When Slavery Was Called Freedom

Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War

John Patrick Daly

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813181653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy.

Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence to the grassroots assumptions of the South. The North and South shared assumptions about freedom, prosperity, and morality. For a hundred years after the Civil War, politicians and historians emphasized the South's alleged departures from national ideals. Recent studies have concluded, however, that the South was firmly rooted in mainstream moral, intellectual, and socio-economic developments and sought to compete with the North in a contemporary spirit.

Daly argues that antislavery and proslavery emerged from the same evangelical roots; both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the Bible and Christian moral dictates in light of individualism and free market economics. When the abolitionist's moral critique of slavery arose after 1830, Southern evangelicals answered the charges with the strident self-assurance of recent converts. They went on to articulate how slavery fit into the "genius of the American system" and how slavery was only right as part of that system.

1

Freedom and Evangelical Culture in the South

Southern morality was an amalgam of Protestant traditions and blunt materialism, because evangelical ministers tended to sacralize the American institutions under which their denominations expanded. It is no surprise, therefore, that southern evangelicals reached seemingly self-interested conclusions on what they deemed wholly religious grounds.¹ The Protestant work ethic had established worldly success as a sign of divine favor since at least 1630 when the Puritans reached American soil. In the two hundred years that followed, and especially since the individualistic and democratic American Revolution of the 1770s, the subtleties of the Puritan theology of success had diminished, where they had not disappeared. In the atmosphere of the early nineteenth-century South’s populist, frontier revival, the equation of individual and national success with moral superiority and divine favor lost even more of its theological and intellectual sophistication.² The evangelicals who came to dominate the South promoted this moral tradition on new soil and elaborated on it in ways that would not have been possible in any other social setting.³ One key social fact, slaveholding, became a sacred badge of success as a result of the evangelicals’ saturating the South in their religion and its moral outlook on success and power.

“Evangelicalism,” as applied to the mid-nineteenth century, denotes a proselytizing Christian insistence on individual moral power.⁴ When southerners advanced the antebellum truism that “the American mind thus far is cast in a religious mold,” the mold referred to was the evangelical idea of individual moral autonomy and accountability. The southern Methodist minister and president of Randolph-Macon College, William A. Smith, gave a typical definition of antebellum religion when describing the basis of a public education: “It must be a strictly Protestant education—Protestant, at least, in its main feature: that is, every citizen [whatever his gospel] . . . is still individually and personally responsible to God and his country.”⁵ Similarly, Smith argued, “He is within the limits of his capacity a cause within himself, strictly a self-acting agent, and hence accountable.”⁶ The mid-nineteenth century was characterized by a popular religious culture in which the autonomy Smith demanded was taken for granted and moralized. It was on the basis of these assumptions that historians call the period an evangelical age.

Evangelicalism, however, was primarily and technically a style of Protestantism centered on the conversion experience and on a theology that stressed heartfelt individual proximity to God over communal or doctrinal definitions of piety.⁷ In America, this movement was associated with the advent of Methodism and with Baptist and Presbyterian participation in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. Theological flexibility and simple appeals to the “word and heart” allowed various denominations to participate in a general movement: southern revivalism.⁸ There was, for example, room for Unitarians and Episcopalians under the “evangelistic” rubric because they tried, as New Orleans Unitarian and proslavery minister Theodore Clapp put it, to “adopt a plan of preaching the simple doctrines of the gospel, instead of distinguishing the tenets of Calvin, Arminicus, Edwards or Wesley.”⁹ The simple message of conversion mattered most to evangelicals, not theological or denominational distinctions. The nondenominational spirit of the evangelical movement had a profound practical reality in revivals and church building, especially in recently opened frontier areas. Evangelical preachers won souls throughout the South, but not necessarily for their own churches. Presbyterian Daniel Baker, a leading revivalist who worked the Old Southwest, remarked how he would sometimes win hundreds of converts at a single meeting, not one of whom became a Presbyterian. In a frontier community in east Texas, he once joined a Methodist and a Baptist in preaching a revival, whose converts proceeded to form an Episcopal church.¹⁰

This popular ecumenical spirit necessitated a de-emphasis of doctrine; indeed, it excused many ministers from intellectual rigor, enabling them to dismiss the theological contradiction between the power of the individual and the power of God, between absolute moral autonomy and accountability. Echoing Calvin, they preached human depravity, insufficiency, and dependence on Providence, thereby implying that individual salvation was uncertain, while simultaneously assuring believers that human effort could carry the day (an accommodation to a uniquely American pelagianism—glorification of free will, or an explicit avowal of free will in the case of Methodist Arminianism).¹¹ Episcopal bishop Stephen Elliot of Georgia unashamedly trumpeted this precarious doctrine: “There is no inconsistency in calling on God and then telling you to do it.”¹² Had evangelicals emphasized doctrinal issues, they might not have celebrated the power of individuals so easily. There was, however, a compensation for, perhaps even a solution to, this intellectual contradiction in the conversion experience. The preachers insisted that new believers be cognizant of their depravity and their powerlessness to overcome sin before leading them into the presence of a God who would grant them the confidence and power they needed to make sanctified lives on their own.

Evangelicals offered believers knowledge of their personal justification much earlier in their lives than did traditional Calvinism. Evangelicalism claimed that after regeneration the unaided self (with the presence of God) could transcend its own passions, tame its own instincts. Such an ethic was consonant with the secular mood of the day and offered a solution of sorts to keenly felt secular moral problems. In its assurance that man could apprehend and fulfill his responsibilities, evangelicalism mirrored Jacksonian America’s confident sense of national destiny.¹³ In a mobile and fast-changing society with few authoritative institutions to provide roles or moral signposts, it offered a model of “right” behavior to nonbelievers who knew that they had selves but were not sure what to do with them. Evangelicals promised such people that, with some help from God, they had “self-power” and that they controlled their own destinies. In considering the 1830s, it is hard to draw any clear lines between promoters of the evangelical movement and Americans seeking secular success, order, unity, and reform. Reform and the creation of a nation of self-controlling individuals obsessed the era. And with good reason. America in the antebellum era still radiated youthful energy and faced potential chaos.

In the early nineteenth century, America was a republic of the young. Demographic trends and geographic mobility produced a landscape over-run with youth. Transcendental pundits and educational reformers sought to direct immature energies through calls for moral self-discipline and adult responsibility. These campaigns coincided with explosions of evangelical conversions. Ministers in frontier and rural southern communities were frank about the social meaning of conversion, calling it the beginning of “self-dependence.”¹⁴ Conversion often marked the moment when young people ceased to work for their parents and set out on their own. For young women, the experience prepared the way for and eased the transition to the responsibilities of married life and motherhood. Whatever their marital state, religion provided rural women with one of their only social outlets. Hyper-emotional and deeply personal conversions also steeled young southerners for the drudgeries most of them would face. Conversion, however, was not simply a form of initiation, training, or social control, although it contained elements of all three. The experience invested the sacrifices of common folks’ lives with a moral and spiritual grandeur, an element of self-direction and choice.¹⁵

Evangelical conversion served to socialize those who experienced it; in convincing them of their powers of self-direction, it made them more effective citizens of a nation whose institutions did not define social roles. Over and above the typical teenage transgressions that preceded his conversion, Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell, one of the South’s leading theologians, said he had been guilty of a fundamental sin—telling himself that he was not culpable because he “was born without any agency.” His conversion as a young man dispelled this evil and convinced him that “we all must be brought to see that all—under God—depends on ourselves.”¹⁶ Another southern minister described the “most salutary influence of human agency” in more socially explicit terms: “It is in it we see the foundation God has laid for pure individualism.”¹⁷ Baptist minister Jeremiah Jeter was converted as a youth in a ruralVirginia revival in 1818. He echoedThornwell in noting that, before regeneration,”it had seemed unreasonable that I should bear a self-imposed yoke.”¹⁸

American individualism, much propounded throughout the period, was an invitation to self-control. The growth of the young Republic demonstrated the wisdom of personal restraint and the inevitability of the achievement of its moral mission. It was therefore easy for southern evangelicals to assume that the problem of personal autonomy had been solved in the new land. Evangelical arguments for individual responsibility were compelled and confirmed by social experiences and so appeared self-evident, irresistible. An isolating personal moral responsibility, not freedom, was the first principle of American public culture in the early nineteenth century.¹⁹ The history of the period makes little sense if this is not understood, as the assumption that simple “personal freedom” was the core American value makes popular southern moral acceptance of slavery appear as self-contradiction, self-delusion, simple dishonesty, a mark of regional deviance, or a product of stupidity on a massive and odious scale.²⁰ The horrors of slavery and racism aside, such readings grossly misrepresent southerners, whose fundamental understanding of morality and veneration of “freedom” were not at variance with that of their northern countrymen.²¹

In his lectures at Randolph-Macon, William A. Smith, a leading proslavery philosopher, regularly told southerners that “self-control is the abstract principle of freedom.” In this aphorism, potential disparities between southern preaching and practice were neatly resolved, and the gulf between northern and southern ideals narrowed. As a form of freedom, self-control—self-restraint—was attainable by women, inmates, blacks, and paupers.²² As historian of freedom Orlando Patterson has indicated: “The fact that people consider freedom the most important thing in life is in no way inconsistent with a tolerance for the institution of slavery or, what amounts to the same thing, a lack of interest in promoting a policy of manumission.”²³ This manner of espousing of freedom describes the attitude of most Americans in both sections of the country in the first half of the nineteenth-century.

Southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell said that “true Freedom” was “discipline,” and that as such it was universally available. He noted that “the lesson is the same however different the textbooks from which it has been taught.”²⁴ In their discussions of freedom, echoed by fellow southern ministers, Thornwell and William Smith paraphrased Francis Wayland, the northern Baptist minister and leading antislavery lecturer who wrote the nation’s most popular book on moral philosophy.²⁵ Wayland, in his more philosophical vein, said,”The truth that every man is responsible for all his actions to God, presupposes the right to universal freedom.”²⁶ Evangelical moralists battled over the practical implications of individual restraint, but they agreed that it was the cardinal element of freedom. They believed that anyone capable of practicing moral self-control had obtained true freedom and therefore could enjoy the good life regardless of material conditions.

Such reasoning on freedom is not as preposterous as it appears if one’s first premises are theistic. Freedom had long since been established as America’s great good—its founding principle and social compass. Goodness, for evangelicals, derived from and was directed toward God. Freedom was properly construed, therefore, not as liberty to do as one chose, but as the ability to choose what Providence intended. The satisfaction of Providence with the social status quo was evident in the blessings it continued to bestow on the United States. Blessings would continue to flow only if the individuals comprising the nation exercised the power, won through ecstatic conversion, to curb instinctual desires. Freedom as unrestraint was therefore anathema to ministers North and South, who agreed that under such definition “freedom is incompatible with a state of accountability.”²⁷

Evangelical terms seemed to be at odds with broader and more obvious interpretations of “freedom.” To listeners not schooled in moral theology, the Evangelical message appeared as this: “You are free to contain yourselves within the roles society has set for you and, in mature acceptance of your fates, to justify yourselves to God. You are autonomous, not in that you have a range of options from which to select, but in that nobody else can win salvation for you. You are alone.” If restraint produced freedom, freedom might mean any social condition that taught lessons of self-control and that encouraged willed acceptance of self-denial. Evangelicals did say that women enjoyed such a form of Christian freedom.²⁸ Likewise, this traditional understanding of freedom gave evangelicals a basis for tolerating almost any form of labor exploitation without blanching. Some important early nineteenth-century moralists and social theorists, particularly in Great Britain and the South, did take brutal positions on the benefits of social depravation and personal abnegation. The pleasures of autonomy and rewards of self dependence, however, were not often subsumed under so limited a concept of liberty.

Many antebellum Americans described the choices of women, the poor, and “inferior” races in highly constricted terms, but their stances rarely paralleled general social thought and were not attuned to the vague optimism of Jacksonianism, popular evangelicalism, and, indeed, the national civil religion. All cultural languages, especially in their rendering of religious myths, obscure or make unexaminable some social realities. While this is achieved in most cultures through the restriction of options, it was accomplished in the United States through the appearance that all options were open. The myths of unlimited opportunity for improvement and of powerful individuals who overcome any obstacles implied that Americans need not attend too closely to social forces. In ethico-religious terms, antebellum Americans were rarely called to make direct choices between submission to social roles and individual autonomy, between personal sacrifice and collective reward, or between traditional values and material progress. As cultural historian Sacan Bercovitch asserts, from at least the time of late Puritan homiletics on the American mission, American public religious doctrine had long been cast such that the “terms are not either/or but both/and.”²⁹

James Henley Thornwell, as one of the South’s leading intellects, demonstrated that his evangelical program could call for both self-restraint and pursuit of power, thereby ...