The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (27 page)

Much as slavery itself was antithetical to America’s political principles and economic enterprise, Bacon argues, so the black victims of bondage were alien to American society and, unlike the freedmen of Greece, Rome, and most other nations, were “all marked out and stigmatized with the brand which nature has stamped upon them.” As a consequence, they could never be “amalgamated with the rest of the community” and gain open access to wealth, honor, and office. It was this racial aspect of American slavery that Bacon finds particularly
alarming, precisely because it appeared to preclude amelioration and gradual emancipation. The individual slave could not reasonably hope for an act of
manumission or eventual integration into a homogeneous society.
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Racial difference could help to rationalize hierarchical domination but it also intensified fear. Writing less than a year after the exposure of
Denmark
Vesey’s alleged but highly publicized conspiracy to seize Charleston, South Carolina, Bacon underscores the terror of slave plots and insurrections, quoting Jefferson’s famous lines about “trembling for his country when he reflects that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” and that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
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Although Bacon thinks that Jefferson exaggerated a bit when he proclaimed that “the whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other,” he echoes Jefferson’s fears when he predicts that America’s slaves, “surrounded by the memorials of freedom,” will inevitably learn “something of their own power” and “that freedom is the birthright of humanity.”

It is only a matter of time, then, before “that righteous Providence, which never wants instruments to accomplish its designs, whether of mercy, or of vengeance, shall raise up a Touissaint [
sic
], or a Spartacus, or an African Tecumseh.” While Bacon can envision the destruction of Southern cities and plantations, he feels certain that within the next century any general insurrection would lead to the near extermination of the “ill-fated Africans” by the united efforts of Northern and Southern whites: “there is hardly an enterprize [
sic
] to which the militia of
Vermont or
Connecticut would march with more zeal, than to crush a servile rebellion (if such an event should ever take place with all its cruelties and horrors) in Virginia.” Blacks would have to wait a longer time to acquire the numerical force sufficient to win total emancipation and a Haitian-like empire. As a colonizationist writing after the
Missouri crisis and eager to find means of uniting slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, Bacon was far more conciliatory toward the South than his Connecticut antislavery predecessors had been in the 1790s.
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The specter of racial warfare, often exemplified by Bacon’s accompanying image of “rivers of blood,” was always a central ingredient of the colonizationist mentality, and the fear led Bacon at times to
compromise or restrict the ideal of African American
education. He appears to have regarded the political and economic evils of slavery as less iniquitous than the institution’s “moral tendency” and “moral influence” on both blacks and whites. Here he has in mind, in language that verges on abolitionism, the way the presence of slaves silenced and deadened the conscience of most Southerners, who failed to lift up their voices against “a system which permits all the atrocities of the domestic slave-trade, which permits the father to sell his children as he would his cattle—a system which consigns one half of the community to hopeless and utter degradation.” No less shocking, for Bacon, were the laws that “exist in nearly all the slaveholding States, prohibiting [the blacks’] instruction, and even driving them from Sunday schools, because it is supposed that the public safety requires them to be kept in perfect ignorance.”
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As we shall see, nothing could be more disturbing to the New England evangelical mind than such barriers to the instruments of divine grace. Yet the version of Bacon’s “Report” reprinted in the
Christian Spectator
and the ACS
Annual Report of 1824 contained a new passage that sharply curtailed the activities of any national movement “for the benefit of the blacks”:

The image of
Samson, we should note, affirmed the capacity of the most “degraded” slaves to recover the source of their strength, honor, and human dignity, but only at the cost of pulling down the temple, of bringing “down the same ruin on the master and the slave.”
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For Bacon, who preached on “the vast designs of that Eternal Providence which will rescue humanity from darkness and misery and death, and renovate our world in the image of heaven,” nothing could blight America’s hopes more decisively than the predicament
that allowed a fear for public safety to convince white Americans that blacks must be kept “in perfect ignorance.” Unlike
George Bourne and a few other early radical abolitionists, Bacon did not denounce slaveholding as a personal sin or as an inexcusable evil in itself. He did not rail against the master’s usurpation of God’s authority or the sin of defining a human being as chattel property. Bacon’s attention focused on the subjective effects of slavery’s “degradation,” particularly within a cosmic framework of redemptive theology.
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In “
A Plea for Africa,” delivered in 1824 as the annual Fourth of July address at Park Street Church in Boston and repeated the following year in
New Haven, Bacon posed the question “And what is it to be a slave? We know what it is to be free. We know what it is to walk forth in the consciousness of independence and to act with the feeling that we are responsible only to our God and to the community of which we are equal members.… But we know not what it is to be a slave.” One could picture, he continued, the whippings, the toil, the physical captivity. These would correspond, in his theology, to partial constraints on man’s natural ability to choose virtue and justice. But try to imagine, he asked his listeners, what it would be like to have your spirit broken, your intellect dulled, your moral sense blinded:

In this image of a ravaged mind and withered soul, of a human being rendered incapable of moral choice or benevolent feeling, Bacon constructed a concrete exemplification of original sin, a helpless victim of an evil system who, paradoxically, has become the sinner.
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While Bacon could not explore these connections in any manifest way, his concern with the “moral influence of the system on the blacks” reflected his struggle with a central theological issue that preoccupied the Congregationalist followers of
Jonathan Edwards. The issue, quite simply, was how to reconcile the basic doctrines of Calvinism with the
evangelical methods needed to Christianize
America and the world. Although Bacon and his famous mentors
Lyman Beecher and Nathaniel W.
Taylor thought of themselves as Calvinists, they could not believe that God had brought sinners into the world in order to condemn them for Adam’s fall or for predetermined actions they could not help taking. A parallel issue, which was beginning to attract increasing attention in the secular sphere, was whether victims of oppression could be held accountable for criminal, immoral, or socially dysfunctional behavior that was the direct result of their oppression. From the time of the American Revolution, the evangelical clergy, both Calvinist and Arminian, had searched for social correlates for sin, repentance, and redemption, in part to dramatize the meaning and urgency of religious issues to a populace preoccupied with politics and skeptical of traditional authority. The sudden outburst of evangelical attacks on the sin of slaveholding, in the Revolutionary era, typified the shifting boundaries between sacred and secular concerns and also suggested that denunciations of black slavery could be a means of testing and objectifying changing concepts of
original sin.
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Ironically, as
Orlando Patterson has shown, the Pauline and Augustinian conceptions of original sin and spiritual freedom had been modeled on actual experiences with Roman slavery and
manumission. A large number of early Christian leaders were either freedmen or the children of liberated slaves who understood the literal meaning of redemption. According to Patterson, “
Paul’s theology miraculously transposed this secular experience of slavery-into-freedom, or the intense expectation of a rebirth into social life, into a doctrine of spiritual freedom from which the Western mind would never be released.”

Augustine, who presented himself as a “disillusioned freedman,” depreciated the value of personal liberty and magnified the importance of spiritual liberty as the unmerited gift of a totally free and sovereign master. Ideas derived from ancient slavery and Roman slave law were “encoded” in Christian theology, which became for future centuries, as Patterson puts it, “a cultural memory bank of ancient knowledge.”
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Obviously there was much diversity and complexity in Christian views of slavery and sin. But a brief summary of some of the linkages between slavery and sin, which were deeply embedded in Western culture, will help to clarify the intellectual framework that Bacon applied to the evils of slavery and racial prejudice.

From the time of the
Stoics and early Christians, the institution of slavery had been associated with the regrettable but unavoidable imperfections of the world, eventually epitomized in the doctrine of original sin. Christian authorities, particularly Augustine, viewed human bondage as one of the penalties for man’s fall from grace and as part of a system of hierarchical discipline and governance made necessary by human sin. The need to punish and control the species as a whole, however, did not imply any correlation between an individual’s outward condition and his inward spiritual state. The conventional dualism of body and soul meant that a particular slave, no matter how degraded, might be spiritually free and even a Christian saint; a master or a king might be “enslaved” to greed, pride, sensuality, or to sin in general. Nevertheless, secular bondage inevitably took on a burden of guilt by association as Christians repeatedly described spiritual salvation as a redemption from bondage to sin, a liberation that drew on and transmogrified the Hebrews’ journey out of Egypt.
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This use of slavery and emancipation as a paradigm for the central religious experience went well beyond analogies and figures of speech. Experience with chattel slavery was a precondition for the idea of physical and spiritual freedom; for devout Christians, sin was not only genuine slavery but slavery in the profoundest sense—slavery viewed, indeed, from eternity. Like chattel servitude, original sin was innate and hereditary, subjecting each victim to the absolute dominion of law, death, or Satan’s will. Binding and constricting, it deprived the individual, at least in the
Calvinist version, of any ability to choose the good, just, or honest. It therefore alienated its victims from their fellows and brethren by promoting deception, self-indulgence, envy, and violence. Like slavery, sin degraded and dishonored human beings, rendering them contemptible in God’s eyes. Sin, to expand a point made by
Orlando Patterson, was both a
condition
that contained no seeds for transformation and a
master
whose resistance could only be overcome by divine grace. Such a state of social and spiritual death could be sublated only by “the death of death,” the negation of death itself as the sinner-slave partook in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
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In the eighteenth century, Calvinists like
Jonathan Edwards confronted a broad movement to repudiate the traditional doctrine of original sin. They struggled to find ways to reinforce belief in the
absolute sovereignty of God and to combat the widespread tendency to exalt the powers and moral ability of individuals, as if human destiny were determined by human valuations of merit. Edwards, who was much esteemed by
William Wilberforce and the British
Evangelicals as well as by his New England disciples, drew a crucial distinction between the natural and moral ability of unregenerate humans. Edwards and his followers rejected the notion of a natural or physically innate depravity—analogous to the belief in inherent racial inferiority—that prevented the unregenerate from choosing the good, just, and honest. For the Edwardseans it was not natural inability but a
moral inability
—the inability of the unregenerate will to break free from self-serving inclinations that led to sin. This subtle shift in emphasis reaffirmed human dependence on divine grace while also opening a window of incentive as Christians searched for the stirrings of grace in their own subjective inclinations.
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Samuel Hopkins, Edwards’s most influential disciple and one of New England’s earliest champions of slave emancipation and African colonization, took further steps to vindicate God’s justice and equate virtue with “disinterested benevolence,” later epitomized, for Hopkins’s followers at
Andover Seminary, by Christian missionaries in Asia and Africa.
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At Yale and Andover, Leonard Bacon was exposed to repeated efforts on the part of
“New Divinity” theologians to expand the limits of human moral ability without abandoning the need for divine grace. No one went further in this project than Nathaniel W.
Taylor, whom Bacon replaced as minister at
New Haven’s Center Church when Taylor was appointed Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology at the new Yale Divinity School. Drawing particularly on Scottish commonsense philosophy, Taylor held that depravity always consists of sinful actions that are freely chosen; depravity should never be thought of as a sinful state of being or as an inherited propensity that is part of God’s creation. “There can be no sin in choosing evil,” Taylor affirmed, “unless there be power to choose good.” However inevitable the choice of sin without the aid of divine grace, individual responsibility was premised, according to Taylor, on a “power to the contrary.” This New Haven theology, of which Bacon became a champion, aroused bitter controversy and eventually contributed to the great
Presbyterian schism of 1837. In 1823 and 1824, however, Bacon was still feeling his way toward a more liberating view of sin and moral responsibility.
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