Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America by Jordan T. Watkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America by Jordan T. Watkins David Waldstreicher (bio) Keywords Bible, Religion, Slavery, Abolition Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America. By Jordan T. Watkins. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. Cloth, $59.99.) When intellectual and religious history have noticed the problem of slavery, it has often been to lament its divisive or prejudicial effects. In his inventive and largely convincing study, Jordan Watkins sees silver linings that actually connect and illuminate, rather than shadow, realms of thought and belief often segregated by scholars. He also sees links to the present that have been underestimated. The debate over slavery, he argues, heightened a sense of distance from the past, which "emerged as a powerful force for interpretive change" (6). Rather than functioning as the dead hand of history, slavery "roused the republic to historical consciousness" (xxii). Watkins makes this perhaps subtle and even counterintuitive point in summary in every chapter, but what the book arguably does best is establish a quite consequential relationship between the way leading intellectuals and some political actors in the North came to read the key civic texts and the way they read the Bible. Increasing awareness of differences between the biblical past and the American pre sent, especially concerning to theologians who followed the new historically informed biblical criticism, began to parallel the republic's lengthening distance from the founding, whether conceived of as 1776 or 1787. At first, distance fueled an interest in context and an intention to separate the timely from the timeless. The new historical criticism, however, also provided openings for dismissing aspects of the Bible, such as miracles or Old Testament proscriptions, as anachronisms, the obscure "letter" that ought to be sacrificed to higher laws or the spirit of the text. Recent debates about versions of constitutional originalism—textual, public meaning, "living,"—have their roots in these antebellum debates and practices.1 Antebellum historical thought, then, wasn't shallow or simplistic; the stakes were high [End Page 473] because people could see the implications, for example, of arguments that stressed how Jesus accommodated to the sin of slavery but emphasized the necessity of moral progress, as opposed to readings that saw slavery as so modern as to be unbiblical, or alternately as the very essence of Bible times, and thus God's plan. "Attention to context and circumstance could be used both to deny and to affirm slavery's biblical sanction," but for Watkins, antislavery led to more creativity and fit better with important religious and intellectual trends. Similarly, and influenced by these hermeneutics, constitutional interpretation shifted from reverence or confidence in a clear original intent that might seem to favor a timeless slavery to debates about the ambiguities and contradictions in the nation's founding where it came to slavery. One hinge, for Watkins, was William Lloyd Garrison, who (like the Quakers who set the stage but get no attention here), prioritized higher law—the Golden Rule, the Declaration's emphasis on equality—over the Constitution and its compromises and silences. The publication of historical evidence like Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 could also support different readings of the framers' original intentions: ambiguous compromises; a striking disinclination to defend slavery in the abstract; or its permanence in law. (In other words, all of the major interpretations still debated today using much of the same evidence.) While capturing the disagreements that shaped so much of the abolitionist movement after 1830, Watkins stresses how an emphasis on progress rather than a primordial golden age, for both moderate antislavery and radical abolition, became a strength, at least insofar as it could be squared with non-literalist or fundamentalist readings of scripture. Controversies over fugitive-slave renditions pushed the dynamic further, allowing for still more intense considerations of precedents regarding the letter and the spirit of the laws. Proslavery Biblicism tends to hover in the background, sacrificed to the emphasis on historicism and its development: We get a lot of Theodore Parker here at the expense of other strains, especially as we move from Biblicism to...