12/31/2023 0 Comments Did francis scott key own slaves![]() ![]() Even in Southern states where a greater number in the faith held slaves, their activities led to increased manumissions. Even before the American Revolution, the most famous of the mid- and late eighteenth-century Quaker reformers, John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Lay, and later Benjamin Lundy began to publish their opinions and raise the issue of human bondage at Quaker meetings, largely in Pennsylvania. The pietism of the Quakers, a radically egalitarian Protestant sect, asserted the love of God for every human being, regardless of color, sex, or station in life. Both movements arose in England and America during the Age of Enlightenment-the eighteenth century. That impulse sprang from two main sources: the theology and practice of Quakerism and the emergence of an aggressive, interdenominational evangelicalism. The cause of immediate emancipation, as the abolitionists came to define it, had a different germ of inspiration from those Enlightenment ideals that Jefferson had articulated: the rise of a fervent religious reawakening just as the new Republic was being created. The Two-Nation Emergence of Antislavery Evangelicalism Northern legislatures freed most of the slaves in their states by the late 1820s. After all, slavery was practiced in the Northern states, though only in relatively small numbers. ![]() You can ask students why the free and slave states did not go their separate ways even before the writing of the Constitution. Yet even those slaveholders who felt a twinge of conscience feared insurrection might emerge from any massive effort at manumission. Seldom questioning its morality, Southerners were used to a system of labor that had been a way of life since early colonial days. Northerners did not want to interfere with slavery in the South. Most Americans failed to see such a discrepancy. Of course, some Southern slaveholders, including George Washington, recognized the discrepancy between the ideal of equality and its violation. Most students probably assume that the antislavery crusade that culminated in the Civil War was largely an outgrowth of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed, “All men are created equal.” Yet a nation of states of which one-half held African Americans in bondage did not fulfill that noble sentiment. This development led directly into the sectional crisis of 1860 and the war that followed. Eventually the antislavery cause with its strong religious support helped to create the Republican party in the 1850s. Out of this fresh religious doctrine, called Arminianism, grew a movement that included the plea for the freedom of all of God’s human creatures, especially the Southern slaves. Growing out of the Great Awakening, these Protestants, largely in New England, were inspired less by earlier Calvinistic doom and gloom theology than by concepts of human betterment under God’s grace and His gift of free will. In both cases, evangelical Christians were most especially influential when pressing their moral issues forward into the public arena. So it was, too, in the years before the Civil War broke out. The religious affiliation of politicians and the religious makeup of voting constituencies are much in the news these days. Students reading about the coming of the Civil War will find the topic of religion and abolition more interesting than they imagined. ![]() Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University Professor Emeritus, University of Florida, and The Religious Origins of Manifest Destinyĭivining America is made possible by grants from the Lilly Endowment and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Religion in the Civil War: The Northern Perspective American Abolitionism and Religion, Divining America, TeacherServe©, National Humanities CenterĮvangelicalism & the Second Great Awakening ![]()
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