of Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the earliest of such works in both America and Europe.11 His subsequently published The Life of the Rev. John Wesley is one of the first American biographies of the founder of Methodism.12 As mentioned in the introduction, putting these two works together in a single chapter, I believe, teases out what Bourne believed was of central importance in the longevity of a nascent republic. The new country had to depend on the “fixed principles,” according to Bourne, and “moral tenour” of such figures, individuals who embodied a universal enlightened republicanism and simple primitive religion, both of which served as foundational to a virtuous republic.13 Biography was also important to Bourne because the principles and structure of a republican government, true religion, and moral philosophy, which often fell into decay when neglected by a population, could not remain without the agency of people willing to embody and apply them. Republican principles and true faith, in other words, would not create a nation without the commitments of confident individuals. Bourne believed that biography would offer instruction in public virtue and private faith, assuaging fears related to what many believed to be the reasons behind the insecurities of the Early Republic.

Hundreds of biographies, mostly military, had been written between 1790 and 1900, as Scott Casper shows in Constructing American Lives. In a period where members of society looked anywhere for social and political grounding, Americans believed that biography had the power “to shape individuals’ lives and character and to help define America’s national character.”14 The creation of civic virtue “was essential to individual character,” and biography was the means to cultivate it. The survival of the American republic “depended on its citizens’ civic virtue, their commitment to participate in public life and place the public good before private interest.”15 This literary genre, Bourne argued in the early 1820s, represented the most “copious source of self knowledge of all the departments of historical record.”16 It “exhibits man in all his variegated hues, and of course enables the beholder accurately to estimate his diversified qualities.”17 Biography allowed people to appropriate the character attributes of others and to participate in the process of their own self-becoming, securing the ethics of republicanism.

Bourne does not provide a rationale for why he chose to write about either Napoleon or Wesley, although we would not be off the mark to say that he was certainly attracted to important issues related to the creation of the republic, and no one would deny that the French Revolution and the explosive growth of Methodism stood as two of the most important issues shaping the Early Republic. We can say with greater certainty after considering the two biographies that Bourne expressed a fascination with historical individuals who, to say it somewhat loftily, bore the weight of a new world on their shoulders, individuals willing to live in accordance with their own principles for the purposes of having a transformative influence on society. Both biographies reveal what Bourne believed to be the key pillars of a free republic: the freedom of conscience and the protection of true religion. In Bourne’s mind, John Wesley exhibited a faith undefiled by the heaviness of tradition. Indeed, the disparagements against Wesley from an Old World denomination (Anglicanism) for his—and his brother’s—efforts to return to a simple faith provided a strong impetus for establishing a denomination that had little to hold on to from the Old World. And Napoleon was the prime example of an individual “animated,” Bourne writes, by the “revolutionary spirit.”18 He lived during a period of significant national uncertainty and political opposition but had the courage to apply the principles of revolution for the well-being of the French people. According to Matthew Rainbow Hale, Americans forg...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: The Protestant Mind of George Bourne
• CHAPTER 1: Bourne, Biography, and American Identity
• CHAPTER 2: The Church, Immediacy, and the Trials of Bourne
• CHAPTER 3: The Maturation of Bourne’s Antislavery Bible Argument
• CHAPTER 4: Catholic Slavery and Protestant Freedom in Bourne’s Lorette
• CHAPTER 5: Abolition and the Woman Question in Bourne’s Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects on Woman and Domestic Society
• CHAPTER 6: The Nation, the Millennium, and Bourne’s American Text-book of Popery
• CONCLUSION: The Bourne Legacy and American Culture
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX