Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave

Peter through Roman Eyes

Schaefer

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532640650
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

When the New Testament speaks of slaves and masters, is it affirming an institution that we find reprehensible? Biblical scholars across the theological and political spectrum generally conclude that the answer is "yes." And in the same passages the Bible seems to affirm male dominance in marriage, if not in society at large. This book meticulously places these passages, the Bible's "household codes," in their historical and literary context, focusing on 1 Peter's extensive code. A careful side-by-side reading with Rome's cultural equivalent (Aristotle's household code) reveals both the brilliance of the biblical author and the depth of 1 Peter's antipathy toward slavery and misogyny.

1

Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave

On Tuesday, December 20, 1859, The New York Daily Tribune reported extensively on the “Grand Union-Saving Meeting” of 7:00 p.m. the previous evening. The coverage sat there uncomfortably amidst articles on the aftermath of John Brown’s October raid on Harper’s Ferry, congressional debate on slavery and dissolution of the Union, and the upcoming 1860 Republican Party Convention. Monday’s meeting at the 4,000-seat Academy of Music opera house, hub of elite urban social life, was crowded to standing-room. The gathering was led by Mayor Daniel F. Tiemann and former governor Washington Hunt. The Grand Union-Saving movement was dedicated to preserving the Union by maintaining the institutions of slavery.

New York City’s prosperity was tied to the economics of slavery. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, about one-fourth of the city and environs’ population was enslaved.1 Before the official end of most slavery in New York (1827), Manhattan had been home to the highest proportion of slave-owning households outside of Charleston. Between 1820 and 1840, New York City’s exports grew from roughly equivalent to other large U.S. ports to larger than all other American ports combined, powered by slave-based cotton and tobacco trade.2 New York City was also the major port of entry for cotton processed in Upstate textile mills. The banks of Manhattan held the promissory notes of plantation owners, who used this credit to buy seed and slaves, and used other slaves as collateral on the loans; some of the city’s bankers also directly financed illegal slave trading. Thus an end to slavery would mean defaults on a large portion of the city’s wealth. And the city had another slave-related export: Every summer 100,000 Southern plantation owners and their families escaped the miserable heat and humidity by taking extended stays in New York City. Tourism was a major source of revenue at a time when the city’s population was only 500,000.

The ties and tradition surrounding slavery in New York City were so influential that on January 7, 1861, anticipating the imminent war, the city’s mayor proposed to his aldermen that they should declare independence from the governments in Washington and Albany. New York City could become an independent, aristocratic city-state atop a network of slave-based estates—a facsimile of the political-economy Aristotle had proposed in his “household codes” twenty-two centuries earlier. Aristotle was adamant this was the natural and moral way to organize an economy.

But this was Christmas Week of 1859; 1861 was over a year away. Perhaps a war of secession could still be avoided. The Union-saving meeting began with a 132-gun salute accompanied by Roman candles. The stage banner quoted Daniel Webster: “I shall stand upon the Constitution. I need no other platform.”3

The first two speakers were lawyer-politicians: James Brooks, Esq., and Charles O’Conor. Brooks, who edited the New York Daily Express from its founding in 1836 until his death, was between stints as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He would serve as a representative until he died in 1873, two months after being censured for attempted bribery. Brooks opined that those who invoke a “higher law” against slavery had

broken up our Missionary stations, thrown discord into Tract Societies, and rent the Church of God in twain . . . When our Savior was on earth he was a subject of that vast slaveholding Roman Empire . . . and sixty millions of slaves, it is estimated, were in that empire. Judea, where he was from; Galilee, where he lived; Egypt, that he visited—all were slaveholding States . . . And now, if there be in the Holy Bible any such denunciations of Slavery or of slaveholders as we now daily hear from men calling themselves the servants of God, it is not in King James’s . . . version of the Bible . . . But oh! Ye Scribes and Pharisees who rail at us publicans and sinners! . . . Ye Beechers and ye Cheevers, wiser and better than our Savior when on earth—go with your new version of the Bible into all the world, and shoos your Gospel into every living creature!4

Charles O’Conor was then introduced. He had been the local U.S. District Attorney earlier in the decade. He would go on to become senior counsel to Jefferson Davis at his trial for treason, and eventually a nominee to challenge President Grant in the 1872 presidential election. Mr. O’Conor

could not express the delight he felt in beholding . . . so vast an assembly. If anything could give assurance to those who doubted the permanence of our institutions and the support which the people of the North were prepared to give them, it was a meeting so large, respectable, and unanimous as this.5

The American Union, as presently constructed, was “time’s last, most glorious, and beneficent production . . . We were created by an Omniscient Being, and in the benignity and the wisdom of His power”6 he allowed mankind to gradually advance for 5,000 years before “He laid the foundations of a truly free, happy, and independent empire. [Applause.] Not until then was the earth mature for the laying of the foundations of this state.”7 The debate about slavery had mattered little

as long as this discussion confined itself to societies with no more action than . . . the strong-minded women who believed that women were much better-qualified than men to perform the functions and offices usually performed by men. But, unfortunately, it had entered into the politics of the North.8

By precipitating secession, the North would break its covenant with the nation’s founders, who had written slavery into the constitution.

Mr. O’Conor presented his case for slavery by contrast to Mr. Brooks. “If it could be maintained that negro slavery was unjust, then he would agree that there was a ‘higher law’ . . . But he believed that Slavery was just.” Slavery is “benign in its influence on the white and on the black”; slavery is

ordained by nature . . . a necessity created by nature itself . . . It carries with it duties for the black man, and duties for the white man, which duties cannot be performed except by the . . . perpetration of the system. [Cheers.] . . . As to the negro, . . . we denied to him every political right or the power to govern. Gentlemen, to that condition the negro is assigned by nature. [Bravo.] He has strength, and has the power to labor; but the hand which created him denied to him either the intellect to govern, or willingness to work . . . And that nature which deprived him of the wi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave
• Chapter 2: Aristotle’s World
• Chapter 3: Alexander and the Culture-War Empire
• Chapter 4: Peter’s Dissident Correspondence
• Chapter 5: The Oikos of God
• Chapter 6: Epilogue
• Bibliography