All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

An interesting article from the perspective of Southern ministers and their positions on slavery before the American Civil War, and the establishment of Liberia and why it is was an ‘advantage’ for “free blacks” and “the nation’s white yeomanry”. As the article mentions , Liberia’s “climate perfectly fitted to” free blacks, and it would also benefit “Africa as a population of Christian.”

A far cry from what some people claim that “obsessive self-pity produces” caused slavery to end in America.

Abstract

The case of James M. Pendleton (1811–1891) adds clarity to understandings of the relationship between slavery and Christianity in the nineteenth-century USA. A white Baptist minister in his native Kentucky throughout most of the antebellum period, Pendleton actively opposed slavery because he believed it an affront to biblical teaching and an economically fruitless way to order a society. At the same time, however, Pendleton also opposed abolitionist measures that called for immediate emancipation of slaves, both because he felt immediatism threatened social stability and because abolitionism appeared to flaunt what he saw as Christian orthodoxy. Pendleton’s example shows why slavery was such a complicated issue for Southerners, as well as why abolitionism held so little sway among Southern evangelicals – even among those that wanted slavery ended.

One of the more vexing problems in American history has been explicating the nineteenth-century relationship between slavery and Christianity. While the literature on this problem is vast, it is really only in the last several decades that the most important advances have been made toward understanding the role of religion before the Civil War in shaping ideas about slavery. Most recently, scholars like Mitchell Snay, John McKivigan, Eugene Genovese and Mark Noll have demonstrated that much of the public argument over the nature of slavery that occurred from 1830 to 1860 stemmed from a debate over the authority and role of the Bible. Proslavery Protestants in the antebellum South, the literature suggests, affirmed a literalist biblical sanction for slaveholding whereas abolitionists in the North interpreted Scripture more broadly to reject the institution.¹ Certainly James Henley Thornwell, the South’s leading proslavery cleric, spoke for many religious Southerners – and even many in the North – when he described the debate as a fight between ‘Christianity and Atheism,’ with ‘the progress of humanity the stake.’²

The relationship between slavery and Christianity was always complicated in the antebellum South. Certainly the Southern religious proslavery elite did their part to defend the peculiar institution, but their support was not uncritical. Even in the years after 1830, where historians have traditionally pointed to a shift in Southern attitudes from ambivalence about slaveholding to decisive support for the practice, Southern theologians wrote that slavery as it was practiced in America needed reformation. They did not doubt that God had established the master–slave relationship as foundational for Christian society. But holy sanction of ‘slavery in the abstract’ did not suggest to Southern divines that slavery as practiced below the Mason and Dixon line was beyond reproach. The proslavery clergy frequently lamented what they saw as slavery’s abuses and excesses. If they were opposed to antislavery measures, if they were unwilling to say that slavery itself was sinful, the proslavery clergy remained hopeful that American slavery could become more equitable and more just – more Christian. Southern divines saw American slavery as a flawed system that needed to be brought into conformity with an identifiably Christian standard.³

That Southern ministers recognized weaknesses in the American slave system suggests that the historiographic emphasis on a hardened, rigid religious proslavery has been exaggerated. Among much of the Southern clergy, there was no clean shift from a ‘necessary evil’ to a ‘positive good’ view of the peculiar institution.⁴ To be sure, regional location played a role in shaping clergy attitudes toward slavery. Especially outside the Lower South, public sentiment never completely crystallized in favour of slavery. The Middle South – including states like Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina – retained pockets of antislavery dissent up to the Civil War. And in the Border South, where geography dictated forms of agriculture that did not require large chattel labor forces and where long state borders touched free soil, the discomfort with slavery was magnified. In Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, antislavery sentiment persisted through the antebellum period.⁵

The complex nature of Southern Christian attitudes toward slavery appears vividly in the case of James M. Pendleton (1811–1891), a Baptist minister who spent most of his antebellum years in Kentucky. Pendleton maintained an antislavery stance up to the Civil War, but he held much in common with the proslavery logic and remained suspicious of any radical schemes suggested by abolitionists – those who sought slavery’s immediate end. Pendleton fit in comfortably with much of Kentucky’s conservative antislavery populace, a vocal minority in the Bluegrass State that wanted slavery ended by gradually emancipating slaves and then colonizing free blacks in Liberia. Pendleton never went so far as to call for monetary compensation to masters of freed slaves, but reimbursement often featured prominently in gradualist literature.⁶ Kentucky antislavery reached its zenith in the late 1840s – when emancipationists made a concerted effort to modify the state’s constitution – and it was in this setting that James M. Pendleton appeared as a critic of the peculiar institution.

Pendleton denounced slavery in several forums, but his most compelling antislavery writing appeared in response to a series of proslavery newspaper articles published by his friend and colleague in the Baptist pulpit, Louisville’s William C. Buck. In his Letters to the Rev. W. C. Buck (1849), Pendleton spelled out explicitly his primary reason for seeking slavery’s end: American slavery was not the same as biblical slavery and no amount of biblical gymnastics could convince him that the institution should be preserved in the United States. The righteousness of ‘slavery in the abstract,’ as the proslavery mantra went, ignored the injustice of slavery as it was practiced. For Pendleton, ‘a great deal of sin’ marked American slavery, and that was enough to end the evil practice altogether.⁷

Pendleton also had a secondary reason for believing that proslavery theorists were wrong: by his judgment, free labour societies proved more economically viable than slave societies. Because of slavery, he argued, Kentucky was nothing more than a colony to the industrial North. Slavery retarded Southern economic growth and, by Pendleton’s reckoning, that undermined the system’s value.⁸

Pendleton may have opposed slavery, but he always believed that it should be ended one way: gradually. Pendleton vehemently disagreed with the abolitionist platform that called for slavery’s quick death and the integration of blacks into American society. He saw abolitionism as a threat to the idea of an orderly society and an affront to Christian tradition. Immediatist abolitionism, to Pendleton, overlooked the social chaos that would occur if slaves were hastily freed into society. Pendleton feared racial integration and felt that abolitionism’s stress on immediacy threatened the social fabric.

The Baptist divine also believed that abolitionism displayed recklessness with regard to Christian tradition. Among Pendleton’s own Baptists, abolitionists ignored the centrality of congregational autonomy. Among Christians as a whole, abolitionists came close to blurring the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. That abolitionists seemingly gave up conventional methods of biblical interpretation in order to discredit proslavery Christianity did not make their position any more palatable for Pendleton.⁹

Rejecting slavery on the one hand and abolitionism on the other, Pendleton tried to determine a position in the ideological middle ground. He may have opposed slavery, but he opposed abolitionism even more virulently. Pendleton created a synthesis of positions, drawn both from proslavery and antislavery argumentation, that worked to meet his ends. Pendleton wanted to maintain a religious and racial conservatism while at the same time working to bring about slavery’s demise. Pendleton’s case highlights the problems Southern clergy saw in slavery and speaks to matters of politics, race, social order and church polity all at once.

James M. Pendleton is best known in historical memory for his role in Baptist ecclesiastical developments. In addition to a pastoral ministry that began in the 1830s and spanned several states, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century Pendleton had authored several books on Baptist theology and church polity, served his denomination at the national level, and played a major part in the establishment of Crozer Seminary outside Philadelphia.¹⁰ Among these contributions, Pendleton’s legacy is primarily attached to his foundational role in giving shape to the Landmark Baptist movement – the movement that claimed a pure and unbroken line of succession from Jesus Christ to particular contemporary Landmark churches, thereby rejecting non-Landmark churches as valid arbiters of the gospel – which began in the 1850s.¹¹

Before his rise to denominational prominence, however, Pendleton made his mark as an antislavery activist. From 1837 to 1857 he served in his native Kentucky as pastor of Bowling Green’s First Baptist Church. In order to grasp Pendleton’s antislavery thought, attention must be given to the late 1840s Kentucky context that gave rise to his opinions.

White Kentucky’s religious mind, like its political mind, always remained conflicted about the nature of slavery. Throughout the antebellum period, Kentucky harboured a persistent antislavery presence. For public figures of all sorts, from politicians to publishers to clergy, slavery was a questionable institution and its supposed merits demanded analysis. Kentucky’s antislavery populace never gained a majority in the commonwealth, but they did generate enough support to make political waves at the state level in the late 1840s. In 1847 the commonwealth’s legislature called for reform of Kentucky’s 1799 constitution. Seeing an opportunity to enter an emancipationist clause into the constitution, antislavery Kentuckians mobilized. From 1847 to 1849, they published a flurry of pamphlets and articles with the hope of affecting the constitutional convention. In 1847, for example, John C. Vaughan began printing the emancipationist newspaper The Examiner in Louisville. Vaughan was a friend of Cassius Marcellus Clay, the famous antislavery political activist – who, like many antislavery Kentuckians, emphasized white supremacy in his attacks on the system – from Madison County who published the antislavery newspaper True American in the mid 1840s. On 25 April 1849, the renowned US Senator Henry Clay led a statewide emancipationist convention in Frankfort. While Clay was recognized as the group’s leader, he believed that representing the emancipationist party at the convention would compromise his standing as a US Senator and therefore declined the position. As a result, Robert J. Breckinridge, then pastor of Lexington’s First Presbyterian Church, accepted the offer. Smaller, local emancipationist meetings convened around the state; they succeeded in nominating antislavery candidates in 29 counties as delegates to the constitutional convention.¹²

Antislavery Kentuckians in the pastorate had mixed opinions about how to end the institution and what should be done with free slaves. The evangelical abolitionist John G. Fee rested at the radical end of the antislavery continuum. Fee wanted slavery to end immediately, with subsequent racial integration. In arriving at this position, Fee not only followed a proto-liberal line of biblical interpretation suggested by Northern clergy like Albert Barnes – that the spirit of the Bible denounced slavery, in spite of the letter (or literal reading) of its text – but he called for an end to the ‘American caste system,’ the nationwide pattern of racial prejudice that undergirded slavery.¹³ Most of Kentucky’s antislavery clergy, however, were not nearly as absolutist as Fee. They saw American slavery as inherently and intrinsically oppressive; for that it needed to be ended. Yet at the same time, this body of conservative antislavery clergy could not, as a matter of Christian orthodoxy, give up conventional methods of biblical hermeneutics that called for a strictly literal method of biblical interpretation. Furthermore, they could not confront the racist foundation upon which slavery rested.¹⁴

Like everywhere else in the antebellum United States, slavery in Kentucky was a topic of the utmost religious importance. Virtually all nineteenth-century American divines asserted that the political question of slavery was one with serious religious implications: Kentucky clerics who reached opposite conclusions about the nature of slavery agreed that it was the Christian’s duty to either attack or defend the peculiar institution. The Louisville Baptist pastor and editor of the statewide newspaper Baptist Banner, William C. Buck, wrote plainly that the ‘abstract question of slavery’ had both ‘religious and civil’ significance. Even though Buck had hoped to leave the matter a ‘purely political one’ reserved for ‘the political press,’ agitation of the slavery question in churches compelled Buck to write.¹⁵ On the other side, the abolitionist Fee felt the need to make ‘chiefly a Bible argument’ against slavery. In so doing, Fee posited what most of his nineteenth-century readers already believed:

The Bible, in our country, is the standard of right. Its decisions are final. And there is not a judge upon the bench, nor a jury in the land, who will decide in opposition to what are the generally received teachings of the Bible.¹⁶

In such an intellectual climate, where the tie between religion and slavery was not questioned but rather assumed, victory in public battles often depended on who claimed the religious high ground. Both proslavery and antislavery divines believed they had God on their side, and both sides followed the same biblical interpretive tradition, what Mark Noll has called a ‘Reformed, literal hermeneutic.’ By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to Noll, the dominant biblical interpretations in America were shaped by the Reformed tradition and emphasized a literal reading of the text. These factors, combined with a commonsense approach to Scripture, led Americans to employ similar assumptions about how the Bible might be used. This approach supported widespread belief in the Bible as an essentially readable book, led to the conviction that its words could easily be interpreted and substantiated the idea that its divinely inspired teachings were sufficient for all of life at all times.¹⁷

Deployed by the proslavery clergy, the literalist, commonsense approach allowed slavery’s defenders to see sanction for the institution throughout the Bible. The South’s leading expositor of proslavery Christianity, James Henley Thornwell, made this point clear in an 1851 report to the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina. Entitled ‘Relation of the Church to Slavery,’ Thornwell expressed lucidly what most proslavery clerics already knew: ‘The Bible, and the Bible alone, is [the church's] rule of faith and practice…. Beyond the Bible, [the church] can never go, and apart from the Bible she can never speak.’ And what did the Bible say about slavery, Thornwell asked?

Certain it is that no direct condemnation of Slavery can anywhere be found in the Sacred Volume…. it is truly amazing that the Bible, which professes to be a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, to make the man of God perfect, thoroughly furnished unto every good work, nowhere gives the slightest caution against this tremendous evil.

Jesus never condemned slavery, the prophets never condemned slavery, and the apostle Paul never condemned slavery. The only way a person could demonstrate that slavery, inherently, was a sin would require that individual to rely on the ‘spirit of speculation,’ not on the hard evidence that the revealed word of God offered.¹⁸

James M. Pendleton affirmed the proslavery approach to reading the biblical text, but he disagreed that proslavery conclusions were the scriptural message. Where proslavery clergy found biblical sanction through a literalist reading of the text, Pendleton saw reason for slavery’s end. Like his opponents, such as Thornwell, Pendleton would have resisted the temptation to move toward a ‘spirit of speculation’ about Scripture to suit his aims. Yet, arguments about the nature of Scripture and how it might be used notwithstanding, Pendleton saw American slavery as a deeply flawed system that needed to end. While the proslavery argument was never ironclad, it was difficult for Pendleton to get around an interpretative method that he himself employed. Nonetheless, this was precisely what Pendleton attempted in his refutation of American slavery.

Pendleton’s most thoroughgoing attack on slavery was occasioned by a series of articles in the Baptist Banner by his old friend William C. Buck.¹⁹ Buck later republished his articles in pamphlet form as The Slavery Question (1849). He circulated 5,000 copies of the pamphlet, intent on discouraging support for the emancipation party.²⁰

Buck saw no reason to reject slavery as a means of social organization. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was full of descriptions of master–slave relationships. That relationship, Buck wrote, was designed for a specific purpose: ‘benevolence to the poor and defenceless, and religious instruction to Idoliters.’ God had instituted slavery for reasons of moral uplift, for those with means to take care of those without. ‘Slavery was never intended by God to minister to the cupidity and luxury of the master without an adequate, and even more than an adequate return of good to the slave.’ Yet, this ‘perverted and abused’ form was exactly what much of American slavery looked like. Buck did not want to defend slavery as an ‘apologist’ for the system as it existed at the time, for he freely admitted that slavery ‘has been the occasion of enormous and crying sins.’²¹

Such admissions, however, did not compel Buck to reject slavery out of hand. One did not have license to proclaim that ‘slavery is a sin in itself’ just because ‘wicked men have sinned.’ As was the case with biblical slavery, American slavery could be rescued from sinful implementation. The biblical slave was ‘the gainer by his enslavement; so that the master is guilty of no moral wrong’ because ‘the condition of his slave is better than it otherwise would have been.’ Indeed, Buck wrote, this was true of much of American slavery. Was not America a better place than Africa? That continent ‘from time immemorial, has been inhabited by a population of the most degraded, ignorant, barbarous, and cruel of any other quarter of the world.’ Africans were ‘pagan idolaters, enveloped in the thickest moral darkness’ who needed to be brought into the light – that is, introduced to Christianity. Whatever its abuses, had not slavery done that for blacks? Truly, Buck wrote, ‘American slavery assimilates with what we have seen to be an important constituent of the slavery recognized in the scriptures – effecting the good of the enslaved.’ Despite such feelings, Buck did not unequivocally endorse American slavery as it existed. He maintained his initial position that the ‘Slavery in this country’ was not the same as ‘the slavery of the Bible.’²²

Buck, regardless of his opinion that American slavery was sinful in practice, did not agree with the emancipationists that universal manumission was the best solution to the problem. Buck had long been a defender of a colonization scheme, writing: ‘Compared with the natives of Africa, the Africans in this country are a civilised and christianised people; and are rapidly approaching that state of intellectual improvement and moral refinement which will fit them for self-government and national independence.’ These opinions very closely lined up with the colonization-emancipation agenda of Kentucky’s emancipationists, yet Buck rejected the Kentucky emancipationists’ program. There were three primary reasons Buck withheld his support. First, slaveholders had to be compensated ‘for the loss of the estate which he holds in his slave property.’ Second, though many colonizationists supported the emancipationist party, they had no plan to colonize blacks once manumitted. Colonization had to be part of the plan or ‘the country is to be infested with multitudes of lawless and irresponsible hirelings for a half century to come.’ Third, Buck wrote, no one had considered how to ensure the continuing moral and civil development of blacks once free, so that once colonized they could properly ‘exercise the right of self-government.’ Thus, in the end, though not an uncritical supporter of slavery, Buck refused to see how emancipation would improve upon the current social system of relations.²³

Buck’s rejection of emancipation aroused James M. Pendleton’s antislavery sensibilities. Pendleton responded to Buck’s writing with a series of letters he intended for publication in Buck’s Baptist Banner. When he was denied a forum there, they ended up appearing in the emancipationist newspaper, the Louisville Examiner.²⁴

Pendleton’s Letters to the Rev. W. C. Buck (1849) were aimed right at the heart of Buck’s argument. Buck had written that ‘God approves of that system of things which, under the circumstances, is best calculated to promote the holiness and happiness of men.’²⁵ The idea that slavery, as it existed in Kentucky, ‘promote[d] the “holiness and happiness” of slaves was ludicrous to Pendleton. To demonstrate that slavery had a pernicious influence, Pendleton wrote, ‘would be like showing that the sun is not the source of cold and darkness.’ That idea was ‘an insult to the good sense of [Buck's] readers,’ as was the idea that American slavery had a positive value.²⁶

Buck and many of those advancing the proslavery argument claimed that the institution was sanctioned in the Bible and, as evidence, pointed to the fact that Abraham had servants.²⁷ This did not satisfy Pendleton. ‘If the term “servant,” as used in the Scriptures, is synonymous with the term “slave” as used among us,’ he queried, ‘is it not remarkable that the Hebrew and Greek words translated servant are in no instance rendered slave?’ Besides the issue of translation, Pendleton argued, ‘it does not follow necessarily that Abraham’s servants were slaves in the American acceptation of the word.’ For example, he wrote, in Genesis 14, Abraham armed his servants for battle, whereas in mid nineteenth-century America ‘many of our states make it a penal offence for a slave to carry a weapon.’ Moreover, ‘Abraham held his slaves for their benefit.’ In what instance, he asked, have ‘American slaveholders [been] influenced by considerations of benefit to their slaves to hold them in bondage?’²⁸

Content with his arguments regarding Abraham, Pendleton moved on to Moses, who ‘says, “He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hands, shall surely be put to death.”’ In Pendleton’s view, if Americans were truly following a biblical model in their slave practice, they would sentence slave traders to death, ‘How were Africans first introduced into this country? They were stolen from their native land and brought here in chains.’ Continuing, Pendleton asked where in American slavery the concept of the Jubilee year might be found. In ancient Israel, under Mosaic Law, every fiftieth year all slaves were to be set free. ‘How would American slaveholders fancy a periodical manumission of slaves?’ he inquired. They would ‘resist,’ naturally. Compared to the American system, ‘servitude under the Mosaic law was indeed benevolent.’²⁹

The rest of Pendleton’s Letters attacked the proslavery argument in a more general sense. The Bowling Green pastor noted that many people, Buck included, argued that slavery was not wrong ‘in the abstract.’ What, he asked, did that mean? He supposed it referred to ‘slavery separated from its abuses.’ But this kind of slavery, he argued, did not exist in reality. ‘[P]ro-slavery men most ridiculously transfer their idea of the innocence of slavery in the abstract to slavery in the concrete,’ he wrote. According to Pendleton, defenders of slavery frequently said, ‘The slavery which sacredly regards the marriage union, cherishes the relation between parents and children, and provides for the instruction of the slave, is not sinful.’ But the proslavery argument from Scripture was at base fallacious when applied to the local situation, Pendleton wrote. The ‘system of slavery in Kentucky … does none of these things.’ Slave masters made no ‘provision’ for the ‘improvement and moral training of the slave,’ and no law compelled masters to do so. Furthermore, marriages between slaves were completely ‘disregarded.’ Whatever case proslavery champions might make for their cause Pendleton believed was confounded by the immorality of the system as it operated in practice.³⁰

On these latter points about the nature of slavery in practice, Pendleton would have earned Buck’s agreement. But the two would have differed greatly about what constituted the most Christian way to order a society. Before his confrontation with Buck, in a series of anonymous articles in the Examiner, Pendleton had tipped his hand in that regard. The Bowling Green pastor signalled his support for a free labour society. Because of Adam’s biblical fall, detailed in Genesis’ third chapter, and the subsequent curse placed on humanity as a result, all people were required to labour. Yet slavery kept some people from contributing their due amount of work. Slavery, Pendleton, wrote, upset the providential design and, as such, free labour was a matter of religious importance.³¹ Moreover, the presence of slavery in Southern states explained why they failed to progress at the rate of Northern states, Pendleton wrote. Georgia did not lag behind Massachusetts because of ‘the inequality of the action of tariff laws.’ No, Pendleton said, the reason was that ‘one is a free state, the other is cursed with slavery. In one labor is considered honorable; in the other disgraceful – the business of slaves.’³²

Lethargy in social development was only a part of the problem, Pendleton wrote. The even greater tragedy was that the Southern states, because of slavery, had become dependent on the North for their very survival. The lack of any sort of manufacturing industry had made Kentucky wholly ‘dependent’ on Northern industry. ‘Is not Kentucky compelled to admit, humiliating as the admission is, that she is tributary to the free states? She depends, in a great degree, on the fabrics of the free states to clothe her population – even her slaves.’ That Kentucky could not provide its own subsistence was a scandal in Pendleton’s mind. Slavery had so enfeebled Kentucky that the commonwealth was forced to give up its ‘independence and self-subsistence.’³³ In truth, Pendleton wrote, Kentucky was stuck in a ‘colonial condition.’ Citing a speech given by the US Senator from Bowling Green, Joseph Underwood, Pendleton wrote that Kentuckians were ‘looking to the mother country for supplies.’³⁴

Such bold arguments for free labour would have aroused the suspicions of proslavery Christians. Obviously, the idea of eliminating slavery was a threat to Southern order, but the issue was not that simple. While proslavery clerics rested their defence of slavery in large part on biblical injunction, they also did so because they saw free labour as at base a pernicious, destructive, and unambiguously anti-Christian way to organize a society. Pendleton might have seen ‘a great deal of sin’ in master–slave relations,³⁵ but most Southerners did not share his appraisal of its implications. They saw no reason to believe that modern capitalist societies were inherently more righteous. Capitalism destroyed familial and communal ties, slaveholders wrote; it preyed upon the weak. ‘Free labour’ was a phantasmal concept. It replaced one form of subjugation with another. The difference was that in a bourgeois system labourers thought they were free but no moral impetus compelled capitalists to treat their workers with magnanimity. Southerners wanted to find an alternative to this social design, and they had one in their slave society. They could preserve paternalism and benevolence, and furthermore, antebellum Southerners could claim the biblical high ground.³⁶

William C. Buck said as much in The Slavery Question. Free labour was a tragic concept because there was always an inequitable power relationship: ‘the rich have the control, not only of the amount of labor to be performed, but of the wages to be paid for it.’ Employers could keep wages low while prices for staples like food rose to exorbitant levels. Workers would ‘labor sixteen hours out of the twenty-four’ and then not be ‘able to supply themselves with bread.’ The immorality of this arrangement appalled Buck, especially when there was a more Christian alternative. People may be ‘fallen’ sinners, incapable of true moral behaviour, but God, in spite of human nature, had provided all the resources necessary to create a just society. It was a truism that ‘in all ages and countries, those who are in affluence and power have oppressed the helpless and poor.’ The only way that such oppression could be overturned, Buck wrote, was if ‘by some benevolent arrangement, the interests of the poor and helpless are identified with the interests of the powerful and wealthy.’ Biblical slavery was ‘such an institution.’ There was no master in the South who would let his slave go hungry, according to Buck. The same, Buck wrote, could not be said of industrial Europe or of ‘the populous cities of the [American] East.’ Slavery may have had its sinful excess, Buck admitted. But those shortcomings were nothing compared to the sort of social upheaval brought on by modern capitalism.³⁷

The type of argument Buck made against free labour has not been lost on historians. With regard to British abolitionism, for example, David Brion Davis’ landmark The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) placed the rise of industrial capitalism at the centre of abolitionist efforts to end the slave trade. Davis rejected the prevailing logic that placed Christian altruism at the centre of abolitionist motivation. Not that Christian impulse was marginal, but rather, Davis saw that the cause of abolitionism was advanced in Britain simultaneously with the rise of a newly formed class of industrial capitalists. Antislavery activists like the Quakers may have abhorred slavery’s oppressive features, Davis wrote, but by his reading, the religious dissent that pushed Britain to end the slave trade in 1807 tacitly affirmed a newly emerging industrial capitalist mode of social relations: ‘Liberation from slavery did not mean freedom to live as one chose, but rather freedom to become a diligent, sober, dependable worker who gratefully accepted his position in society.’ While Davis carefully avoided a simplistic interpretation of British abolitionism, the overwhelming conclusion of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution was that abolitionists, far from achieving the egalitarian aims they claimed to seek, served basically to replace one form of oppressive social relations – slavery – with another: industrial wage labor.³⁸

It is not necessary to accept Davis’ argument,³⁹ but his work is useful in understanding precisely why proslavery clergy were so allergic to antislavery measures in the mid nineteenth century. Like Davis, proslavery divines saw the North’s emerging capitalism as a threat to their slave-driven social order. Part of the reason for this proslavery rejection of free labour had to do with what historian Kenneth Startup has described as a consistent, profound, Southern Christian disdain for ‘mammonism’: Southerners believed ‘that the economic enthusiasm of the day was leading to a deadly indifference toward higher, spiritual things.’ No serious proslavery clergyman doubted that the slave system as it existed was in need of reform, but demands for the generation of more capital stymied any attempts to make slavery more just. By Startup’s assessment, the proslavery rejection of capitalism was only part of a larger proslavery attempt to create a biblically based, just society.⁴⁰

Pendleton, a Christian supporter of free labour, did not agree with proslavery views that slave labour was superior to free labour. Moreover, he did not think, as proslavery advocates did, that God had sanctioned the sort of slavery that existed in the United States. Dissent against slavery on these grounds, however, did not lead Pendleton to join the ranks of immediate abolitionists. For Pendleton, slavery was always a complex matter, laden with complicated factors. He may have opposed slavery, but he even more strongly opposed the work of abolitionists.

Pendleton’s posthumous memoirs, Reminiscences of a Long Life (1891), provide several critical insights regarding why the Baptist minister rejected abolitionism and slavery at the same time. Published just months after his death, Pendleton had written his memoirs over the course of a few months in the winter of 1890–1891. At 79 years of age and in declining health, Pendleton wanted to tell his life’s story in his own words. For the most part Reminiscences dealt with the minister’s ecclesiastical affairs, but the book also provided many interesting anecdotes pertinent to his role as an antislavery activist. Even as Pendleton’s Reminiscences catalogued his view that the eventual ‘overthrow of slavery’ at the end of the Civil War ‘was God’s work,’⁴¹ the Baptist minister did not mean to suggest that he considered all antislavery activity worthwhile. Pendleton wanted his readers to understand clearly that even though he sought slavery’s end, he ‘was never for a moment an Abolitionist.’ If Pendleton’s contemporary or future readers did not inherently understand the problem with abolitionism, he made it plain: There was a

distinction between an ‘Abolitionist’ and an ‘Emancipationist.’ The latter was in favor of doing away with slavery gradually, according to State Constitution and law; the former believed slavery to be a sin in itself, calling for immediate abolition, without regard to consequences.⁴²

There is no simple way to conclude what Pendleton might have meant when he said he was ‘never an abolitionist,’ but in the context of Kentucky emancipationism, it is possible to speculate. Pendleton, who saw ‘consequences’ for his actions, placed himself on the same ideological platform as most of Kentucky’s antislavery activists. They were not radicals. If the words of Pendleton’s colleagues in the movement are any indication, a major problem these conservative antislavery advocates had with abolitionists was their disregard for racial boundaries. The words of the religious figure at the forefront of Kentucky emancipation, Lexington’s Presbyterian pastor Robert J. Breckinridge, were representative and instructive. In a seminal 1833 article, Breckinridge had written that there were two possible solutions to the race problem as he saw it. Free blacks could be ‘admit[ted] all the privileges of whites,’ or Americans could ‘divide the two races totally, by colonizing the free blacks.’ The Presbyterian minister, and most antislavery activists in Kentucky, favoured the latter. Outright egalitarianism would never be achieved without racial integration through ‘amalgamation,’ and that sort of racial mixing was problematic. For his part, Breckinridge maintained that he could not ‘see what good was to be effected, by reducing all races of men to one homogenous mass; … thus reproducing throughout the world, or in any single State, a race different in some physical appearance from all that now exist.’ Rather, to maintain racial autonomy, free blacks should be sent to a climate ‘perfectly fitted to [them], and to nobody else on earth.’ Thus, he wrote, ‘the moral and intellectual condition’ of American blacks would be ‘immediately and greatly improved.’ Blacks would ‘retain in an equal or higher degree in Liberia’ any ‘advantage’ they possessed in the USA. Since blacks held few rights or privileges in antebellum America, the plan seemed appropriate to Breckinridge. In one respect it would benefit the white population in the USA by providing jobs for the nation’s white yeomanry. Furthermore, Breckinridge saw colonization as also benefiting Africa as a population of Christian, civil, formerly enslaved blacks would be introduced to the continent.⁴³

Even though Pendleton never went as far as Breckinridge with this sort of racial theorizing, it can be assumed that the Presbyterian divine represented Kentucky’s antislavery, anti-abolitionist, anti-black populace with such comments, Pendleton included.⁴⁴ While less overt on racial matters, many of Breckinridge’s themes informed Pendleton’s antislavery writings. From September 1847 to June 1848, Pendleton published a series of pro-emancipationist articles under the pen name ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ in the Examiner. In these essays, the Baptist opposed the extension of slavery into the West and called for a program of emancipation, but he also made sure to distance himself from the agenda of more radical abolitionists to the north.⁴⁵ Pendleton generally avoided overtly racial statements, and even appealed to the Declaration of Independence’s line that ‘all men are created equal’ to undermine the racist assumption of black inferiority. ‘Africans are not excepted,’ Pendleton wrote. ‘There is no allusion to their inferiority.’⁴⁶ Still, in the midst of more enlightened argumentation, Pendleton also followed Breckinridge in placing white concerns at the centre of the issue. One essay lamented that slavery perpetuated idleness among Kentucky’s free population and asked: ‘Who’ could ‘not deplore slavery as a great calamity, the effect of which is decidedly unfavorable to the interests of our white population?’⁴⁷ Assertions like these aligned Pendleton closely with the racial ideology of the bulk of Kentucky’s emancipationists.

In addition to such white-centred arguments about slavery, Pendleton also supported other conservative antislavery measures. In April 1849 he attended the state emancipation meeting in Frankfort, and in May he helped lead a meeting of Warren County emancipationists that included Joseph Underwood, the US Senator from Bowling Green. At the meeting, Pendleton joined the others in resolving not to ‘disturb, or to aid others in disturbing the right of masters to their slaves now in being in Kentucky.’ At the same time, they advocated entering a clause into the commonwealth constitution opposing ‘any increase of slaves in this state,’ agreeing that to do so would be ‘highly detrimental’ to Kentucky’s free black population. Furthermore, they agreed to a platform of gradual emancipation connected to the colonization effort.⁴⁸ As these activities and writings indicate, Pendleton’s rejection of abolitionism and acceptance of conservative antislavery put him on an intellectual trajectory that followed the bulk of Kentucky’s conservative emancipationists. The tacit message of his Examiner articles, stated more openly by the Warren County emancipationists, was that Pendleton promoted gradual emancipation connected to colonization, a position laden with a belief in black inferiority. Pendleton muted the racial implications of his gradualist position more than most of his fellow antislavery conservatives, but he could not escape racism altogether.

If abolitionism was a problem because of its disregard for racial ‘consequences,’ however, it presented difficulties beyond simply issues of race. For no small number of Southerners, abolitionism was also laden with notions of religious radicalism. To put it directly, Pendleton’s contempt for the abolitionist tag resonated on another level: the slavery debate had much to do with matters of Christian orthodoxy. For vast numbers of white Southerners who counted themselves as orthodox, abolitionists were seen to be on the wrong side of theological fidelity.

Pendleton must have known from the start of his ministry of all the religious problems slavery posed. Perhaps that is why he worked so hard in the early stages of his ministry to avoid the slavery question as much as possible. From his start in Bowling Green, Pendleton worked to ensure that local slaves would have access to the gospel. His church moved in 1838 to admit slaves into the congregation, and the next year they voted to create a separate ‘Negro congregation’ that would be allowed to gather for worship at the First Baptist Church. Other than these measures, however, Pendleton relegated the matter to a secondary status. Several members of his church held slaves, and it was not a concern in determining who could become church members. The issue rarely made its way into sermons except to affirm that Christian slaveholders had the moral obligation to treat their slaves charitably.⁴⁹

By the mid 1840s, however, Pendleton had no choice but to confront the slavery issue head on. In 1844 he personally observed the events that would lead to the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention. It was then, just a few years before the rise of Kentucky emancipationism, that Pendleton witnessed abolitionist radicalism firsthand. Though all indications suggest that Pendleton never intended to get drawn into religious debates about slavery, he unwittingly found himself unable to avoid the controversy. Pendleton’s antislavery position was still undeveloped in 1844, but his displeasure with abolitionism was already beginning to formulate. That April he travelled to Philadelphia as a delegate to the triennial convention of the Baptist Home Mission Society. Slavery had become a contentious religious issue for the nation’s Baptists. The meeting’s attendees might have agreed in principle with Pendleton’s view that ‘discussion of the [slavery] question in the Home Missionary Society is out of order,’ but that did little to keep the issue from dominating much of the tenor of the conference.⁵⁰ Pendleton’s experience in Philadelphia shaped his religious opinion of abolitionists and contributed to his antislavery conservatism.

Leading up to 1844, Northern abolitionist Baptists had been pushing for the denomination to articulate a denunciation of slaveholding, and they argued that slaveholders should not be missionaries. Ever since the 1840 American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention, a meeting of Northern abolitionists in New York City, sectional tensions had been building. The 1840 Convention produced a treatise entitled ‘An Address to Southern Baptists’ that denied the biblical sanction of slavery and called Baptists in the South to repent for perpetuating the institution. Moreover, the abolitionists demanded that Southerners immediately move toward emancipation or face being cut off from fellowship. Naturally, the ultimatum did not motivate slaveholding Baptists to free their slaves, but only increased friction. In between the Northern and Southern factions, the Home Mission Society attempted to hold a middle ground. At the 1841 meeting of the Society, its executive committee passed a resolution that implored both sides to avoid bringing extra-religious affairs to the centre of Baptist life. Whatever political differences might separate Baptists, the committee urged, they ought to be bound together by a sense of unity shaped by adherence to the same Christian tradition.⁵¹

This spirit of tension marked the 1844 meeting Pendleton attended. As did the leaders of the convention three years prior, Pendleton tried to maintain a neutral stance on the slavery question. Nevertheless, Pendleton’s journal reflected a noticeably negative tone toward the abolitionists at the convention. Pendleton’s record of the event tells of the slavery question being introduced at the convention on 26 April and recounts some of the argumentation. South Carolinian Richard Fuller, according to Pendleton, ‘remarked impressively that there must be a new Bible before it could be proved that slavery is a sin – for where there is no law there is no transgression.’ Moreover, by Pendleton’s estimation, the chief abolitionist spokesman, a Dr. Colver of Boston, was ‘exceedingly rough & uncourteous’ and failed to argue ‘with fairness and magnanimity.’ Despite these opinions, Pendleton refrained from taking sides. Because the Society had not been organized to deal with such ‘extra-constitutional’ questions, there was no reason to debate them. Although Pendleton briefly mentioned another debate over slavery on 29 April and the vote on 30 April that continued to allow ministers from slave states to become missionaries, he provided no further analysis of the matter.⁵²

Clearly Pendleton thought the issue had been tabled, but that fall a group of Alabama Baptists decided to test the resolution. They appealed to the General Convention, asking what it would do if a slaveholder attempted to become a missionary. Though stated cautiously, the executive committee effectively ended its neutral stance when it replied that it would not appoint a slaveholder to such a post. The committee, based in Boston, felt more of a connection to Northern concerns and also believed that the future of the denomination rested in the North. By taking a definitive stance against slavery in late 1844, the members of the General Committee, decisively rent the fabric of Baptist America that had, in the years leading up to their decision, somehow managed to stay together.⁵³

In May 1845 Southerners held a meeting in Augusta, Georgia, to discuss splitting from the national convention and forming a new body comprised of Baptists from the slave states. The Upper South was vastly underrepresented – only one representative from Kentucky attended and no one from Tennessee – although according to historian C. C. Goen, most Baptists in these states agreed in principle with the convention’s purpose but lacked the time to send delegates. Confident of Southern solidarity on the issue, the meeting went forward and formed the Southern Baptist Convention.⁵⁴

Pendleton followed his fellow Southerners into the Southern Baptist Convention, though he had little to say about it in his Reminiscences. Here too, Pendleton’s lack of commentary requires interpretation. His 1891 account of the meeting of the 1844 Home Mission Society, for example, followed almost word-for-word that of his 1844 journal. The reason for this latter silence also has much to do with Pendleton’s dismissal of abolitionist activity and his assessment that they commenced their activities ‘without regard to consequences.’⁵⁵

More than any other American denomination, Baptists maintained a rigid commitment to the autonomy of local congregations. Unlike Protestant counterparts in the Episcopal, Methodist or Presbyterian traditions, Baptists had no authoritative body that exercised congregational oversight. For Baptists, ‘congregational autonomy’ was neither mere lip service nor a simple catchphrase. Baptists like Pendleton believed, as a matter central to the way they practiced their faith, that their Christian identity was an individual matter expressed through the local congregation. Naturally, different practices and interpretations grew from different churches. Historian Philip Mulder has stated the nature of Baptist church relations cogently: ‘The host of people and congregations claiming to be Baptist included a tremendous variety of ideas and rituals, and Baptists managed somewhat to coexist with each other under the guiding principle of church autonomy.’⁵⁶ This view of congregational polity is precisely what made the abolitionists’ raising of the slavery question so offensive to Pendleton. Slavery and like questions of moral and political import were matters to be sorted out in local churches. The Home Mission Society existed to discuss missions, not affairs that were meant to be handled at the congregational level.

Pendleton’s disdain for Northern abolitionist Baptists would not have been limited to their cavalier attitude toward congregational autonomy. Such abolitionists, he believed, also came dangerously close to heterodox views of the Christian religion as a whole. Historian John R. McKivigan has written that Northern Baptists tended to treat the slavery question like their abolitionist counterparts in New School Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Unitarian circles, who were all well known for employing – in differing degrees – what Pendleton would construe as a loose view of Scripture.⁵⁷ Pendleton would have agreed with the position of proslavery Christians, as Anne Loveland documented it: where Southerners once might have looked at abolitionists as being motivated by genuine religious conviction, by the 1830s Southern evangelicals’ ‘perception of the abolitionists changed. They contended that abolitionists had repudiated the church, the Bible, and Christianity, and were motivated by a “political radicalism.”’⁵⁸ In general, to Southern evangelicals, abolitionists during the nineteenth century slowly – but steadily – downplayed the importance of Scriptural authority, and moved instead toward faith in the individual’s ability to decide religious issues.⁵⁹ Statements that placed Scripture above reason, the Bible over an individual’s intuition, and orthodoxy versus liberalism (heresy), therefore, became part and parcel in the slavery debate.

The Southern view of abolitionist heresy relied in many ways on caricature. Many of the evangelical abolitionists – individuals like Lewis Tappan, Jonathan Blanchard and Kentucky’s John G. Fee, to name a few – would have also been hesitant to identify with the theological liberalism of more radical abolitionists. Certainly they blended Bible arguments against slavery with more secular ideas about natural law, but as historian Mitchell Snay has shown, divines on both sides of the slavery argument drew from Scripture and natural law.⁶⁰ To be sure, however, beyond such evangelical abolitionists, there were those abolitionists who fit the proslavery description. William Lloyd Garrison is one such example. Garrison in fact agreed with the proslavery movement and its view that the Bible did sanction slavery. By 1845, however, he concluded that biblical sanction meant not that slavery was right, but that the Bible was wrong. Garrison employed the critique of Enlightenment rationalism to Scripture, arguing, ‘The God, who in America, is declared to sanction the impious system of slavery … is my ideal of the Devil.’ Rather than the authoritative source of truth most Americans saw in the Bible, Garrison read the book to be ‘a lie and a curse on mankind.’ He went further in other essays, claiming that ‘To say everything contained within the lids of the Bible is divinely inspired,’ like the idea that slavery was a necessary part of God’s ordained social order, ‘is to give utterance to a bold fiction, and to require the suspension of the reasoning faculties.’ Although he succeeded in rallying some support within abolitionist circles – Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson all voiced agreement – the lingering effect of Garrison’s anti-biblicism was to alienate from the abolitionist movement many who affirmed the high place of Scripture.⁶¹ For Pendleton, who shared the widespread evangelical conviction in the Bible’s authority and import for the believer, the religious heterodoxy of the Garrisonian wing made abolitionism on the whole unacceptable.

If abolitionism was beyond the pale of Christian orthodoxy for Pendleton, antislavery in any form proved too much for Kentuckians at large in the late 1840s. In 1849 the emancipationist effort fell far short of expectations. The generally proslavery populace voted unambiguously against emancipation throughout the state. Emancipationists did not succeed in getting a single delegate elected to the 1849 constitutional convention. Furthermore, the newly revised constitution upheld the rights of slaveholders and essentially barred free blacks from the commonwealth.⁶²

The defeat hit Pendleton hard. In his memoirs, Pendleton recorded that his ‘spirit sank’ with the failure of the emancipation movement. The cleric lamented that he ‘saw no hope for the African race in Kentucky, or anywhere else without the interposition of some Providential judgment.’⁶³ Furthermore, with Kentucky’s defeat of emancipationism in 1849, as Pendleton counted the many slaveholders in his Bowling Green congregation, the Baptist cleric came very close to accepting a pastorate in Springfield, Illinois, in order to take his family away from the agitation and to raise his children in a free state. His church in Kentucky, however, refused to accept its pastor’s resignation and Pendleton remained at the post for several more years.⁶⁴

The 1850s were no less contentious times for Pendleton or Kentucky. The state continued to experience public dissent against slavery, but it took the Civil War to force its end. In fact, it was not until the United States officially banned slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment that the commonwealth finally moved to outlaw the peculiar institution.⁶⁵ Pendleton, who was a rising talent among Southern Baptists, received an appointment in 1857 as a theology professor at Union University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His antislavery principles did not wane, however, and Pendleton was routinely criticized in public for his position as the sectional conflict intensified. When war broke out, Pendleton feared for his life and fled to the North, accepting a pastorate in Hamilton, Ohio.⁶⁶

From all indications, Pendleton managed to hold his ideological ground through the rest of the antebellum period. Yet, the public literature on Pendleton’s slavery views is scant after the 1850. This does not suggest, as it might with other antislavery Kentuckians, that Pendleton’s racism accelerated or that he became more cynical.⁶⁷ Rather, Pendleton’s activity in the 1840s should be seen as an important moment in the history of religious antislavery, where historians are able to compare individual rhetoric to that of a larger movement. Though Kentucky’s emancipationists did not achieve their aims, Pendleton offers a compelling look at the sorts of difficulties presented by the attempt to maintain a conservative antislavery Christian platform.

That no cleric ever managed to effectively skirt the Bible-slavery dilemma in America has perplexed historians, particularly Mark Noll. He has done the most extended work on the relationship between Bible-reading and slavery and has noted the ‘failed alternatives’ to more literalist interpretations. Among the unsuccessful clergy were conservatives from the Reformed tradition, such as Princeton’s Charles Hodge and Robert J. Breckinridge. Hodge and Breckinridge both attempted to show how slavery might not be evil in and of itself, how the Bible sanctioned it, but how the peculiar institution ought to be ended just the same.⁶⁸ James M. Pendleton was not nearly as prominent as either Hodge or Breckinridge, but he nonetheless contributes to the historical understanding of religious antislavery dissent. The Baptist cleric’s case, in light of Kentucky’s antebellum political culture, adds a new dimension to prevailing understandings of the relationship between Christianity and slavery in nineteenth-century America. Pendleton was devout, sincere in his concerns about slavery, and not a strident racist, but he could not solve the conundrum of slavery in his time and place.

By Luke E. Harlow (Luke Harlow is a PhD candidate at Rice University. Correspondence to: Department of History–MS #42, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251–1892, USA. Email: harlow@rice.edu.)

Source: Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 27, No. 3, December 2006, pp. 367–389 | Year: 2006

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