The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  Even as they proposed ways of relocating black people back to Africa, some white Christians celebrated the flowering of interracial faith in the antebellum era. Much of this growth came from another wave of revivals that swept the nation. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening added droves of new converts to the flock of American Christianity. The Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801 attracted between 10,000 and 20,000 people and became known as “America’s Pentecost.” Territories at the western edge of the American expanse began to turn toward Christianity, fanning the hopes of evangelists for a nationwide Christian revival.

  One of the theological legacies of the Second Great Awakening was postmillennialism, the view that Christ would return only after an extended era of peace and justice. Christians saw it as their duty to usher in this millennium and to prepare for Jesus’s return by reforming society and tamping down its vices. As a result, dozens of new Christian-led social reform organizations sprang into being. These societies addressed issues related to poverty, orphan and widow care, alcoholism, and abolitionism. The loose organization of these societies became known as the “Benevolent Empire.”

  Yet despite energetic efforts at reform, slavery remained the most intractable issue of American life. A majority of white Christians refused to take a definitive stand against race-based chattel slavery, and this complicity plagued the church and created stark contradictions. Segregation and inequality defined most of American Christianity—even in an age of great revivals. For example, many black people attended the Cane Ridge Revival, but they were forced to meet in a separate area apart from the white worshipers.

  One of the most well-known revivalist preachers of the day was Charles Grandison Finney. Finney led Oberlin College, which became the first institution of higher education to accept both women and black people. Finney was an outspoken abolitionist, but he was not a proponent of black equality. He advocated for emancipation, but he did not see the value of the “social” integration of the races. Though he excluded white slaveowners from membership in his congregations, he also relegated black worshipers to particular sections of the sanctuary. Black people could become members in his churches, but they could not vote or hold office.17

  Finney’s stance for abolition but against integration arose from his conviction that social reform would come through individual conversion, not institutional reform. Finney and many others like him believed that social change came about through evangelization. According to this logic, once a person believed in Christ as Savior and Lord, he or she would naturally work toward justice and change. “As saints supremely value the highest good of being, they will, and must, take a deep interest in whatever is promotive of that end. Hence, their spirit is necessarily that of the reformer.”18 This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church’s easy compromise with slavery and racism.

  The antebellum period was a time of compromise and complicity. During this time, many Christians engaged in evangelism to enslaved and freed blacks. The black church grew, laying the foundation for a distinctive tradition that would stand at the center of the black freedom struggle for the next century. Even as slavery became further embedded in American culture, evangelical Christianity became more mainstream. Unwilling to confront the evil of this institution, some churches lost their prophetic voices, and those who did speak up were drowned out by the louder chorus of complicity. Competing understandings of freedom, equality, and belonging in both the country and the congregation would soon explode into Civil War.

  CHAPTER

  5

  DEFENDING SLAVERY AT THE ONSET OF THE CIVIL WAR

  The battles of the Civil War did not just happen in places like Shiloh and Gettysburg. The Bible itself became a battleground. With the onset of the Civil War, the nation faced not only a political and economic crisis but a theological one as well.1

  As historian Mark Noll has written, no single individual characterized the conflict better than Abraham Lincoln.2 When Lincoln was inaugurated for his second and very brief term as president in 1865, a Union victory was on the horizon. Robert E. Lee would formally surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, just a month later. Rather than gloat about his military success, Lincoln’s address struck a somber and reflective tone: “Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.”3 The president concisely summarized the theological tension that lay at the center of the conflict. Was God on the side of the Union or the Confederacy? Did the Bible sanction slavery or oppose it? Who were the righteous warriors in this conflagration? The war decisively ended slavery, but the fighting did not end. The bullets of competing biblical interpretations continued to ricochet across the country.

  This chapter briefly recounts the events leading up to and including the Civil War, with an emphasis on the biblical and theological justifications Christians used to defend slavery and the Confederate cause. It unpacks the concept of sectionalism—the increasing tension between the North and South—over the issue of slavery. As the nation settled into its political identity, the differences between the slaveholding states of the South and the relatively free states of the North became more pronounced. Massive schisms along sectional lines in the major denominations—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—portended the national divide to come. Throughout the conflict, Christians of both the Union and Confederate forces believed that God was on their side.

  TWO FACTS ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR

  The Civil War remains the deadliest war the United States has ever waged. The latest estimates show that between 650,000 and 850,000 people died.4 In the Battle of Gettysburg alone, 51,000 combatants perished. The war began just as technological innovations allowed for deadlier guns and cannons. Yet battle tactics still resembled those used in the Revolutionary War seventy years prior, and leaders adapted poorly to the threats the new weapons posed.

  Disease claimed up to two-thirds of all who perished in the Civil War. Soldiers slept in tents stuffy with unventilated air. They endured cold, damp conditions on their journeys to the battle front. Unsophisticated medical techniques increased the likelihood of death. Dysentery was the most common cause of fatalities, but typhoid fever, pneumonia, small pox, and gangrene could decimate troops as surely as a hail of bullets.5

  Two facts about the Civil War are especially pertinent to our examination of race and Christianity in America: that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that countless devout Christians fought and died to preserve it as an institution. The first fact, that the war was about slavery, was never in dispute during the conflict. The combatants knew what the stakes were. Even if there were additional disputed issues, such as the extent of federal versus state power, the future of slavery in America was paramount. Only after the war, when southerners and their sympathizers sought to give reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat, was slavery’s relevance to the war partially obscured.

  The second fact, that many Christians supported slavery to the extent that they were willing to risk their lives to protect it, has not been fully considered in the American church, even though 150 years have passed since the war. Slavery has always been a profound contradiction at the heart of both the United States and the American church. The Civil War was the climactic, bloody reckoning of this contradiction. The nation, which emphasized liberty as a natural right, made repeated concessions to allow for slavery. The church, which prioritizes the love of God and love of neighbor, capitulated to the status quo by permitting the lifetime bondage of human persons based on skin color. A house divided against itself—with conflicting ideals at its foundation—cannot stand. The antebellum way of life had to fall, and the Civil War was the sledgehammer that knock
ed it down.

  THE NATION’S BLOODIEST WAR AND ITS CAUSES

  Amid the myriad streams that combined to break the dam of national political unity and usher in the Civil War, five events stand out: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, John Brown’s raid in 1859, and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

  In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Even though the Constitution stipulated that enslaved people who escaped to free territories remained in bondage and had to be returned to their masters, this was poorly enforced and often contested in northern states. At the time, California was petitioning to enter the Union as a free state, so legislators struck a compromise. To satisfy southerners, the law included harsher penalties for fugitive slaves. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, free people who failed to assist authorities in recapturing runaways could be fined up to $1,000. The Fugitive Slave Act also made it easier for enslavers to capture fugitive slaves; enslavers simply needed to supply an affidavit to a federal marshal for the capture and return of an individual. Since suspected fugitives had no rights in court, many legally free black people could now be captured and enslaved, often without recourse. The Fugitive Slave Act effectively protected and even expanded slavery nationwide. Black people were never completely safe from capture and enslavement, no matter where they were. Antislavery advocates expressed outrage that the federal government had compromised with southern slave owners.

  Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered the uneasy truce between slave states and free states. This act permitted the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. The act effectively nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and soon Kansas became a battle ground between slavery and antislavery forces. Settlers on each side of the debate rushed into the territory in hopes of determining its fate concerning slavery. Proslavery politicians won the first election after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but antislavery advocates accused them of fraud and unilaterally declared the results void. Armed groups attacked one another, and the territory became known as “Bloody Kansas” because of the casualties. The nation was on edge, and battle lines began to form.

  Three years after the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, the Supreme Court considered the case of a man named Dred Scott. Scott thought he had a good legal case when he sued for his freedom. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1795, Scott had labored for his master in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Scott sued when his mistress refused to let him buy his own freedom and that of his wife and daughter. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled seven to two against him. Writing the majority opinion, Judge Roger Taney stated that black people were of “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” Taney went on to explain that the Constitution did not have black people in mind when it outlined the rights and duties of citizens. Instead, black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”6 This decision effectively closed courts to enslaved blacks. They could not sue for their freedom or pursue justice through the court system, and once again the American legal system had declared black people to be something less than fully human. The Dred Scott decision left no question in the minds of antislavery activists that the federal government, especially under the leadership of President James Buchanan, planned to extend and protect slavery across the growing nation.

  Some abolitionists, frustrated by these events and the growing expansion of slavery, advocated extreme measures. John Brown, a white man who abhorred slavery, was a man of action. Brown had led raids during the “Bloody Kansas” days. He was convinced that slavery could only be overcome through violent means, and he was prepared to lead an insurgency against the government. Brown formed a small party of both black and white men, including his three sons, and they raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what became West Virginia. Brown and his men successfully captured the armory, but within two days a force led by Robert E. Lee killed most of the men and captured Brown. The abolitionist was hanged a few weeks later. Brown’s raid further escalated tensions between slavery and antislavery citizens, and it foreshadowed and fed the violent confrontation that would take place just over a year later.

  In 1860, voters elected Abraham Lincoln, a Republican committed to limiting slavery’s expansion, as president of the United States. This was the final event that pushed southerners to openly talk of secession and war, if necessary. Yet despite the anger of southern politicians, Lincoln was far from a racial egalitarian. He objected to the expansion of slavery, but he was not initially interested in abolishing it, nor did he advocate for civil or social equality for black people. During a series of political debates against Stephen Douglas in Illinois in 1858, Lincoln carefully explained, “I am not nor have I ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”7 The president, later hailed as the “Great Emancipator,” made it clear that abolitionists who opposed the institution of slavery could also be antiblack and even racist. At one point Lincoln invited five black leaders to the White House to discuss a colonization plan that would send freed black people to Liberia, Haiti, or Panama.8 As we have seen, colonization was an easy way for white people to skirt the issue of white supremacy. Rather than combatting racism, why not simply send people of other races far, far away?

  If anyone today still doubts whether the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, they need only to read the declarations issued by the Confederate states upon their secession from the Union. With Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven states quickly seceded from the Union with South Carolina leading the way. South Carolina’s leaders clearly explained their reasons for withdrawing: “Those [non-slaveholding] States have assume[d] the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution.” South Carolina and the other states that withdrew from the United States considered slavery a matter of personal property ownership, and citing Article IV, they saw slavery as an institution explicitly protected by the Constitution. Yet slavery was more than simply a legal issue; it was a moral and spiritual concern for the South as well. South Carolina’s leaders lamented that northern states “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.”9

  Mississippi was the second state to separate from the Union, and they made their position on slavery even more explicit. The legislators explained, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Yet again, the chattel principle came into play as Mississippi’s leaders used financial arguments to support slavery. In addition, they posited that the biology of black people uniquely suited them for slave labor because “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”10

  After the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, four more states joined the Confederacy, and the schism was complete. Yet another split was happening as well—not between states but in the American church. Decades before the nation split into Union and Confederate sides, the dilemma of slavery had already frayed the unity of the American church. The three of the most influential denominations at the time—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—all divided and fought over whether Christians could own slaves and remain in good standing. Although each group split under slightly different circumstances, ultimately it was the issue of slavery that divided churches.

  METHODISTS SPLIT OVER SLAVEHOLDING BISHOPS

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the possession of slaves by a white man in the antebellum South was rather unremarkable. What made James Osgood Andrew stand out was the fact that he was a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), a denomination that had opposed slavery since their founding in 1784. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, found slavery appalling. “It cannot be,
that either war, or contract, can give any man such a property in another as he has in sheep and oxen. Much less is it possible, that any child of man, should ever be born a slave,” he said.11 Although it was far from advocating for racial equality, this antislavery stance—along with Wesley’s emphasis on revivalism, interracial camp meetings, a swift ordination process, and an appeal to the non-elite classes—initially attracted black Christians such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones to the denomination.

  Despite the Methodists’ original opposition to slavery, as the denomination grew more socially conservative, views shifted, especially in the South. In southern states Methodist ministers became more comfortable with slavery and accommodated their preaching and practices to its presence. In 1808, the quadrennial General Conference determined that annual regional conferences could decide for themselves whether local Methodists could buy and sell black people. This led to an uneasy tension between Northern and Southern Methodists, a tension that continued to increase through the mid-nineteenth century with the surge of abolitionist sentiment among many Methodists.