Religion and Society in America Week 6 – Lecture 2 “Antislavery Reform, Secession, and Societal...

Religion and Society in America

Week 6 – Lecture 2

“Antislavery Reform, Secession, and Societal Divides” – Part I

Antislavery Reform, Secession and Societal Divides – Part I

• Introduction: The Persistent Memory of War

• The “Secession Crisis”: Locating the Importance of Slavery Arguments

• Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery Reform

• Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public Sentiment

Introduction: The Persistent Memory of War

• Memorializing the war: North and South

• Battle flag issues – license plates, state flags, college campuses

• Holidays – Lee, Jackson, King Day

• Symbolic use of flags by hate groups


• Naturalization Test Questions for Applicants

• “An applicant for naturalization must demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history and of the principles and form of government in the United States…”

• Applicants asked 10 questions from a list of 25


• Question #14 - The Civil War was fought over what important issues?


• Answer #14 – “Slavery or States Rights”• In general if one asks a Northerner what was the

principal issue they remark the former; Southerners offer the latter

• What is historically accurate? Are these the only issues?

• More importantly for us, how do these issues relate to religion?

• What is the relationship between church and state in mid-19th Century America?


• William H. Seward (1801 – 1872)• He stirred controversy and antagonized some

anti-foreign and anti-Catholic elements of the Whig party when he supported the demands of Catholics to have their children taught in public schools by teachers speaking the same language and sharing the same faith

• Increasingly interested in antislavery reform.• Congressman and Secretary of State under

Lincoln


• Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858. Seward suggests, They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”


• As the New York Tribune later announced, "We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”

• Look to the issues discussed during the “Secession Crisis” and the relationship of Antislavery reform in shaping the national sentiment in 1861

The Secession Crisis: Locating the Importance of Slavery Arguments

• Scholars efforts to explain “historic causation”

• Differing ideologies, separate cultures, clashing economics, blundering and paranoid leaders, failed political parties, conflicting notions of honor, etc.


• “Almost all historians recognize the central role that the institution of slavery and the concept of states’ rights played in fostering disunionist sentiment in the Deep South. There is no way to avoid these two factors, in part because the secession conventions and Southern political leaders referred to them constantly in their efforts to explain why their states were leaving the Union.” Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion


• What is the “Secession Crisis”?

• Election of Abraham Lincoln – November, 1860

• The South hotly debates the meaning of election and merits of secession

• December 20, 1860 – South Carolinians meet and declare Secession followed by the “Deep South” or “Lower South”


• April 12, 1861 – Confederates open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC

• Response of Federal Armies precipitates the secession of the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas)


• Meanwhile in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives of the Lower South meet to draft a constitution on February 4, 1861

• Representatives from only 6 of the nation’s 15 slave states were represented (SC, GA, AL, MS, FL, LA)

• Preliminary constitution of the Confederacy drafted in four days

• February 8, 1861 – twelve man committee headed by Robert B. Rhett appointed to create a complete document


• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy declare?• States’ Rights• Preamble – “more perfect union” is replaced by provision the states

were acting in their “sovereign and independent” capacities to create “a permanent federal government.”

• Supremacy of states’ rights not complete or total, however• Required oath of office for representatives to uphold constitution

and national government’s laws• No state could independently ally or confederate with another state

or power• No coining of money independently• No mention of the right of secession explicitly within document


• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy declare?• Slavery• No national law could impinge on “the right of property in

negro slaves”• Preservation of slavery in territories to the West and

South• “Dred Scott institutionalized” – right of owners to take

slaves in such territories• Assurance for the property rights of slaveholders

regardless of the state’s current legal position concerning slavery

• Advocates to include a provision calling for the revival of the foreign slave were rebuffed


• Secession documents of state conventions reveal Southern fears about abolitionists

• Abolitionist conviction cut to the heart of the political, social, and moral convictions of much of the Southern leadership

• Raises questions concerning the persistent debate about religion and politics

• Some examples:


• Robert Toombs of the Georgia Convention – “For twenty years past, the Abolitionists and their allies in the Northern states have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions and to excite insurrection and servile war among us.” Toombs argued the Constitution would be nothing but “parchment rights” in the “treacherous hands” of Republicans whose “avowed purpose is to subject our society, and subject us, not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.”


• Mississippi Convention document’s Declaration of Immediate Causes read – “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. There is no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the union, whose principles had been subverted to work our ruin.” It declared the Northern abolitionist a majority who “advocates Negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.”


• February 18, 1861 – Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address delivered in Montgomery makes no mention of the institution of slavery only stating the seceded states had determined the “government created by that compact [1776] should cease to exist.”


• March 21, 1861 Georgian and now Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens provided Southerners in Savannah a striking alternative view of the South compared to the argument [or non-argument] presented in Davis’s inaugural: The “new Constitution has put a rest forever all the agitating questions relating to…the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, he asserted, believed “that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically…Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error..”


• Stephens continued by stating “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Stephens concluded stating the Confederacy was “the first Government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to the nature and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society.”

Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery Reform

• Society of Friends (Quakers)• Proclaim the universality of God’s love and

equality of all humanity as recipients of divine love.

• Hold that physical coercion is an act of evil and unjust in any society

• Colonization Society – founded in 1816 by Robert Finley a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey and other influential men. Loose structural organization allows colonizers to appeal to a diversity of interests

View of Monrovia – 1856 24th Annual Report of the Colonization Society

Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery Reform

• Encouraging developments for Colonization in early 19th Century• Congress’s prohibition of the slave trade in 1808• The debates of the Virginia legislature concerning colonization in

1816, state bans on the importation of slaves• A spike in the number of private manumissions in the upper South• Henry Clay, the leader of the National Republican Party

incorporated the scheme of colonization into his party’s platform. • Evangelicalism with its emphasis on personal accountability for sin

coupled with the emotionally charged forum of revivalism provides an opening for the abolitionist message to take hold in wider circles

Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public Sentiment

• Shortly following the debates by the Virginia legislature over slavery in 1832, William Lloyd Garrison published his Thoughts on African Colonization

• The work suggested the principle of melioration through the removal of blacks was “a libel upon humanity and justice--a libel upon republicanism--a libel upon the Declaration of Independence--a libel upon Christianity.”


• Garrison’s words were without compromise. No longer, he exclaimed, could the institution of slavery be dismissed as the remnant of a foreign oppressor—the claim of James Monroe—the imposition of international trade—the assertion of William Thorton —or an “insurmountable barrier” of humanity—the reflections of Thomas Jefferson.

• This critique gave shape to those advocating immediate abolition by its resolute belief that contemporary Americans were responsible for the continuation of slavery and this was a sin.


• More importantly, Garrison forwarded the novel assertion that instant uncompensated emancipation without repatriation was guaranteed by the semi-religious principles of the Declaration of Independence.


• The following year the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded by former colonization advocates Arthur and Lewis Tappan, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. Now for a new generation of reformers, immediate abolition and black equality was the only logical measure that would truly redeem the nation.

• The society and its largely Quaker constituency renounced the use of “all carnal weapons” to accomplish these directives instead encouraging the abolition of slavery through “the potency of truth” and the “power of love.”


• Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932)

• Born in Philadelphia an orthodox Quaker

• Took up the cause of abolition in her teens

• 1856 – Contributed to Garrison’s Liberator

• Goes on a speaking tour attracting large crowds and catches the attention of well-known female abolitionists such as Hannah Longshore and Lucretia Mott


• 5,000 greet her in New York City

• Lectured on the rights of women and African Americans by 1860s

• 1863 – takes up a tour for Republican candidates winning over large crowds

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