“Sustaining the Truth of the Bible”: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy

Abstract

This article examines how the black Presbyterian minister James W. C. Pennington (1807–1870) and other black evangelicals engaged with German academic theology to challenge Southern slavery and demonstrate fitness for citizenship. It also shows that these black evangelical leaders strategically associated themselves with the same conservative German religious thinkers admired by Southern slaveholders. Recovering this transatlantic exchange reveals the surprisingly conservative character of many black evangelical abolitionists as well as the roots of an enduring black intellectual and theological tradition that explicitly linked religious orthodoxy with racial equality.