Leonard Bacon and the Myth of the Good Slaveholder

Abstract

AS the son of a missionary, a member of most of the national benevolent societies, and a defender of the New Haven Theology, the Reverend Leonard Bacon closely reflected the impulses affecting religion before the Civil War. And as editor and contributor to the Quarterly Christian Spectator, the New Englander, and the Independent, he commented on the secular and religious issues of the period. Bacon never forgot his position as a minister, viewing secular issues from a religious perspective.' Nowhere is this religious slant more evident than in his discussion of slavery, but nowhere is a higher personal imperative more evident. Because his social conservatism informed his approach to theology, it also controlled his attitude toward slavery. This tension between his conservatism and his religious liberalism did not show itself early, but in the end it muted his protest against the evils of slavery and left him without an adequate position on the issue. The changing context in which