The Greatest Proslavery Army: The Conservative Clergy
South Carolina governor George McDuffie told the State Assembly in 1835, “No human institution, in my opinion, is more consistent with the will of God, than domestic slavery, and no one of his ordinances is written with more legible characters than that which consigns the African race to this condition.” South Carolina College professor Maximilian LaBorde would later second that statement: “Southern slavery is regulated by law, the principle of humanity is infused into it, it is the slavery of the Bible.” Southern leaders like McDuffie and LaBorde had plenty of help from the clergy in arriving at such a belief. As we saw in the last chapter, as church leaders strove to fill pews and grow churches, especially when energized by the religious frenzy and, for some, methods of the Second Great Awakening, they adapted their message to allow for slavery, and in some cases, to justify and promote it openly. Just how openly and how commonly may be surprising to modern readers.[1]
One review of 279 proslavery publications up to the Civil War revealed 130 that were definitely the work of clergy, and perhaps even more were. A more recent monograph numbered a staggering 275 clergymen who published defenses of slavery. Both studies agree that around half of all such defenses came from the pens of Christian ministers—almost all of which were conservative, Bible-believing Protestants. Astoundingly, in 154 of those cases, the written defense appeared in official church publications.[2]
. . . In 1860, while war was almost, but not yet, inevitable, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer preached a proslavery Thanksgiving sermon that was immediately published with the title, “The South: Her Peril, and Her Duty.” A month before South Carolina would declare secession, Palmer filled the pulpit to lament “the probable doom of our once happy and united confederacy.” Oblivious to the hypocrisy of a man defending southern slavery, Palmer condemned northern politics as “a bastard ambition which looks to personal aggrandizement rather than to the public weal,” and abolitionism as “a reckless radicalism which seeks for the subversion of all that is ancient and stable, and a furious fanaticism which drives on its ill-considered conclusions with utter disregard of the evil it engenders.” Arguing that nations have trusts assigned to them by Providence, Palmer asked what the South’s divine trust may be. He answered: “[I]t is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.”[3]
(From The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, 275–280, 288–289.)
Why must this system be indefinitely perpetuated? After all, had not the southern clergy argued for some time, under abolitionist pressure, that if left alone the system would be ended within as little as twenty years? Had not the slaves progressed so far in morals and ability that they were almost ready for freedom? Was this not mentioned often in defense of the system up to this point? As defenses of slavery often did, Palmer’s contradicted this well-established argument. Blacks must remain enslaved indefinitely because, “We know better than others that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude.” Their “constitutional indolence” has proven itself in other places. When entrusted with freedom, Africans had “converted the most beautiful islands of the sea into a howling waste.” Once again, racism lay at the root of the issue.[4]
Not only did Palmer blame abolitionists for agitating the issue of slavery, not only did he reveal the racism and lies at the root of it, not only did he express the duty to perpetuate it, but Palmer seemed cognizant of his fire-eating countrymen’s plan to expand slavery into surrounding territories—and he defended that too
[F]or us, as now situated, the duty is plain of conserving and transmitting the system of slavery, with the freest scope for its natural developement [sic] and extension.[5]
To be sure there was no misunderstanding, Palmer reiterated his points about the South’s great “trust” as “the cause of God and religion” and “the cause of all religion and all truth”: slavery must be protected and allowed to expand as far as needed. The South’s trust was “to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.” This unchallenged expansion of slavery should be “subject to no limitations.” Palmer would go on in that sermon openly to call for secession from the Union to protect the “trust” of this slavery and its extension. South Carolina would accept that call only three weeks later.[6]
Palmer hardly stood alone; the Southern clergy almost unanimously supported the entrenched defense of the slave system as the cause of God and truth. When pressed on why they would support such an evil, they pointed to the allegedly greater evil of “atheistical” abolitionism. Some, in fact, pointed to the work of abolitionists with a sort of thankfulness for pushing them to study the issue and realize they were more correct than they thought. In 1864, for example, the Georgia Presbyteries jointly reported “an increasing interest in the spiritual welfare of the colored population.” By “interest” in the colored population they meant an intensified focus on keeping it enslaved. But why such a focus? The report explained:
The long continued agitations of our adversaries have wrought within us a deeper conviction of the divine appointment of domestic servitude, and have led to a clearer comprehension of the duties we owe to the African race. We hesitate not to affirm that it is the peculiar mission of the Southern Church to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.[7]
Confederate leaders in church and state recognized the importance of the clergy to the southern cause and the war effort. Memphis preacher R.C. Grundy stated on August 21, 1864, that “the southern rebel church ... is worth more to Mr. Jeff Davis than an army of one hundred thousand drilled and equipped men.” Likewise, William Porcher Miles, chairman of the military committee in the Confederate House of Representatives, testified in February 1865, “The clergy have done more for the success of our cause, than any other class. They have kept up the spirits of our people, have led in every philanthropic movement.... Not even the bayonets have done more.”[8] . . .
After the South suffered its defeat, however, many of the clergy refused to repent of the institution or their racism. Instead, many followed the same course as the statesmen and journalists we saw earlier: the issue of slavery suddenly disappeared as a cause of their concern, though they had held it central before. Palmer, for example, had stated that slavery was the central trust of the South, that he would stand or fall with it, and would accept its fate even if God tested it with the sword. After the settlement of the dust of “Redemption,” however, Palmer joined in common cause with fellow proslavery ministers like Robert Dabney and Moses Hoge, anointing statues of Jeff Davis and other Confederate heroes into the religion of the Lost Cause. “Surrender” this “trust”? “Arbitration of the sword”? Not so for the same Benjamin Palmer in 1882. Now he stood before a grand meeting of the Southern Historical Society in New Orleans, raising money for the preservation of the Lost Cause: “Was there ever a cause lost which was supported by truth? And can a cause be lost which has passed through such a baptism as ours?”[9] . . .
The deeper problem was, however, that Palmer and others like him throughout the South’s Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other churches had defended the necessity of preserving the slave system explicitly on racial grounds, appealing to the Bible, nature, reason, and a variety of anecdotes, historical and current. The War may have abolished the institution, but it did not abolish the racism at its root. The racism was left to manifest in other forms.
From The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, 275–280, 288–289.
Notes:
[1] McDuffie quoted in James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998), 108; LaBorde in James Oscar Farmer, Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 195.
[2] Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in (Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), xvii, 125–127, 169, 371n5; see also Farmer, 209.America, 1701–1840
[3] Benkamin M. Palmer, The South: Her Peril, Her Duty: A Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, on November 29, 1860 (New Orleans: The True Witness and Sentinel, 1860), 6; emphasis in original.
[4] Palmer, 9.
[5] Palmer, 7; emphasis added.
[6] Palmer, 10–11, 15.
[7] Quoted in Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, Volume Two: 1861–1890, 54–55.
[8] James W. Silver, Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda, Confederate Centennial Series, ed. by W. Stanley Hoole (Gloucesert, MA: Peter Smith, 1964 [1957]), 93, 96.
[9] Quoted in Southern Historical Society Papers 10, No. 6 (June, 1882): 253; see also Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 74.