Bushnell in Black and White: Evidences of the "Racism" of Horace Bushnell

Abstract

AMERICAN historians have reacted to the neo-abolitionists of our second Reconstruction by reexamining the thought, style, and achievements of their predecessors of over a century ago. As the new movement wrestled with social and institutional forms of racism, and as it matured and revealed its own internal cleavages, the historians have sought to understand these same problems in the earlier movement. Some have found within the ranks of the old crusaders a heavy strain of racist thought and attitude, while others have insisted that a racial egalitarianism lay at the heart of the movement against slavery.' Twenty years ago, Charles Cole anticipated this new debate in an examination of the life and thought of Horace Bushnell. With some of these questions in mind, Cole sounded out the Hartford theologian as one of those lesser-known individuals who, though not members of antislavery associations, leaders of Congress or political pamphleteers, nevertheless contributed in no small way to the crystallization of a nation-wide sentiment concerning slavery and its place in American society.2 What Cole found was a series of apparent paradoxes, which may have satisfied the theologian in Bushnell, but which would have gagged a single-minded crusader like William Lloyd Garrison. Appropriately for the advocate of Christian nurture, Bushnell condemned the barbarous institution for its failure to promote the family ties of the slaves, to protect the bondsmen from abuse, and to recognize in them a