When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War

Abstract

When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. By John Patrick Daly. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Pp. 1, 207. Cloth, $45.00.)In twenty-first-century America, southern-style evangelicalism radiates cultural and political power nationwide. Not surprisingly, its nineteenth-century forebears have recently enjoyed a great deal of attention from historians. Investigations of evangelical doctrines and practices have been interpolated with analyses of evangelicals' attitudes towards slavery, the spread of market forces, and the sectional crisis. Randy Sparks, Richard Carwardine, Mitchell Snay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, and Ellen Eslinger all have contributed insightful monographs, and with John R. McKivigan, Snay has also edited an anthology on religion and slavery.John Patrick Daly's excellent new book both complements and challenges the work by these scholars. One prominent feature of today's southern evangelicalism is its theology; i.e., the conviction that God bestows favor on converted Christians in this life. Daly argues forcefully that this cultural stance has roots in antebellum evangelicals' defenses of slavery. He concludes that while current social and economic inequities are not the equivalent of slavery . . . the moral rhetoric now employed to justify them was developed in the antebellum slavery debate (157).Drawing chiefly on sermons from across the antebellum South, Daly distills two key ideas driving southern morality: belief in God's providence at work in the world, and a conviction that individuals were personally and morally accountable to God. The conversion experience turned people into true Christians; afterwards, they could expect to win both salvation and worldly success as a result of providential forces. And if this success included gaining wealth through slaveholding, then slavery itself, at least as administered by converted masters, must be part of God's plan.According to Daly, ministers acknowledged that slavery in the abstract was an evil, but came to consider such abstractions irrelevant. In the words of William Brownlow, bad men abuse negroes, good men do not and in all cases the abuse arises from the character and disposition of the master (45). To such thinkers, condemnations of slavery as immoral meant little; however, organized abolitionism represented nothing less than a religious heresy. Providence would end slavery in good time, and human attempts to abolish it represented sinful rebellion against God's will. For Daly, abolitionists were a comparatively minor irritant to a South ever more united around a proslavery morality; free soilers posed a more potent threat with their godless desire to thwart the providential awarding of new lands in the West to Christian slaveholders.Daly's narrative begins in 1831, by which time evangelicals had accommodated themselves to southern hierarchies of age, gender, and race, per Heyrman's exposition in Southern Cross (1998), and had become the dominant religious group in the region. Most ministers were by then living the practice of an as-yet largely unarticulated proslavery. Daly sees Thomas Roderick Dew's 1832 Review of the Debates over colonization in Virginia's legislature in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion as a key work that popularized the fusion of economic and evangelical language in defending slavery. …