Gospel of Disunion

Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South

Mitchell Snay

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469616155
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of religion in the development of southern sectionalism. In Gospel of Disunion Mitchell Snay examines the various ways in which religion adapted to and influenced the development of a distinctive southern culture and politics before the Civil War, adding depth and form to the movement that culminated in secession. From the abolitionist crisis of 1835 through the formation of the Confederacy in 1861, Snay shows how religion worked as an active agent in translating the sectional conflict into a struggle of the highest moral significance. At the same time, the slavery controversy sectionalized southern religion, creating separate institutions and driving theology further toward orthodoxy. By establishing a biblical sanction for slavery, developing a slaveholding ethic for Christian masters, and demonstrating the viability of separation from the North through the denominational schisms of the 1830s and 1840s, religion reinforced central elements in southern political culture and contributed to a moral consensus that made secession possible.

Part One
Religion and sectional politics

1 The abolitionist crisis of 1835: The issues defined

In May 1835, the American Antislavery Society announced its intention to “sow the good seed of abolition thoroughly over the whole country.” Lewis Tappan, prominent evangelical abolitionist from New York and member of the society’s executive committee, devised the plan to flood the nation with antislavery pamphlets, kerchiefs, medals, and even blue wrappers around chocolate. The names of 20,000 Southerners appeared on Tappan’s mailing list. Targeting the South, suggested the antislavery newspaper Emancipator, would force Southerners to show “their real views and feelings.”¹

These words proved prophetic. On July 29, 1835, the steam packet Columbia arrived in Charleston from New York with thousands of anti-slavery tracts in its hold. No sooner had the boat arrived than a group of angry citizens snatched these mail bags from the post office. The next evening 3,000 Charlestonians gathered at the Parade Ground and watched as this antislavery literature, along with effigies of Tappan and two other leading abolitionists, was burned. The bonfires that night in the summer of 1835 provided unmistakable evidence of the “real views and feelings” of the South. The abolitionist crusade to end slavery would be met by swift and stiff resistance by the slaveholding states.²

By confronting the South with an assault on the morality of slavery, the postal campaign of 1835 created a political crisis that drew Southern ministers into sectional politics. Their first important confrontation with Northern abolitionists prefigured the ways in which religion would help shape antebellum Southern distinctiveness. It revealed the dynamics of call and response between abolitionism and Southern religion. It also forced Southern clergymen to articulate their moral defense of slavery and to divest abolitionism of religious authority. The antebellum debate between Northern abolitionists and Southern clergymen over the morality of slavery would follow the lines set forth in 1835. In their response to abolitionism, Southern clergymen spoke most often about the relationship between religion and politics. They emerged from the crisis of 1835 with a particular understanding of this relationship, one that would profoundly shape their thinking throughout the sectional conflict.

I

The Southern clergy faced the abolitionist crisis of 1835 with an ambivalent and somewhat contradictory legacy toward slavery. Historians have traditionally argued that the early 1830s marked a decisive shift in Southern thinking toward a defense of slavery as a positive good. According to this interpretation, the liberal Jeffersonian acceptance of slavery as a necessary evil crumbled under the combined weight of the Nat Turner rebellion, the debates over slavery in the Virginia legislature, the nullification controversy in South Carolina, and the emergence of immediate abolitionism marked by the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831.³ Although this interpretation is clearly credible and compelling, much evidence suggests that among Southern clergymen and denominational groups, proslavery emerged far earlier than the 1830s. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Southern churches accepted slavery and attempted to Christianize slaveholders. These efforts persisted during the eighteenth century, despite increasing attacks on slavery after the American Revolution. By 1835, then, the Southern clergy had ample precedence for choosing either to defend or challenge human bondage.

With their insistence upon human brotherhood, spiritual equality, and benevolence, Quakers provided the earliest and strongest religious contribution to early American antislavery. Southern Quakers were speaking out against slavery by the mideighteenth century. In 1758, the Virginia Yearly Meeting directed its members to avoid both the importing or holding of slaves. Quakers in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina petitioned their legislatures for exemptions from restrictions on manumissions. Quaker emancipation was practically complete in Maryland and Virginia by 1788, although the process was a little slower in North Carolina. Quakers continued their antislavery activities during the early nineteenth century. For example, they dominated the North Carolina Manumission Society formed in 1816. Yet the Quaker thrust toward anti-slavery was blunted in the Southern slaveholding environment. The Western Quarterly, for example, a subdivision of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting, advised its members in 1768 not to buy or sell slaves “in any case that can be reasonably avoided.” Other Quaker governing bodies in the South sought to distance themselves from manumission and antislavery.⁴

It was the secular ideology of the American Revolution that really sparked the growth of antislavery sentiment in the late eighteenth-century South. What historian Bernard Bailyn has termed the “contagion of liberty” brought into sharp focus the inconsistency of human bondage in a republican society. The Lockean emphasis on natural rights and the republican insistence on liberty led logically to a questioning of slavery. Virginia Baptists, for example, stated in 1789 that slavery was “a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.” The influence of Revolutionary ideology on religious anti-slavery is more fully illustrated in a public letter written by the minister David Barrow in 1798 explaining his decision to leave Virginia. A native of Virginia, Barrow freed his own slaves in 1784 and later moved to Kentucky, where he became an antislavery preacher. Barrow’s religious antislavery views reflected Enlightenment liberalism and republicanism. He stressed the natural equality of man and argued that liberty was “the unalienable privilege of all complexions, shapes and sizes of men.” Accordingly, he argued that slavery was “contrary to the laws of God and nature.” Appealing to the clash between slavery and the ideals of the Revolution, Barrow suggested that slaveholders “may consider how inconsistently they act, with a Republican government, and whether in this particular, they are doing, as they would others should do to them!”⁵

Evangelicalism was an equally potent source of antislavery sentiment in the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century South. Originating in the First Great Awakening and reinforced by the great revivals of the 1790s and early 1800s, the logic of evangelical thought could and often did lead to a conflict between professed religious creeds and the holding of slaves. This was first made manifest by Baptists in pre-Revolutionary Virginia who welcomed black slaves into spiritual fellowship, further antagonizing the class conflict between these poorer farmers and their gentry neighbors. The evangelical ideal of a true community of believers and the insistence that the conversion experience was open to all people, regardless of race or sex, had profound egalitarian implications. “Christ has shed his blood for all nations,” suggested one Virginian in 1774, “and therefore why should we counteract the kind intentions of heaven, by enslaving and making them miserable, and thereby putting an effectual bar in the way of their conversion?” Drawing upon the evangelical emphasis on spiritual freedom and equality, the Presbyterian David Rice claimed that the slave was “a free moral agent legally deprived of free agency.” In 1823, the Jefferson Branch of the Manumission Society of Tennessee declared that blacks and whites were equal before God. In addition to its implicit egalitarian message, the evangelical commitment to a life of holiness, signified by the conversion experience, also led some Southern Protestants to free their slaves.⁶

Antislavery sentiment in the post-Revolutionary South was often channeled into support of colonization, the program aimed at sending freed slaves back to Africa. Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society (ACS) received support from such prominent Americans as James Monroe, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. The colonization movement had widespread appeal in the 1820s. It seemed to be a viable solution to the problem of slavery, it appealed to the prevailing belief that blacks were essentially not assimilable into white America, and it even appeared to be a means of Christian benevolence toward blacks. Not surprisingly, colonization was backed by church leaders across the nation. Within the first five years of its existence, the ACS program was adopted by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist General Conference, the Baptist General Convention, and the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church.⁷

Most Southern churchmen with humanitarian proclivities joined the American Colonization Society. All Virginia religious denominations gave this organization their official approval. The Presbyterian Synod of Virginia resolved that “this enterprise, if conducted with proper discretion, will produce the happiest effects, particularly in aiding to communicate the glad tidings of the gospel to an interesting quarter of the globe; and to meliorate the condition of a degraded portion of our population, while it promises the means of alleviating evils which our own country has reason to deplore.” Denouncing slavery as “one of the most tremendous evils that ever overhung a guilty nation upon earth,” the Episcopalian Bishop William Meade of Virginia was an ardent worker for the American Colonization Society. Although it was never as strong as in Virginia, colonization did receive support from religious groups outside the Old Dominion. The New Orleans Observer sought to interest Presbyterians in the activity of the Mississippi Colonization Society. The Rev. Christopher Gadsen, rector of St. Philip’s Church and later Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, pledged $50 to the American Colonization Society. The two vice-presidents of the North Carolina Society were clergymen. William Winans of Mississippi and James Osgood Andrew of Georgia, who were to become proslavery spokesmen in the Methodist Church, served as vice-presidents of the American Colonization Society in 1839.⁸

The message of the Quakers, the ideology of the American Revolution, and evangelicalism clearly gave rise to antislavery sentiment and support for colonization in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South. Yet the extent and significance of Southern religious antislavery feeling in the period before 1835 should not be overstated. The number of Quakers in the South remained small. Their influence was limited to small areas in Virginia and the North Carolina piedmont. The “contagion of liberty” unleashed by the Revolution never spread so far as slavery in the South was concerned. Southerners acknowledged the contradiction between liberty and slavery but pleaded helplessness in its face. To further avoid the antislavery implications of Whig ideology, they blamed the British for the existence of slavery in the colonies, cited their own inalienable rights of property, and suggested that blacks were really not part of humanity. Similarly, the evangelical potential for abolition was difficult to maintain in a society becoming increasingly dependent upon slavery. The social soil of the South simply could not nourish the seeds of radical emancipationism implicit in the evangelical ethos. In the words of one historian, the evangelical attack on slavery between 1750 and 1800 “was as shallow as it was short-lived.”⁹

At the same time that Southern religion was nourishing antislavery sentiments, some ministers and denominational groups were giving significant support to slavery. This can best be explained as a process of the accommodation of religious institutions to a slaveholding society. With both the established Anglican Church and the growing evangelical sects of Baptists and Methodists, the need for denominational growth required acquiescence to slavery. The religious support for slavery in the colonial South often took the form of Christianizing both slaves and slaveholders. The result of these efforts was to move Southern denominations and clergymen in the direction of becoming defenders rather than critics of slavery.¹⁰

Anglican attitudes toward slavery were closely connected to the growth of the church in the Southern colonies. In the seventeenth century, the Anglican Church lacked a solid institutional foundation. The absence of a legal establishment to support religion and the settlement patterns of early Chesapeake society worked against the formation of strong parishes and organized religion. During the late seventeenth century, Anglican authorities in England began to reassert their authority in the Southern colonies to invigorate the church. Significantly, this paralleled the growth and entrenchment of slavery in the Chesapeake region during those same years. Anglican missionaries inadvertently strengthened slavery as they sought support among colonial slaveholders. They helped ease the concern that Englishmen could not hold baptized Africans in captivity and presented the emerging slaveowning class with a doctrine of slave obedience.¹¹

James Blair, an Anglican commissary sent to Virginia in 1689, suggests how even the Christianization of slavery capitulated to the social and political pressures of the time. Blair recognized that the success of the church depended on an acceptance of slavery and an alliance with slaveholders. With a blend of humanitarian and pragmatic motives, he recommended to the General Assembly of Virginia in 1699 a plan “to endeavour the good instruction and Education of their Heathen Slaves, in the Christian faith.” The plan was never adopted. The Christianization of slavery continued in the eighteenth century through the work of Dr. Thomas Bray and his associates, who began a missionary program in 1729. Schools for black children were later established under their auspices in Williamsburg and Fredericksburg. In these ways, the Anglican Church established itself in the Southern colonies partly through adapting itself to the needs of a slaveholding society.¹²

A similar process of denominational accommodation to slavery can be seen in the experience of Methodists in post-Revolutionary ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Gospel of Disunion
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Religion and the search for Southern distinctiveness
• Part One Religion and sectional politics
• Part Two Religion and slavery
• Part Three Religion and separatism
• Conclusion Religion, the origins of Southern nationalism, and the coming of the Civil War
• Bibliography
• Index