The Faithful Church Abolished Southern Slavery

slave beaten back

The Lie:

Bible-believing Christians were slaveholders.

The Truth:

There were two groups of people who carried the name of Jesus during the slave era:

1) The abolitionists, who studied the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27, ESV) and made a practice of “rightly dividing the Word of Truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, KJV).

2) The slaveholders, who cherry-picked scriptures which seemed to agree with their views on slavery, while ignoring or disobeying scriptures which disagreed with their views, and who gave precedence to the authority of science or reason over the authority of the Bible.


     There are some (even in the evangelical community) who argue that the Southern slaveholders were biblical literalists who looked at the “letter of the law” while abolitionists could only rightly refer to the “spirit of the law.” They say that Christians who tried to abolish slavery were ignoring the actual words of the biblical text in contrast to non-specific commands concerning love and freedom, thereby discounting the “plain meaning” of the Bible.

     This argument insists that slavery was justified by a literal reading of the Bible, but abolitionists, such as Andrew McLeod, in his popular book (eleven editions were printed) Negro Slavery Unjustifiable, directly challenged this view. McLeod says he wrote his book to counter the “deceptive error” of the slave owners’ biblical arguments.[1] He didn’t do this by appealing to “love” or to the spirit of the law, but by quoting a direct commandment of God:

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession. – Exodus 21:16, NIV

This means, if Southern slaveholders were obeying the whole counsel of God, anyone who kidnapped Africans and tried to sell them should have been arrested as soon as their ship came into port with its illegal cargo of human flesh. Since they defended their so-called “biblical” right to hold slaves, they should have also defended the biblical command to not kidnap someone against their will. If they were actually biblical literalists, Southern slavery would have been shut down immediately, but the Southern slaveholder “cherry-picked” the scriptures.

McCleod also pointed out this literal commandment from God:

If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master. Let them live among you wherever they like and in whatever town they choose. Do not oppress them. – Deuteronomy 23:15-16, KJV

 In fact, any slave who ran away from the surrounding nations was to be given refuge by the Israelites. They were to be taken in, protected, and allowed to live amongst them. Israel was a sanctuary for those who were oppressed and enslaved. If the Southern slaveholder was actually following biblical law, their cities and homes would have had to become places of refuge for slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act, which was used to round up slaves who escaped from the South, would never be allowed under the Old Testament law.

While the Southern slaveholders ignored this scripture (or didn’t take it literally) evangelical abolitionists heroically heeded these words from the Bible and risked their own safety and security in order to be obedient to the Bible and care for runaway slaves. The Underground Railroad was set up as a way to be obedient, not only to the command to love our neighbor or set the captive free, but to a specific law from the Old Testament which commanded the Jews to protect runaway slaves from their masters.

McLeod then argued that the Old Testament law made a distinction between enslaving innocent people and causing people who had injured others to make restitution. For example, if a person stole money from someone and they couldn’t pay it back, the Hebrew justice system demanded that he/she must work for a period of time (up to six years) to pay the money back. (My kids got in trouble with the law and had to pay restitution by working at our local thrift shop. It’s the same concept.) The condition of the person who was making restitution was called slavery, but it was actually a form of civil justice.

Even so, there’s no denying that Southern evangelicals (Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and members of other denominations) believed they had biblical permission to hold slaves, and they pointed to scriptures such as this one, found in Leviticus 25:44-46, KJV (in the Old Testament) to support their case:


     These verses seem to give permission to the ancient Israelites to become involved in the slave trade, but in reality the exact opposite is true!

First of all, Old Testament law never allowed Jews to SELL slaves. They could only PURCHASE them! I believe God allowed the Hebrews to purchase people from the surrounding tribes in order to give them REFUGE.

Throughout Hebrew history, Gentiles were welcomed into the Israelite family as long as they were willing to assimilate, and worship and serve the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Consider these Old Testament laws and how they were applied to both slave and free, Jew and Gentile.

  • Resting on the Sabbath was allowed for slaves.

Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed. —Exodus 23:12

  • Slaves who were purchased by a priest could eat of the meats that were offered to God. They were treated as family members.

No one outside a priest’s family is to eat the holy offering. A foreigner staying with a priest or a hired hand is not to eat the holy offering. But if the priest purchases [redeems] someone with his money, that person may eat it, and those born in his house may eat his food. —Leviticus 22:10-11

  • Slaves could be circumcised and become part of the Hebrew covenant.


  • Slaves could participate in the Passover Feast if they were circumcised.

And the LORD said unto Moses and Aaron, “This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner may eat of it. But any slave a man has purchased may eat it, after you have circumcised him.” —Exodus 12:43-44


An Israelite could sell themselves to others as a form of contractual employment (due to poverty or restitution), but they could never sell each other. The “kinsman redeemer” could deliver a person out of slavery, but a Jew could never sell another Jew. Even more amazing, a Jew could never sell a foreign slave either. Once a slave was purchased, he/she was secure in the Hebrew family.

Even the future offspring of those who were redeemed were promised security under the safety of the Hebrew God. They would remain a Hebrew possession and couldn’t be sold.  All that the purchased slaves had to do was assimilate to the beliefs of the Hebrews by following the same laws, forsaking the idol-worship of their past, and like Ruth, love the God of the Hebrews (Ruth 1:16). When they did this, they were no longer under the cruel bondage of those who traded in human flesh. They had a place of safety where they and their children could remain if they wanted to, but they could also leave if they wanted to, as Deuteronomy 23:15 guaranteed.

Throughout Hebrew history, Gentiles were welcomed into the Abrahamic family. Isn’t this the same picture of salvation given to the Gentiles through Jesus Christ? Jesus said he came to set the captives free. How would he do this?  As foreigners and strangers, we have been purchased (redeemed) by the blood of Jesus. Consequently, we have been grafted into the Hebrew family (Romans 11). We come as bondservants (Romans 1:1, Philippians 1:1, James 1:1, 2 Peter 1:1, Jude 1:1), slaves to sin (John 8:34, Romans 6), but Jesus calls us friends (John 15:15). The Bible also says we are now family who can cry out “Abba!” to the heavenly Father (Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6).

Jesus also said he came to “fulfill the law and the prophets” (Matt. 5:17).  I am convinced, especially after studying the great mission movements, that the Jewish redemption of slaves was a type and shadow of what Jesus did to redeem the Gentiles who were in bondage and darkness throughout the world.

It was only when the God of Israel came to the ancient Gentiles that they were set free. In the same way, it was only when missionaries came to the Gentile nations that they overcame the same bondages: idol worship, human sacrifice, cannibalism, tribal warfare, widow-burning, and infanticide (just to name a few). As Isaiah 9:2 says:


     But what about the contrast in Leviticus 25:44-46? It says the Israelites can purchase slaves from the surrounding nations, but they must not treat their fellow Israelites with “rigor.” Doesn’t this imply that they were allowed to treat their slaves with “rigor” (Lev. 25:46)?

In the Hebrew translation of the text, the word “but” doesn’t appear. The English translators ADDED the word into the text. If the word “but” did not appear in the text, verse 46 would read like this:

 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever. Over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

The continuation of that sentence would then read:


     Do you see how verse 46 ties in with verse 53? What if verse 46 was a lead-in to the idea that fellow Israelites were to be treated with kindness? Not that foreigners were to be treated harshly, but just a reminder that there was an expectation that Jews were to be kind to one another also. Verse 53 says just that.

The addition of just one little word (“but“) changes the entire flow and meaning of the text. Could this be an example of how a small addition (a jot or tittle) when added to the text has been the cause of so much human suffering and cruelty? Unfortunately, it has also caused the name of God to be vilified.

In fact, if verse 46 is applied to foreign slaves, then it would counter Exodus 23:9 which commands the Israelites not to oppress a stranger because they were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Leviticus 19:34, KJV makes the same assertion:


     Some may think that my argument is a stretch, but when I look at the rest of the scriptures, I see only kindness toward those who have been poor, orphaned, or victimized. It seems out of character to have this harsh scripture sitting right in the middle of all the other laws that were formulated to be blessings to humanity–or types and shadows of Christ.

An example of the law being a type and shadow that points to Jesus is that the Old Testament law demands a blood sacrifice to atone for sin (Lev. 1:1-4). When John the Baptist cried out, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world! (John 1:29, ESV) he was making a reference to Old Testament law and declaring that Jesus was our sacrificial lamb who would atone for sin. He was also pointing to Jesus as the Passover Lamb, which was commemorated by an ordinance in the law as the Passover feast (Exodus 12:14).

Another example would be that the Old Testament law prohibited the Hebrews from eating unclean meat, such as pigs or shrimp (Lev. 11). We know, after Peter’s vision (Acts 10:9-16) that unclean meat was a symbol for the Gentiles, who were considered to be unclean, but now were able to come into the family of God because they were purchased and cleansed by the blood of Christ.

Each of the Old Testament laws pointed to some aspect of the gospel and symbolized something precious. How is the ability to take slaves from the surrounding nations and hold them with “rigour” as a generational possession in any way a type and shadow that points us to Christ? I believe the only way Leviticus 25:44-46 can be interpreted correctly is to look at it as though it’s a picture of Gentile redemption.

The Jews were allowed to purchase slaves from all of the surrounding nations, except for the Canaanites, who God commanded them to completely destroy (Deut. 20). The Canaanite tribes were involved in all the sins of Leviticus 18: incest, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and homosexuality. They worshipped gods who demanded human sacrifice, especially of babies. They also had a remnant of the Nephilim—the giants—who persecuted the Israelites and mocked their God. (Goliath was an example of this.) God said these things “defiled” the land.

The Hebrew word for defile is “tame.” According to Strong’s Concordance it means “to be foul—especially in a moral sense (contaminated): –defile (self), pollute (self), be (make, make self, pronounce) unclean, utterly.”[2] The sins of the Canaanites had left their people so polluted by disease, genetic abnormalities, and hardness of heart toward people and God that the Israelites were instructed to wipe them out as a form of physical, moral, and spiritual protection.

The specific tribes that were commanded to be destroyed were the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perrizites, Hivites, and Jebusites. In fact, one of the sins of the surrounding people that Israel was commanded to destroy was manstealing (kidnapping). The name “Perrizites” actually means “to drag away violently, hate.” According to Genesis 15:16 God waited 400 years before judging the Canaanites—until the iniquity of the Amorites (in particular) was “full.”

There were other tribes that God didn’t command to be destroyed. These tribes were further away from the wicked tribes found in central Canaan. God told the Israelites to offer these outlying tribes terms of peace. In exchange, the people would have to pay a tribute to the Israelites. On the other hand, if they refused, when God gave the Israelites the victory, then all the men were to be killed, but the women and children were to be saved. Israel was commanded to take in the women and “little ones” (Deut. 20:14) and care for them. (To care for widows and orphans was a command of God [Exod. 22:21-24].)

People were continually grafted into the Hebrew family. The Hebrews were never a pure race. They were made up of stragglers and slaves. Abraham was called out of Babylon and told by God to travel to a place far away. He had gathered some people from Haran to go with him (Genesis 12:5). In one incident, Pharaoh gave servants to Abraham to make up for taking Sarah, another man’s wife. (Genesis 12:16) This is probably how Hagar, the Egyptian servant, became part of Abraham’s clan. Unfortunately, Sarah and Abraham became impatient and tried to fulfill the promise of God by enlisting Hagar to commit adultery and have a child with Abraham. Not only did they not trust God to fulfill his Word, they also sinned and mistreated someone who was put under their care.

Although Sarah and Abraham sinned concerning Hagar, servants were generally loved and treated with respect. Eliazer was born as a servant into Abraham’s family, and since Abraham had no descendants, he was set to inherit Abraham’s wealth. Eliazer was so beloved and trusted that he was sent out to find a wife for Abraham’s son, Isaac.

Abraham’s slaves are an example of bondservants who served with loyalty. Gen. 14:14 says 318 of them were even armed and went into battle. If they were held against their will, couldn’t they have used their weapons and led a slave rebellion against Abraham?

Jacob was a servant to Laban in exchange for his daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage. Rachel and Leah were foreigners (they came from Mesopotamia), yet they became the mothers of the twelve tribes of Israel. Moses married a Midianite. Rahab, the Gentile prostitute who helped the Jews at Jericho, married Salmon, an Israelite from the tribe of Judah. Their son was Boaz, the husband of Ruth, a Moabite who would receive the Hebrew God. Both of these Gentile women are in the lineage of Jesus Christ.

God is not exclusive. He is looking for hearts that are open to Him, that will assimilate into His ways, and love his Word, but he isn’t open to every Gentile. If there was no repentance and no desire to change, to love and obey His commandments, then God didn’t open the way for them to become part of Israel.

This love for God and His commandments also applied to the Israelites! If they turned away from Him to foreign idols, and forsook the commandments, then they were judged by God. This warning was conveyed to the Hebrew people through the ministry of the prophets.

The Curse of Ham

The Southerners also pointed to the so-called “curse of Ham” as a biblical justification to hold slaves. Here is the story as it’s found in Genesis 9:18-27, KJV:


     Those who believed slavery should be abolished made passionate arguments against the supporters of slavery, who claimed that the “cursed” descendants of Ham had settled in Africa, were dark-skinned, and destined to subjugation.

When James A. Sloane published his pro-slavery treatise, The Great Question Answered; or Is Slavery a Sin in Itself? Answered According to the Teaching of the Scriptures, David R. Kerr, editor of The United Presbyterian Quarterly Review, gives Sloane credit for making the Bible “the only rule for faith and practice,” but then he slams him for his weak biblical arguments concerning the curse of Ham. At one point he laughs at the absurdity of Sloane’s position and proclaims: “Risum teneatis, amici?!” (Can you help laughing, my friends?!)[3]

Why was the pro-slavery teaching on the biblical “curse of Ham” so laughable to abolitionists?

For one thing, only the descendant of Ham (Canaan) was cursed. Genesis 9:25 says, “Cursed be Canaan.” It doesn’t even say, “cursed be Ham.” According to Josiah Priest, writing in his book, Bible Defence of Slavery, the authority to expand the curse to Ham came from the Arabic translation of the Bible, not the Hebrew Bible itself:

For an account of this appalling anathema, see Genesis ix, 24–27, as follows: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him: and he said, cursed be Canaan [Ham]; a servant of SERVANTS shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan [Ham] shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan [Ham] shall be his servant.”

But lest the reader should become perplexed, respecting the application of this anathema, on account of the text above referred to being, in the English, “cursed Canaan” instead of “cursed Ham,” as it should have been translated; we state that the Arabic copy of the book of Genesis, which is a language of equal authority with the Hebrew (emphasis mine), and originally the very same, reads “cursed Ham,” the father of Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.[4]

The pro-slavery defense took liberty with the scriptures by using the Arabic copy of Genesis as their authority for changing the word Canaan into Ham!

Ham’s descendants didn’t even settle in sub-Saharan Africa, the place from where southern slaves were taken. According to Genesis 10:6-20, Ham’s sons were Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. The sons of Cush settled in Babylon (his son was Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel), Egypt would become the father of the Egyptians and the Philistines, and Canaan would become the father of the tribes that spread from Sidon to Gaza to Sodom and Gomorrah (the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perrizites, Hivites, and Jebusites, etc . . .). Put settled in modern Libya and northern Africa.

According to Sloane, the name “Ham” meant “black,” but Kerr argued that this was untrue. The word Ham is never used for the word black. Instead the Hebrew word used for black is “shachar” or “shachor.” The Hebrew word for Ham is “cham” and it means “hot.”

The Bible was abused by the Southern slaveholder. They weren’t literalists! There is no “curse of Ham” found in the scriptures. Those who wanted to hold slaves for their own profit had to become biblical contortionists. There were two groups of “Christians” involved in the debate over slavery. One group was “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15, ESV) while the other used the Bible as “a means of gain” (1 Tim. 6:5, ESV).

Science and Slavery

If the Christians of the South believed they were right with God, even though they attained their slaves through the process of kidnapping Africans (manstealing), how did they justify it? Many people also question how Thomas Jefferson could claim that all men are created equal, and then be a slaveholder, especially after penning these beautiful words from the Declaration of Independence:


     Like most of the intelligentsia of his time, Jefferson was a “scientific racist.” He believed that people of color were of a different species, making them sub-human. It’s a little-known fact of history, but racism was supported by the brightest scientists of the slave era, and most of the Enlightenment philosophers were scientific racists! Jefferson thought that blacks were different than whites. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he described blacks in scientific language (reticular membrane, secretion, transpiration, etc.):


While Jefferson’s reasoning may seem archaic to us, he believed he was merely using empirical methodology and scientific observation to develop his views.

Jefferson was also a deist. This spiritual view resulted from the blending of Christianity with science. Jefferson believed that God was Isaac Newton’s “First Cause” of creation and that He merely wound the universe up like a clock and put it in motion. Therefore, God didn’t interject himself into the affairs of men. Jesus, to Jefferson, was a great teacher, but since he rejected the possibility of miracles (because that meant God was intervening in the physical world), he cut out all the scriptures in his Bible that had to do with the miraculous. Unfortunately, Jefferson put more faith in “science” than he did in the scriptures, and now we look back on his scientific views with disdain.

David Hume, the Enlightenment philosopher and empiricist, who relied only on reason and scientific observation for his views (rejecting faith and biblical revelation as a source of knowledge), had this to say about people of color:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences…such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.[6]

     Immanuel Kant, who, in part, defined Enlightenment thought as simply the freedom to think for oneself, would make this scientific observation, in agreement with Hume:


     The Enlightenment emphasis on reason and science over biblical revelation would be exemplified in the person of Voltaire, and he had this to say about the black race:


     Another name for scientific racism is “polygenism.” This was the belief that each race had different parents. Instead of one set of parents (Adam and Eve, according to the Bible), the polygenists claimed there were many sets of parents who birthed the different races.

This wasn’t the obscure work of mad scientists. It was the cutting-edge science of its day. It was promoted by Samuel George Morton, a believer in “phrenology” and well-respected President of the Academy of Natural Sciences. He attempted to develop a racial theory based on the measurement of skull size. He had a collection of skulls from around the world. In his opinion, the skulls found near the Caucasus Mountains in the Near East were the most perfect. These were the skulls of white people, and Europeans would eventually get lumped together with Caucasians, which led to the term “Caucasian” being used in reference to the white race. Morton’s Crania Americana would describe the black man in a way similar to other Enlightenment thinkers:


     Morton was an “ethnologist.” This was just another name for a person who studied scientific racism during the slave era. His disciples, George Glidden and Josiah Nott, would write Types of Mankind (or Ethnological Research), which was used by southern slaveholders as a scientific justification for slavery.

The Abolitionists Used the Scriptures

Opposing the scientific ethnologists/phrenologists were the abolitionists. They stood on the Words of the Bible as the truth and argued that all races came from Adam and Eve, and therefore they were all equal. They were “monogenists,” rather than “polygenists.” They declared that God’s Word had more authority than science and proclaimed:

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; –- Acts 17:26, KJV

     The history of the Christian battle against scientific racism isn’t very well known, but it should be. The battle was fought in both England and America. The abolitionists argued that since all races descended from Adam, they were all brothers. They believed in the brotherhood of men, because they all had one father.

In England, as traders and explorers went out into the world, Christians began to hear stories of how the people of darker races were being abused and taken into slavery, so in order to defend people of color from the abuse of white colonizers, Christians set up the Aborigines Protection Society. Out of this group, the Ethnological Society of London would form. Their motto was “ab uno sanguine” (from one blood).

Members would also be part of the Clapham Sect, which was founded by John Newton, the former slave trader and writer of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” William Wilberforce, who repeatedly presented antislavery bills to the British parliament, was also a member of the Clapham Sect. Their tireless efforts to overcome scientific racism by using the Word of God, finally led to the abolition of all slavery in the British Empire.

In America, abolitionists such as John Rankin, whose home was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, would proclaim, based on his literal reading of the scriptures:

It must be admitted that the Africans and the rest of mankind have all sprung from one common father; and consequently all, originally were alike free. The right to freedom belongs to the Africans.[10]

     John Bird Sumner, who argued against polygenism in his book, A Treatise in the Records of the Creation, would end up being ridiculed as an evangelical whose trust in scriptures made him blind to scientific facts.

Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist who was a former slave, would also battle scientific racism. He mockingly referred to the ethnologists Morton, Glidden, Nott, and Aggasiz as a “phalanx of learned men.”[11] In a speech given at Western Reserve College entitled, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” he asked that the truthfulness of a scientific theory be judged by its fruit. He understood the limits of science in determining truth and argued that . . .

“. . . viewed apart from the authority of the Bible, neither unity [monogenism] or diversity [polygenism] of origin of the human family, can be demonstrated.”[12]

     He also pointed out the hypocrisy of those “Christians” who beat their slaves, mocking the scientific and religious arguments used by the Southerners:

Look at your hard, horny hands—see how nicely they are adapted (emphasis mine) to the labor you have to perform! Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see how manifest it is that God designed us to be his thinkers, and you the workers—Oh! The wisdom of God!”—I used to attend a Methodist church, in which my master was a class leader; he would talk most sanctimoniously about the dear Redeemer, who was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives, and set at liberty them that are bruised”—he could pray at morning pray at noon, and pray at night; yet he could lash up my poor cousin by his two thumbs, and inflict stripes and blows upon his bare back, till the blood streamed to the ground! All the time quoting scripture for his authority, and appealing to that passage of the Holy Bible which says, “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes! [Luke 12:49] Such was the amount of this good Methodist’s piety.”[13]

     There were two battlefronts in the war waged against men like Frederick Douglass:

  1. Science was given authority over the scriptures. Instead of tethering science to the truth of the Word, when a conflict arose, the Bible was mocked and set aside.


  1. Some Christians refused to rightly divide the Word of truth. They needed the Bible to accommodate their views, so in places where there was a clear command, they either resorted to extrabiblical sources, contorted the scriptural arguments, or ignored the particular scripture completely.


The battle to uphold God’s Word as an authority over scientific authority raged during the slave era. In 1833, Richard H. Colfax would write a pamphlet, Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, which would cite Jefferson, Voltaire, Gibbon, and others as asserting the polygenist view that the black race was inferior. The Charleston Medical Journal published a debate between Dr. Morton, who held a polygenist view, and Rev. John Bachman, who held a monogenist view. The Southern Presbyterian Review held a monogenist view, while De-Bow’s Review and Southern Quarterly Review held a polygenist view.

I think it’s important to note that since the discovery of DNA, we now know that God’s Word is true. People from all nations HAVE come from “one blood.”

“Reason” Inadequate to Overturn Slavery

Skeptics point to the ability of humanity to “reason” that Southern slavery was wrong, but Merle Curti, in his immense Pulitzer-prize winning historical study, The Growth of American Thought, said at least fourteen pro-slavery novels appeared in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and “each made use of one or more of the arguments from the Bible, from expediency, from ethnology, and from example.”[14] A list of some of these reasons would include:

  1. Slaves are better off than the Northern employees of the industrial capitalists.
  2. The Haitian uprising could happen here, therefore we need to keep them under control.
  3. The Southern climate necessitates using blacks.
  4. Blacks are incapable of being educated. (This was part of the polygenism argument.)
  5. Slavery existed in great civilizations of the past (especially Greece and Rome).
  6. The slaves are not unhappy.
  7. Until they are prepared for freedom, we need to care for them.
  8. They’re better off here than they were in Africa. At least here they can hear the Gospel.
  9. Slavery is a “necessary evil.”
  10. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t outlaw slavery.
  11. The overseas slave trade has been protected by the U.S. government for decades.
  12. The “fugitive slave law” mandates that slaves be returned over state lines.
  13. The “3/5 clause” of the Constitution agrees that blacks are sub-human.
  14. Letting the slaves go could mean the South would be ravaged by African savages.
  15. The slave system domesticates and civilizes the black heathens.
  16. The government is the one who enslaved the Africans, not individuals.
  17. The laws of slaveholding states prohibit the liberation of the slaves.


John C. Calhoun, who served as vice president of the U.S., and senator from South Carolina, presented a combination of political, scientific, historical, and philosophical thought as embodied in Enlightenment thought to justify slavery. His scientific racist views can easily be discerned in his speech on the Senate floor:


But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, (emphasis mine) are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.[15]

     Calhoun’s polygenism contributed greatly to the suffering of humanity. He opposed abolitionism, and his political views contributed greatly to the belief that the South should secede from the Union, a view which ultimately led to the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of deaths.


The Second Great Awakening

Most historians agree that the greatest contribution to the anti-slavery crusade was the Second Great Awakening, led by the evangelical preacher Charles Finney. Starting in upstate New York, the revival would spread across the United States, reaching into small villages, farmlands, forests, frontiers, and cities. Circuit riders would go from place to place preaching in tents and cornfields. As a result, the United States would become an “evangelical empire.” Finney taught that Christianity wasn’t only about escaping from hell, but it was also about living a life of “benevolence.” This led many Christians to get involved with the great reform movements of the time. One of the greatest of these reform movements was the antislavery movement.

Abolitionists had been active in writing and lobbying against slavery for years, but the masses weren’t prepared to act against slavery until they were influenced by Finney’s teachings. According to the antislavery historian Dwight Lowell Dumond, “evangelism and the antislavery movement were inseparable.” He said that Finney’s revival provided a group of young men with the “greatest combination of moral and intellectual power ever assembled in support of any cause before or since.”[16] To help them in this endeavor, Dumond says:

They had the Bible. They had the great charters of Western liberalism. They had the writings of Woolman, Benezet, Rush, Hopkins, Cooper, Rice, Branagan, Barrow, Duncan, Rankin, and a host of British liberals such as Sharp, Clarkson, and Wilberforce. They needed all this and more to beat down and destroy the doctrine of racial inequality, enshrined in slavery, and upheld by the courts, the churches, and the political parties.[17]

     One of Finney’s greatest converts was Theodore Dwight Weld, who would become an articulate and passionate abolitionist alongside William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. After Weld helped to convince students at Lane Seminary to work to abolish slavery, the faculty rebuked him, and he, along with many other students moved to an unknown little school known as Oberlin College, which would become a base for the anti-slavery movement. He trained seventy students in the abolitionist cause and sent them out only to be insulted, tarred and feathered, and have their meetings shut down.

Weld, like Garrison, and unlike Thomas Paine, supported “immediate emancipation.” Thomas Paine was an Enlightenment philosopher and a deist who supported “gradual emancipation.” In fact, in 1780, he authored the “Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” Because he was a deist and didn’t believe God interfered in the affairs of the world, he thought that slavery would eventually be worked out in the course of history.

I mention Thomas Paine because many skeptics point out that he founded the first antislavery society in America. Because he was a proponent of “reason” they think this means that skeptics were on the cutting edge of abolishing slavery, but most of his anti-slavery views came from the Bible. (Just as much of his call for revolution in the pamphlet “Common Sense” was based on the Bible.)

Paine referred to God as being the “Lord of ALL” (a reference to Acts 17:26 “one blood”) and reminded Christians of Jesus’ admonition to love their neighbor. He also argued that manstealing was prohibited by the Bible and that Christians must obey the Golden Rule. While his views against slavery had their source in the Bible, his views on when and how the slaves would obtain freedom came from his deist views. On the other hand, the revivalists, who would plead with people to receive Christ because “Today is the day of salvation!” (2 Cor. 6:2) would apply the same reasoning to their views on immediate emancipation.


The Effort to Redeem (Purchase) Slaves


Just as the Hebrews purchased slaves, and the early church redeemed slaves, during the era of Southern slavery there was also a movement to purchase (or redeem) slaves. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, redeemed slaves. Levi Coffin, one of the main conductors on the Underground Railroad said that “in the face of such appeals, it was hard to refuse . . .”[18] James Russell Lowe would admit in a letter written in 1849 that even though he didn’t have much money, still “if a man comes and asks us to help him buy a wife or child what are we to do?”[19] Harriet Beecher Stowe would take Milly Edmundson on a tour of New England churches, which resulted in enough money to redeem her two children. And Garrison would print notices in The Liberator, such as this one, which appeared in January of 1837:

George Potter and Rosella, his wife, would take this opportunity to express their gratitude to God, and under him, to the benevolent individuals, who generously contributed to aiding them to redeem their two children from Slavery. They have the unspeakable happiness of informing the generous donors that, on the 12th . . . they received their children, aged eleven and seven years, raised from the degradation of Slavery to the rank of Freemen.[20]

A Higher Law

Just as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, would refuse to bow to King Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, and Peter and Paul would continue to preach the Gospel (despite it being outlawed) because they would rather obey the Higher Law of God, Charles Beecher would implore Christians to disobey the Fugitive Slave Law. He appealed to the teachings of the scriptures and the heart of Jesus:

Suppose . . . a fugitive mother and child should come knocking at your door on a winter night pleading for aid. What does the law require of you? What must you do, to obey the law? What is obedience to law? You must shut your door in her face, or you must take her captive, and shut her up until the hounds of officers can come up. This is obedience, and if you do not do this you are a law-breaker. If you give her a crust of bread, you break the law. If you give her a shawl, a cloak; if you let her warm herself by your fire an hour, and depart, you break the law. If you give her a night’s rest, and let her go, you break the law. If you show her any kindness, any mercy, if you treat her as Christ treated you, if you do to her as you would wish to be done by, you have broken the law.[21]

     Beecher went on to explain that he could not obey the Fugitive Slave Law because it “commands me, when fully obeyed, to deny Christ, to renounce and abjure Christ’s law, to trample under foot Christ’s spirit, and to remand Christ’s flesh and blood into cruel bondage.”[22]

Frederick Douglass would also claim to be a law-breaker when he opened his speech at a meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1842 with these words:

I appear before the immense assembly this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and I ran off with them.[23]

     And Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, also appealed to the Higher Law of God when she asserted:

God willed us free. Men willed us slaves. We will do as God wills.[24]

     With so many societal strongholds lined up against the abolitionists, how was it that they were able to see the light of truth in the midst of so much darkness? The atheist, Hume, wasn’t able to discern evil. The scientist, Morton, wasn’t able to discern evil. The Enlightenment philosophers weren’t able to discern evil. The rationalist, who relied on “reason,” wasn’t able to discern evil. The Southern slaveholder, who cherry-picked the scriptures that were conducive to his wants and desires, while ignoring others, wasn’t able to discern evil.

But those Bible-believing Christians who rightly divided and stood on the Word of Truth were able to discern good from evil, even when every hardship hounded them because of their position. They refused to compromise, and consequently, they formed a bulwark the slave could run to for safety and help. As a result of their efforts, the institution of slavery would be destroyed, and liberty would finally come to the captives. And these men who were mocked and persecuted for their views would be remembered by future generations as heroes.








[1] Andrew McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable, A Discourse. (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1802), 4. (

[2] “H2930 – tame’ – Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon (KJV).” Blue Letter Bible. Web. 31 May, 2018. <;.

[3] David R. Kerr. “Article II: Sloan on Color and Slavery” The United Presbyterian Review, Volume 2. (Pittsburgh, PA: Publication Office, No. 76 Thirds St., 1861), 336.

[4] Josiah Priest, Bible Defense of Slavery (Louisville, KY: J. F. Brennan, 1851).  accessed 8/30/2017 at

[5] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. (Richmond, VA: J.W. Randolph, 1853), 149-150.

[6] David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, cont. Henry Maudsley (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1854), 228.

[7] Immanuel Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” as quoted by David Brion in the book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2006), 75.

[8] Voltaire, “Essai sur les mouers,” as quoted by David Brion in the book Inhuman Bondage. Ibid.

[9] Samuel Morton, Crania Americana. (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, Chestnut Street, 1839), 25. (

[10] Rev. John Rankin, Letters on American Slavery, Ohio, 1823. (Boston: Garrison & Knapp, 1833), 69-70. (

[11] Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” an Address Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, At Commencement, July 12, 1854. The Frederick Douglass Papers, 10, The Library of Congress (

[12] Ibid, 11.

[13] Frederick Douglass, “The Church and Prejudice” Plymouth County Antislavery Society, Nov. 4, 1841. (

[14] Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003), 435.

[15]John C. Calhoun “Slavery a Positive Good”

[16] Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc. 1961), 158.

[17] Ibid, 159.

[18] Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 62.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Dumond, Antislavery, 310.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Raymond Bial, The Underground Railroad (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 1999), 38.

[24] Ibid.


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