According to abel how does the bible justify slaveholding

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ARTICLE IS BELOW

Slavery and Religion

Was the Bible Proslavery?

By Jeff Forret

The Issue

Both proslavery clerics and antislavery clerics used the story of Moses in the Old Testament of the Bible to support their arguments. Proslavery clerics argued that the law of Moses offered clear instructions governing the keeping of slaves. Antislavery clerics argued that when God’s chosen people were held in slavery in Egypt, God appointed Moses to deliver them to freedom.

Illustrators of the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us by Charles Foster

The issue: As the debate over slavery intensified in the mid-19th century, both supporters and opponents of the institution invoked religion to defend their positions. Was the Bible proslavery or antislavery?

· Arguments that the Bible was proslavery: Many theologians in the South as well as in the North believed that the Bible provided divine sanction for the institution of American slavery. In their view, the curse of Ham (or Canaan) condemned Africans and their descendants to slavery. The biblical patriarchs of the Old Testament owned slaves and nevertheless held favor with God, and the law of Moses offered clear instructions governing the keeping of slaves. In the New Testament, Jesus remained silent on the issue of slavery, never explicitly condemning the institution. Instead, the New Testament is filled with passages imploring slaves to obey their masters. One letter of the apostle Paul also ordered the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his owner. Looking at these passages collectively suggested to many clergymen and southern slaveholders that the Bible justified slavery.

· Arguments that the Bible was antislavery: Abolitionist ministers in the North found ample condemnations of slavery in the Bible. They pointed out that the forms of bondage practiced in biblical times differed markedly from the institution of southern slavery. Slavery was permitted in the Old Testament, but that did not make holding slaves morally right. Like slavery, polygamy and divorce occurred in the Bible, and theologians now denounced them. Slavery, too, had become morally repugnant over time and should be outlawed. Indeed, when God's chosen people were held in slavery in Egypt, God appointed Moses to deliver them to freedom. In the New Testament, Jesus never attacked the institution of slavery directly, but neither did he identify many sins by name. They were nonetheless wrong. Jesus' teachings—to love one another, to treat others as you would want to be treated—condemned slavery implicitly. Slavery, in short, violated the entire spirit of the Bible, with its emphasis on freedom from oppression, equality, and love.

Background

In the late 1820s and 1830s, a radical abolitionist movement took shape in the North. In 1829, the free black David Walker published in Boston his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that endorsed violence as means to end slavery.

David Walker, a black man who was born free in North Carolina, published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829. This militant antislavery tract urged bondpeople to resist slavery and approved the use of violence against masters.

Library of Congress

The blossoming of radical abolitionism continued in 1831 with the publication of William Lloyd Garrison's weekly newspaper, the Liberator. Although small in numbers and confined mainly to the New England states and the Northeast, abolitionists proved exceptionally vocal in their denunciations of slavery as sinful, a great moral evil to be eradicated. In a departure from previous antislavery efforts, they called not for the gradual abolition of slavery but rather for the slaves' immediate emancipation. To achieve their goal, they organized antislavery societies, launched a mass mailing of abolitionist materials into the South, and deluged Congress with abolitionist petitions. Their efforts consistently emphasized the immorality of bondage in the American South and provided biblical evidence of the sinfulness of slavery.

In Slavery: Its Origin, Nature, and History (1861), Thornton Stringfellow argued that the Bible supported the idea that blacks were unsuited to rule and were fitting objects of subordination.

Open Library

Surprised by the new vehemence of antislavery forces, proslavery theologians gathered biblical evidence of their own in justification of slavery. By the early 1840s, Thornton Stringfellow and other proslavery ministers both South and North unfurled a list of proslavery arguments culled from the Bible. They attributed slavery to the curse Noah placed on Canaan, which condemned his descendants to bondage. They pointed out that even though Abraham and other great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament owned slaves, God did not smite them but bestowed his grace upon them. Moreover, Mosaic law codified the rules governing slaveholding in ancient times. Turning to the New Testament, proslavery forces observed Jesus' failure to condemn slavery as evil. To the contrary, the New Testament repeatedly entreats slaves to comply with their masters' wishes. The Bible furthermore beseeches fugitive slaves to return to their masters. Proslavery forces made the Bible central to the intellectual defense of slavery.

Abolitionists had drawn upon the Good Book even earlier than their proslavery foes and arrived at the opposite conclusion. For them, the Bible offered no rationale for the continuation of slavery in the American South. A vast gulf separated American slavery from the more benevolent varieties of bondage of the Old Testament. Old Testament slavery existed side by side with polygamy and divorce, two practices widely condemned in mainstream 19th-century Christian churches. If polygamy and divorce had begun to be recognized as wrong over time, slavery merited a similar moral judgment. In the Old Testament itself, Moses had redeemed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. Surely, the abolitionists figured, God wanted the same for enslaved black Americans. That Jesus in the New Testament failed to censure slavery by name did not make the practice of slaveholding any less sinful. His instructions to love one another and to follow the Golden Rule betrayed the broad antislavery spirit contained within the pages of the Bible.

From "Necessary Evil" to "Positive Good"

Eighteen thirty-one proved a pivotal year in the development of the abolitionist movement as well as of proslavery thought. William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, in Boston on January 1. In it, he rejected gradual emancipation schemes in favor of the immediate liberation of American slaves. Many southerners believed it no coincidence that Nat Turner launched the bloody Southampton insurrection late in the summer of the same year. Although contemporaries in the South linked Garrison to the massacre, Turner had probably never heard of the northern abolitionist. Furthermore, Garrison, despite his antislavery invective, was a pacifist opposed to the utilization of violence. Nevertheless, the Turner rebellion sparked debate in the Virginia legislature over the future of slavery in the Old Dominion and whether or not to abolish the institution. Proslavery forces emerged from the contest victorious, inspiring Thomas Roderick Dew's seminal proslavery essay "Abolition of Negro Slavery," a work that dismissed plans to colonize blacks abroad and enumerated the horrific consequences of emancipation.

William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly newspaper the Liberator, first published in 1831, was the leading antislavery journal of the mid-19th century.

American Broadsides and Ephemera

On the whole, however, the rise of radical abolitionism caught slavery's supporters off guard. Abolitionists, a small but very vocal minority concentrated most heavily in the northeastern states, busied themselves in pursuit of immediate emancipation, laboring under the conviction that slavery was morally wrong. Garrison was involved in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and the following year joined brothers and New York merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan to establish the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a national organization dedicated to the abolitionist cause. The AASS was founded shortly after a notable abolitionist success overseas, as Parliament in 1833 freed slaves in the British West Indies through a program of compensated emancipation. At the instigation of Lewis Tappan, abolitionists in 1835 launched a mass mailing campaign that inundated the South with antislavery pamphlets. In Charleston, South Carolina, and other locations, crowds of angry southerners seized from the post office bags of undelivered abolitionist literature and set them ablaze. Although historians estimate that fewer than 10 percent of all slaves could read, the arrival in the U.S. mail of abolitionist propaganda posed a real threat to southern slaveholding interests.

Angry southern mobs destroyed abolitionist propaganda mailed to the South in 1835.

Library of Congress

The abolitionists' postal campaign roused slavery's defenders to action. Despite the rise of Garrison and radical abolitionism in 1831, proslavery voices remained remarkably silent for the next few years, seemingly stunned by the sudden assault upon the "peculiar institution." Although South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun proclaimed slavery a "positive good" by 1837, the southern white masses after the Turner revolt did not instantly spurn past characterizations of slavery as a "necessary evil." Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of the founding generation, they continued to look forward to slavery's eventual demise. Most southern whites between 1831 and 1835 continued to lament the presence of slavery, describing it as a burden and regrettable inheritance from their ancestors, and willingly discussed plans of gradual abolition and black colonization abroad. Only in 1835 did the antislavery mailings mobilize a more concerted effort to defend slavery. That year, the number of proslavery works began to mount. With time, their initially inchoate arguments coalesced into a distinctive proslavery ideology.

Religion featured prominently in the developing proslavery and antislavery arguments of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Biblical justifications and refutations of American slavery were nothing new, having appeared early in the 1700s. More recently, pro- and antislavery biblical references surfaced occasionally during both the congressional debates over Missouri's admission into the Union and the Virginia legislature's deliberations over the abolition of slavery. The antebellum decades therefore witnessed an elaboration of existing arguments that demonstrated continuity with the past rather than a sharp break from it. But while antebellum Americans did not invent biblical pro- and antislavery arguments, the debate did enter a new phase after 1831. The rise of the radical abolitionist movement placed a new emphasis on the morality—or, rather, the immorality—of slavery. Garrison and his colleagues condemned slaveholding as sinful, a moral evil to be eradicated. "If Slavery is ever abolished from the world," wrote Methodist minister LaRoy Sunderland, "it will be done by the influence of the Christian Religion. Men never will abandon slave-holding, till they feel it to be a sin against God."1 Abolitionist critiques of slavery's immorality forced slaveholders to articulate more thorough and sophisticated proslavery defenses, and debate over slavery's morality therefore grew more pronounced. An examination of scripture became central to the project of determining the justice or injustice of American slavery. The respective theological allies of slaveholders and abolitionists reached contradictory answers to the question, Was the Bible proslavery?

Argument that the Bible Was Proslavery

By 1841, proslavery forces were prepared to skillfully use the Bible to defend the peculiar institution from abolitionist attacks. More than any other individual, Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister in Culpeper County, Virginia, made the Bible a centerpiece in the defense of slavery, scouring the good book for scriptural evidence in support of bondage. Other southern clergymen, including South Carolina Baptist Richard Fuller, Kentucky-born Episcopalian Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and Presbyterian Fred A. Ross in Alabama, lent their voices to the chorus of religious proslavery arguments. Southerners were not alone, however, in insisting that slavery was divinely ordained. Many northern-born ministers such as Charles Hodge, the moderate head of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Samuel Blanchard How, pastor of the First Reformed Dutch Church of New Brunswick, New Jersey, also agreed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. They were joined by northern Congregational ministers Nathan Lord and Moses Stuart and the Irish-born Episcopal bishop John Henry Hopkins. Together, the writings of clerics South and North informed the more secular proslavery tracts of southern intellectuals James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. Despite their denominational differences, Stringfellow and other pastors located frequent references amenable to slavery in scripture. They argued that they maintained complete fidelity to the Bible, unlike their antislavery opponents, who deviated from the Bible's plain language creatively but erroneously to pervert the true meaning of God's word.

Some proslavery clerics used the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis to argue that the Bible supported slavery. They assumed that the mark God placed upon Cain after Cain murdered Abel was black skin.

ruskpp/Shutterstock

Much of the religious proslavery argument was rooted in the Old Testament, especially in the books of Genesis and Exodus. Some proslavery clerics viewed enslavement as the by-product of the curse of Cain. After Cain murdered his brother Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis, God angrily cursed Cain, but, to prevent others from killing him, placed a mark upon Cain, which some assumed to be black skin. Many other clergymen traced the origins of slavery to the so-called curse of Ham, or, more accurately, the curse of Canaan, explained in Genesis 9:18–27. The story centered on Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. After the great flood, Noah planted a vineyard. On one occasion, he drank too much of his wine, became intoxicated, and passed out naked inside his tent. Ham stared at his father's immodesty and reported it to his two brothers. To avoid seeing Noah nude, Shem and Japheth walked backward into their father's tent and covered his body with a robe. When Noah awakened and learned what Ham had done, he cursed Ham's son Canaan and made him a slave to Shem and Japheth. According to many supporters of slavery, Shem's progeny migrated to Asia and Japheth's to Europe; Africans were the descendants of Ham and Canaan. For Thornton Stringfellow and others, then, blacks were condemned to perpetual bondage as punishment for their ancestor's biblical wrongdoing. The subordination of one race to another was divinely ordained. As Stringfellow put it, "God decreed slavery."2

Many proslavery ministers attributed slavery to the curse Noah placed on Ham and Canaan, which condemned his descendants to bondage.

Gustave Dore's English Bible

God not only sanctioned slavery but showed favor to those who held others in bondage. Many of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, Stringfellow noted, were slave owners. Slavery "did exist in the patriarchal age, and . . . the persons most extensively involved . . . are the very persons who have been singled out by the Almighty, as the objects of his special regard—whose character and conduct he has caused to be held up as models for future generations." Central to this argument was the figure of Abraham. According to Albert Taylor Bledsoe's 1857 Essay on Liberty and Slavery, "Abraham himself . . . was the owner and holder of more than a thousand slaves," and the Lord never expressed disapproval of him. The book of Genesis reported that Abraham purchased servants with money and promptly had them circumcised, bringing them into covenant with God and demonstrating the authority he exercised over them. Abraham bequeathed his slaves to his son Isaac, who in turn passed them on to his son Jacob. "How, then," Bledsoe asked, "could . . . professing Christians proceed to condemn and excommunicate a poor brother for having merely approved what Abraham had practiced?" Job, too, was a wealthy slaveholder when God tested his faith. Concluded Stringfellow, "from the fact that he has singled out the greatest slaveholders of that age, as the objects of his special favor, it would seem that the institution was one furnishing great opportunities to exercise grace and glorify God, as it still does, where its duties are faithfully discharged."3

Proslavery ministers insisted that God would never sanction an institution that was an unmitigated moral evil or countenance a practice he deemed sinful. Slavery, then, was not innately immoral, as the abolitionists supposed. Bledsoe argued that "slavery among the Hebrews . . . was not wrong, because there it received the sanction of the Almighty. . . . We affirm that since slavery has been ordained by him, it cannot be always and everywhere wrong." In Slavery Ordained of God (1857), the Reverend Fred A. Ross added that since "Abraham lived in the midst of a system of slave-holding exactly the same in nature with that in the South," then it was also appropriate for "the Southern master in the present day."4 Baptist minister Richard Fuller made an appeal to moral consistency over time. If God looked favorably upon slavery in the Old Testament, it could not have somehow devolved into a great wrong by the 19th century. To argue otherwise suggested that God had once withheld a spiritual truth from his people.

Many proslavery clergymen observed that Mosaic law permitted slaves to be held as property. That Moses made laws governing slavery and slave treatment implied God's approbation of bondage. "Our argument from this acknowledged fact," remarked Charles Hodge, "is, that if God allowed slavery to exist, if he directed how slaves might be lawfully acquired, and how they were to be treated, it is in vain to contend that slaveholding is a sin, and yet profess reverence for the Scriptures." One biblical passage recurring in proslavery ministers' defense of bondage was Leviticus 25:44–46: "Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bond-men forever." As Ross explained, "I do not see how God could tell us more plainly that he did command his people to buy slaves. . . . The passage has no other meaning." Mosaic law permitted God's chosen people to hold foreigners as slaves who could be bought, owned, sold, or bequeathed to the next generation in perpetual bondage. The 21st chapter of Exodus completed the objectification and commodification of the slave, describing servants and maids as "money." According to the law of Moses, a master who struck his slave faced certain punishment if the bond person died immediately. If, however, the servant lingered a day or two before succumbing to death, the master escaped penalty because he intended only to correct, not to kill, the slave. The slaveholder, explained Samuel Blanchard How, avoided prosecution "because the servant or maid was his property, and he had the right suitably and not cruelly to chastise them when they, by their improper conduct, merited it."5

Proslavery writers found evidence in the New Testament as compelling as that in the Old. Even though he lived in a slaveholding region and would have been familiar with the practice, Jesus never took the opportunity to refute the law of Moses and explicitly condemn the institution of slavery. No New Testament figure either denounced or abolished it. Albert Taylor Bledsoe marveled that "the most profound silence reigns through the whole word of God with respect to the sinfulness of slavery," and he was not alone in making the point.6 In contrast, Jesus did single out for rebuke polygamy and divorce, both practices formerly permitted under Old Testament law. His failure likewise to censure slavery in the new covenant underscored his acceptance of the institution.

Rather than assail bondage, the New Testament repeatedly implored slaves to obey their masters. Paul's letters to the Ephesians 6:5 and the Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, the letter to Titus 2:9, and 1 Peter 2:18 all instructed bond people to respect and serve their owners. In Paul's brief letter to the slaveholder Philemon, Paul explained that he had converted Onesimus, a fugitive slave belonging to Philemon, to Christianity but then ordered him to return to his master. The apostle's instructions mirrored those of the Old Testament's Book of Genesis, in which an angel told the runaway bondwoman Hagar to return and submit to her mistress Sarah, Abraham's wife. Both the Old and New Testaments demanded that slaves fulfill their duties to their masters.

Proslavery churchmen also countered the abolitionists' claim that Jesus ushered in a new moral principle antithetical to slavery, the Golden Rule: "Do to others as you would they should do to you." Thornton Stringfellow contended that the Golden Rule introduced nothing unique to the New Testament. He viewed it, rather, as merely a rewording of the Old Testament command in Leviticus 19:18 to love your neighbor as yourself. If the underlying principle was identical, as Stringfellow supposed, and slavery was sanctioned by God in the Old Testament, Jesus' teaching of the Golden Rule in the New provided no impetus for the prohibition of slavery. For proslavery clergymen, the Golden Rule implied only that masters should treat slaves as they would wish to be treated if they, too, were enslaved.

Many southern theologians upheld the model of the Christian slaveholder. They considered slaveholders in the South divinely chosen masters who mitigated the possible ill effects of slavery through their own Christian character. In conformity with the golden rule, they insisted, masters treated slaves well, as members of an extended family, civilizing and Christianizing heathen slaves and guiding their moral improvement. When benevolent masters fulfilled their obligations to their slaves, they made slavery acceptable as an institution. Nothing about slavery was inherently immoral; it was quite possible for good Christians to own slaves, assuming they executed their duty to serve as guardians of their bondpeople.

Proslavery clergymen and their secular allies viewed antislavery northerners as stunningly ignorant of God's word. The South adhered loyally to the letter of the Bible, whereas the North betrayed it. "With men from the North," Thornton Stringfellow scoffed, "I have observed for many years a palpable ignorance of the Divine will, in reference to the institution of slavery. . . . How can any man, who believes the Bible, admit for a moment that God intended to teach mankind by the Bible, that all are born free and equal?" Some proslavery theologians acknowledged that God may someday choose to eradicate slavery, but in seeking to dismantle the institution prematurely, abolitionists were interfering with God's divine plan, which embraced the master-slave relationship no less than that between husband and wife or parent and child. Any potential disappearance of slavery must occur in its own time, consistent with God's will. In the meantime, Stringfellow concluded, "The moral precepts of the Old or New Testament cannot make that wrong which God ordained to be his will, as he has slavery."7

Argument that the Bible Was Antislavery

Although proslavery forces laid claim to a biblical argument, abolitionists had no intention of surrendering the Good Book to their rivals. For them, slaveholding was unquestionably a sin, "a heinous crime in the sight of God," and only a tortured reading of the Bible could conclude otherwise. Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Albert Barnes declared the biblical proslavery argument "among the most remarkable instances of mistaken interpretation and unfounded reasoning furnished by the perversities of the human mind." Northern and foreign-born abolitionist preachers such as Barnes and his fellow Presbyterian George Bourne; Baptists Nathaniel Colver and Elon Galusha; Methodists Charles Elliott, William Hosmer, and LaRoy Sunderland; Congregationalist Charles Beecher; and William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian, joined unordained allies, including Francis Wayland and Theodore Dwight Weld, among others, to marshal biblical evidence in condemnation of slavery. As one contemporary observed, "The Abolitionists have quoted Scripture quite as much as their opponents, but . . . on the side of right and justice."8