Bounds of Their Habitation Read online

  More broadly, the biblical proslavery argument spoke to the biblical commonsense literalism of many evangelicals. For them, the Bible clearly meant to justify, not to abolish, slavery. What else could explain the frequent references to biblical patriarchs of the Old Testament owning slaves and New Testament passages in which the sainted apostles instructed slaves to obey their masters. “Can’[t] tell you how many times I done heard that text preached on,” one enslaved Christian scoffed.

  The top ranks of southern theologians outlined a powerful proslavery argument. Good order pleased God; anarchy and theological infidelity did not. Conservative theologians of both regions developed and presented a coherent proslavery argument that could not be rebutted successfully with the commonsense biblical principles of the day. If the Bible meant what it said, and readers could discern its plain meaning from the text, then it was virtually impossible to refute the argument that biblical passages supported the obedience of slaves to masters. The proslavery argument relied on the evangelical synthesis to make its points. As one religious southern proslavery writer put it for DeBow’s Review in 1850, “What we have written is founded solely upon the Bible, and can have no force, unless it is taken for truth. If that book is of divine origin, the holding of slaves is right; as that which God permitted, recognized and commanded, cannot be inconsistent with his will.” If Jesus and the Apostle Paul had considered slavery wrong, then why didn’t they say so? And why did Paul clearly command obedience to masters?

  This proslavery sermonic literature began to appear in the eighteenth century and over time developed into a formidable intellectual edifice. Richard Furman of the South Carolina Baptist Convention contributed one of the earliest expressions of the genre with his address in 1823, just following the abortive Denmark Vesey Rebellion in Charleston. He sought to allay fears among some masters that acquainting slaves with scriptures would disturb domestic peace, only because opposition to slavery has been attributed by abolitionists to the “genius of Christianity.” If holding slaves was a moral evil, he asserted, then it “cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles . . . would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church.” The idea that the Golden Rule condemned slavery was absurd. For example, if a son wished that his father would follow his commands, did that mean that fathers were obligated to obey orders from their sons? Furman acknowledged the evils and cruelties that had been attendant upon slavery. But such abuses also had been true of other primary social institutions, such as marriage, and that hardly proved that “the husband’s right to govern, and parental authority, are unlawful and wicked.” When tempered with “humanity and justice,” slavery might provide a state of “tolerable happiness” for those in the lower orders of society. And in doing so, masters had a right to “demand and receive from them a reasonable service, and to correct them for the neglect of duty, for their vices and transgressions.” Governments, he continued, were justly concerned “not only to provide laws to prevent or punish insurrections, and other violent and villainous conduct among them (which are indeed necessary)” but also to prevent unreasonable acts of cruel masters.

  Furman’s views seeded the growth of the religious paternalist proslavery theology that spread through the antebellum South. Typically, these defenses rejected any hint of the scientific racism that was just then being invented by phrenologists and early anthropologists such as Josiah Nott of Mobile. Instead, they were founded on a conservative vision of a godly social order and warnings of the potential dire implications of violating that order. In this, southern Protestants joined with Catholics, for while Catholic social philosophy excoriated the slave trade, it classed abolitionism as a worse social evil than the institution of slavery. New York Archbishop John Hughes of New York articulated that philosophy. The “fathers on the frontier” in the South, concentrated particularly in Louisiana and around Louisville, defended the peculiar institution. The white southern religious community closed ranks and produced reams of literature combating abolitionist propaganda.

  Just at the beginning of the Civil War, the well-known Episcopalian divine Stephen Elliott reinforced God’s plan for slavery and the war to a population just then engaged in a death struggle for their existence and way of life. He found the meaning of the war in God’s plan for the “poor despised slave as the source of our security.” He proclaimed that God had “caused the African Race to be planted here under our political protection and under our Christian nurture, for his own ultimate designs”—that being their preparation to return the Christian word to their home continent of Africa. How else, Elliott asked, could one explain the providential history of slavery itself and its perpetuation in spite of so many obstacles against it:

  God protected it at every point, made all assaults upon it to turn to its more permanent establishment, caused the laws of nature to work in its behalf, furnished new products to ensure its continuance and, at the same time, ameliorate its circumstances, made its bitterest antagonists to furnish arguments against its destruction, and raised up advocates who placed it, through reasoning drawn directly from the Bible, upon an impregnable basis of truth and necessity, connecting it, as we have shewn you, with sublime spiritual purposes in the future. And, finally, when the deeply-laid conspiracy of Black Republicanism threatened to undermine this divinely-guarded institution, God produced for its defence within the more Southern States an unanimity of sentiment, and a devoted spirit of self-sacrifice almost unexampled in the world and has so directed affairs as to discipline into a like sympathy those border States which were not at first prepared to risk a revolution in its defence.

  If God kept his own chosen people in the Old Testament enslaved for four hundred years, as part of their preparation to “go forth as a nation among nations,” then surely history would teach that American slavery was the yoke Africans would be under until God “saw fit to break it and to carry them, a humbled and prepared people, into the land which had been marked out for them as the scene of their future glory.” In this sense, the very presence of slaves in the Confederacy was its greatest security and the protector of the proper bounds of habitation. Enslaved people articulated a very different vision.

  CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE ENSLAVED

  The dual revolutions of the antebellum South—the expansion of the empires of evangelicalism and slavery—generated a passionate response among black Americans forced to confront the reality that Christianity underlay the ideology of the master class. At the same time, subversive readings of the Bible and of Christianity spread through slave communities. As the former slave Charles Ball noted, it was not possible to reconcile the slave to the idea of “living in a state of perfect equality, and boundless affection, with the white people. Heaven will be no heaven to him, if he is not to be avenged of his enemies. I know from experience, that these are the fundamental rules of his religious creed; because I learned them, in the religious meetings of the slaves themselves.” The “cornerstone” of slave religion, he thought, was “the idea of a revolution, in the condition of the whites and the blacks.”

  Enslaved Christians might have attended white-sanctioned and supervised services, sung the hymns of whites, and listened to white ministers enjoin them to obedience and patience with their lot in life. But they also created their own covert religious culture. Enslaved African Americans developed a religious culture that brought together elements of their African past and their American evangelical training. After the Civil War, the invisible church would become visible, as African Americans after the Civil War formed thousands of their own churches and denominational institutions. Before the war, however, when such independent institutions were impossible, black religious life emerged most clearly in the religious rituals of their own services. These included including ring shouts, spirituals, and chanted sermons.

  Many spirituals have some base in the white popular evangelical tunes that were making their way (in the form of shape-note hymn books) to churches through the newly settling and developing areas
. Whites also employed a variety of lyric books from the eighteenth century, including the hymns of Isaac Watts, and set those to familiar tunes. Many originated as songs compiled by Richard Allen, the Philadelphia Methodist who had created the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His widely reprinted songbook circulated quickly through the South. So did shape-note hymnals (named for the fact that the “shape” of the notes, rather than their position on the staff, signified their pitch for those singing) which started to emerge from southern publishers with the publication of Southern Harmony in 1835.

  Enslaved Christians also brought their own images, literary devices, and musical stylings to the songs circulating through evangelical America. The spirituals, as poetry and literature set in musical form, took on many meanings, depending on the time and circumstance and individual. For generations of slaves, there was simply no viable hope that freedom would come in this life. “Trials on my way, Pray, sister pray/Heaven is my home, Pray, brother, pray,” slaves sang in southern Georgia. “Tis hard to serve the Lord,” they added. In times of turmoil and war, when the very future of slavery was in question, songs about freedom took on more obvious meanings. Confederate authorities jailed some Charleston slaves for publicly singing what were now obviously subversive lines, such as “We’ll soon be free.” Recording these lines, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a member of the Boston literati and white army officer who commanded a black regiment during the Civil War, wrote that the chant was “no doubt sung with redoubled emphasis during the new events.” As one of his soldiers told him, “‘De tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees.’”

  The spirituals exalted Old Testament heroes such as Moses as well as more obscure figures. They often turned New Testament figures such as Jesus into Old Testament avenging heroes. These biblical heroes, moreover, were available now, for the slaves’ sacred world invoked a kind of constant present. Slaves quickly adopted the story of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt as their own. “Go down Moses,” with its exhortation to tell Pharaoh to release the captives in Egypt, is a well-known example. Thomas Wentworth Higginson provided even more powerful evidence as he recorded the praying and singing of former slaves, now Union soldiers, laying to rest one of their own. As they reflected on their lives, their army service (with its obvious perils, including reenslavement or a quick death if captured by Confederates), and their faith, one soldier publicly prayed his hopes to serve as a Christian soldier for freedom: “Let me lib wid de musket in one hand an’ de Bible in de oder,—dat if I die at de muzzle ob de musket, die in de water, die on de land, I may know I hab de bressed Jesus in my hand, an’ hab no fear.”

  Slaves placed the crucifixion, resurrection, and triumph of Jesus in the present tense. One song announced that “Mass Jesus is my bosom friend.” The son of God was also a friend, comforter, and deliverer. In a song recorded by the white Georgia Presbyterian missionary Charles Colcock Jones in 1834, lowcountry slaves sang out, “Jesus sends the comfort down/In my soul, in my soul/Go reign, go reign, kind Saviour reign.” Jesus walked on earth like a man, a suffering servant who channeled God’s power. Peter Randolph, an ex-slave memoirist, described how slaves linked their suffering savior with their own hardships: “The slaves talk much of the sufferings of Christ; and oftentimes, when they are called to suffer at the hands of their cruel overseers, they think of what he endured.” Enslaved Christians understood human suffering profoundly, as seen in lines such as “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” or “this world is not my home,” or “I’ve been in the storm so long.” They also longed for the peace coming after the turmoil of this life. Thomas Wentworth Higginson recorded the lyrics to “I Know Moon-Rise.” On its surface, this spiritual is about the peace that death will bring: “I’ll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms; Lay dis body down.” But the lyrics attest to the conquering of death. The spirituals recognized the evanescence of human power: “Did not old Pharaoh get lost, get lost, get lost . . . . get lost in the Red Sea.”

  The ever-changing roster of lyric motifs for the spirituals came alongside a repertoire of group performance strategies that were key in bonding slave communities. They also evidenced that the bounds of the habitation of African religious practices found new homes. This was most evident in the ritual that accompanied the singing: the moans, shuffles, and ring shouts central to African American religious expression. In slave cabins (oftentimes with great secrecy, including a tradition of turning a pot upside down at the door to “catch” the sound, a tradition probably derived from African folklore), or in other secluded settings, slaves would form a circle and begin singing. A leader would sit in the middle and become the caller, often chanting lines followed by the rest of the group responding. Gradually, the group would begin a slow shuffle, clapping their hands and moving rhythmically counterclockwise, circling the leader. Sometimes after hours of the singing, the ring shout leader picked up the tempo, with successive verses and refrains of familiar tunes. Participants called out new verses to the spirituals, including local names and locations. By such means, stock phrases came out as new material, some of which found their way into the versions of the spirituals. Finally, the intensity of the ring shout waned, and the informal services finished off with slower and more solemn spiritual tunes. White observers of the ring shout, dating from the early nineteenth century, were fascinated with the ritual, as in this account: “The fascination of the music and the swaying motion of the dance is so great that one can hardly refrain from joining the magic circle in response to the invitation of the enthusiastic clappers, ‘No brudder!’ ‘Shout, sister!’ ‘Come, belieber!’”

  The Christian culture developed by a significant minority of enslaved people reassured whites, on the one hand, because it proved the success of their missions to a people they considered as formerly heathen. Biracial churches in southern cities, with whites sitting in the main auditorium and blacks often seated in a balcony, side wing, or outside, seemed to represent an ideal of southern Christianity: two peoples worshipping and praying together, but doing so in ways that reflected and reinforced social hierarchies. But those who oversaw the system should have been disturbed rather than comforted. Within the Christianity of enslaved Americans lay a deep culture of aspiration for freedom in both body and soul. Those aspirations took flight when the Union Army provided the opportunity for escape from slavery and service to the cause of freedom.

  RELIGION, RACE, AND ABOLITIONISM

  The antislavery movement in the United States is most often associated with the famous nineteenth-century figures who propelled it forward from the early 1830s to the Civil War, including William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), and an entire network of female antislavery activists who bombarded Congress with petitions in the 1830s. Their relationship to the conventional evangelical religion of the era was troubled. Faced with a rising proslavery argument that drew deeply from biblical verses and theology, abolitionists most often found themselves appealing to the spirit of religious texts, particularly the Golden Rule. Abolitionists demanded that antislavery principles be put into action in America’s denominations—by, for example, not appointing slaveholders as missionaries. Abolitionists successfully convinced many northern Protestants that association with slaveholders in denominations was, in effect, complicity with sin, and that they should separate themselves from that sin. The result of this was a splintering of many of the major American denominations by section, resulting in the Northern and Southern Methodist Church. Baptists similarly divided, resulting in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 by southerners angered by the rise of abolitionist sentiment among northern Baptists. In the twentieth century, it would grow into the nation’s largest denomination.

  To the degree that abolitionists were successful, it was through invoking a sentimental religious rhetoric about what Jesus would think about slavery, and what slavery did to families. Slavery was wrong, they said in effect, because it robbed human souls of their God-given dignity. It also interf
ered with God’s plan for how humans should flourish within families. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catalyzed antislavery sentiment more than all other antislavery pamphlets combined. Stowe capitalized on the most effective religious antislavery arguments. Her hero Uncle Tom, a far cry from the “Uncle Tom” slogan that later became an epithet for cringing weakness, was powerful precisely because of his Christian faith. Stowe’s other black heroes, including the famous runaway fugitive slave mother Eliza, were as well. Stowe softened the strident abolitionism of the pamphleteers and propagandists with a compelling and sentimental story and deeply Christian plot line that attracted millions of readers worldwide. Meanwhile, antislavery Christians flooded the nation with pamphlets, appeals, ghostwritten slave memoirs, and imagery that forced Americans to ask the question posed by the famous slave print from eighteenth-century England that became a symbol of the worldwide abolitionist movement. On it, a chained and kneeling slave asks, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Female abolitionists created a corresponding print of a female slave asking, “Am I not a woman and a sister?”