The Southern Aid Society and the Slavery Controversy

Abstract

During the 1830s American society was swept by a reform movement that had as its goal the improvement and uplift of humanity and human institutions in all facets of personal and associated conduct. The antislavery cause was one of the most dynamic areas of reform, and by the 1840s the movement against human bondage became almost entirely a campaign of the northern advocates against the peculiar institution of the South. One of the basic sources of this antislavery sentiment was religious in its orientation, and the crusade against slavery secured its enduring strength from the revivalism of the Presbyterian, Congregational and Baptist churches, from the perfectionism which reinforced it among the Methodist and independent Congregationalists, and from the radicalism of the Unitarians and Quakers. After the Mexican War, the questions revolving around the sectional controversy became the all-absorbing preoccupation of a concerned nation, but while the slavery controversy was only one of the questions involved in the political arena, the morality of slavery was the total issue within religious circles and the churches.