Ending Slavery

1For an increasing number of scholars, the movement against slavery in Britain and in the United States was not only a ‘social movement,’ it was one of the first, if not the very first. In a passage on British antislavery, Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, authors ofContentious Politics, have noted that ‘the social movement as we know it . . . emerged through episodes such as antislavery.’1InThe Slave’s Cause, Manisha Sinha has contended that abolition in the United State was ‘a model of activism’ and ‘a template’ for future radical social movements.2 In 2002, in TheTransformation of American Abolitionism, Richard S. Newman had also treated abolitionism in the United States as a social movement: ‘abolitionism became the first social movement to so completely transform itself.’3 The book focuses on the period between the late eighteenth century and 1840 and provides an analysis of the way abolitionist strategies evolved over the decades preceding the passage of the thirteenth amendment in 1863. Newman’s analysis of the transformation of the movement was also meant to modify our interpretation of the fight against slavery, which for a long time had exclusively been referred to as a ‘reform’ movement largely inspired by the evangelical revivals of the nineteenth century. Without denying the importance of religion, the historian proposed a new perspective because ‘[h]istorians ha[d] long known that religion was the primary motivator for generations of abolitionists. However, this focus on motivation has often pulled scholars’ attention away from what abolitionists did and how their activities shifted over time.’ Bertram Wyatt-Brown was one of the most prominent representatives of the trend which placed religion first. For the author ofLewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery, ‘the abolitionist movement was primarily religious in its origins, its leadership, its language, and its methods of reaching the people.’4

2For a little more than two decades now, sociologists and political scientists have theorized the connection between religion and social movements, and underlined the structural and ideological features they share in terms of mobilization and empowerment.5 In the field of the sociology of religion, Rhys H. Williams has emphasized that ‘religion and communities form natural bases for social activism’ and defined religion as a ‘mobilizing force,’ noting ‘its affinity for motivating people to try and change the world.’6 As for the sociology of social movements, following Jeffrey Hadden, it identifies religious movements as a subcategory with endogenous, exogenous and generative variables—endogenous when efforts are made to change the internal character of a religion, exogenous when efforts are made to change the environment in which the religion resides, generative when new religions are introduced into the culture.7 Because abolitionism contained a powerful critique of slaveholding Christianity by Christians, but also because abolitionists aimed to remove slavery from society on the ground that slavery was a ‘sin,’ it can be argued that the abolitionist movement was both an endogenous and exogenous religious movement. The fact that abolitionism also fostered new attitudes to religion and encouraged the emergence of alternative systems of beliefs, and even secular forms of religion, makes it generative to a degree.8

3In this chapter, I first delve a little deeper into some of the historiographical reasons for the persistence of the idea that American abolitionism was ‘primarily religious.’ I then show that an examination of eighteenth and nineteenth-century sources makes it possible to move beyond the argument that abolitionism in the United States was a social movement with a significant religious component and contend that it was a religious social movement mixing endogenous, exogenous and generative variables. I do not try to distinguish between the first two variables, which in many cases were inextricably connected. Instead, in order to better grasp the dynamics of the intertwining of abolitionist activism and religion, and thus assess the crucial role religion played in the abolitionist movement, its success and its failures, I propose two approaches. The first one is interested in what religion did to abolition. It identifies rationales, obstacles, and signs of change, and thus attempts to appraise the efficacy as well as the limits of the religious vision. The second one analyzes what abolition did to religion, or, in other words, the ways it changed religion. Stressing the generative variable of the movement, it evaluates the extent to which abolition shaped new attitudes to and new understandings of religion as the movement gained momentum in the late eighteenth century. In conclusion, I suggest that abolition coalesced with secularizing processes already underway in the early Republic to produce long-term religious transformations in the United States.

4The interpretation of abolition as primarily religious starts with the way a number of monographs, edited volumes and biographies on antislavery and abolition published in the United States have been entitled, and consequently framed. Since the 1960s, several book titles have showcased the religious nature of the abolitionist movement by identifying abolitionists as saints (Friedman 1982), holy warriors (Stewart 1976; 1997), and prophets (McCarthy et al. 2006).9 Similarly, a number of biographies have hammered home the notion that abolitionists were fervent believers and, more often than not, professing evangelical Christians steeped in Biblical rhetoric. Two of those areTheodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom by Benjamin P. Thomas (1950) and Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s aforementioned biography of Lewis Tappan,Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Wyatt-Brown 1969; 1997).10 Mark Perry’s 2001 book on the Grimké sisters, who converted to the Quaker faith in the 1820s, bears a title based on a line from the book of Isaiah,Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. In October 2018, David Blight’s ‘definitive’ biography of Douglasswas released under the titleFrederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.11

5This may well originate from book marketing strategies and titles that sell. It can, however, be pointed out that at least until the early 2000s there was a general tendency among scholars to emphasize the influence of the series of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening and most prominently of evangelical Protestantism on the various reform movements of the nineteenth century, and on abolitionism in particular.12 What has been put forward is what has been called the ‘united evangelical front’ or Benevolent Empire, a catch-all phrase used to refer to the large number of benevolent societies which were created in the early nineteenth-century, such as the American Bible Society and the American Colonization Society, both founded in 1816, and later anti-slavery societies.13 For Donald G. Mathews, the Second Great Awakening was ‘an organizing process,’ which ‘helped to give meaning and direction to people suffering in various degrees from the social strains of a nation on the move into new political, economic and geographical areas.’14 In 1978, William G. McLoughlin argued that awakenings could be conceived of as ‘revitalizations of culture,’ and asserted that ‘through most of the century (. . .) revivalism was the most powerful engine in the processes of American church growth, frontier acculturation, and benevolent reform.’15 The Second Great Awakening has consequently been interpreted as being closely intertwined with the abolitionist movement, in particular because of its postmillennialist component. It was believed that Christ’s Second Coming would take place after (and not before) one thousand years of peace and harmony, and consequently that Americans ought to reform society and individuals in preparation for the advent. According to Daniel Walker Howe, inWhat has God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, the faith of nineteenth-century reformers was ‘strengthened by the expectation that they worked to hasten the millennium and the Second Advent of Christ.’16

6InAwash in a Sea of Faith, published in 1990, Jon Butler described antebellum America as ‘a spiritual hothouse’ and proposed that ‘we attach less importance to Puritanism as the major force in shaping Christianity and more importance to the religious eclecticism that has long been prominent.’17 Butler urged historians to look beyond Puritanism but also evangelical Christianity to make room for all kinds of beliefs, Christian and non-Christian, and that included rationalism, magic and the occult. In 2002, in ‘The Religion Problem in Modern American History,’ in which he discussed the quasi-absence of religion in surveys and textbooks dealing with the period after 1870, Butler underlined that ‘so much antebellum reform is now traced to Protestant evangelicalism—from abolitionism to women's rights, education, and, still more, temperance—that we may undervalue secular sources for those movements.’18

7With the relative decline of the evangelical thesis, which posits the centrality of evangelical Christianity in making sense of ‘the unfolding of American society,’ many a scholar have followed Jon Butler’s and Richard S. Newman’s lead.19 Academic accounts of nineteenth-century movements, and of abolitionism in particular, have been secularized. Manisha Sinha’s book,The Slave’s Cause, exemplifies the trend toward a decentering of the evangelical narrative. It is not that Manisha Sinha ignores religion, but her account, which draws on Marxist ideology, focuses on abolition as ‘a radical, democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor’ and starts with slave resistance.20 Manisha Sinha is interested in telling an ‘integrated story,’ which emphasizes continuity rather than rupture, cooperation rather division (Sinha 2016: 3). Hence in the introduction, she writes: ‘The abolitionist movement married the black struggle against slavery to progressive white evangelicalism and to the iconoclasm of more secular reformers’ (Sinha 2016: 2).

8Abolition was not primarily religious, but compelling religious motives, insights, interpretations, and metaphors suffused the abolitionist struggle. For Sinha, in the eighteenth century, ‘blacks began the long process of making Christianity their own, developing a liberation theology that identified with the ancient Israelites as the chosen people of God and the story of the Exodus’ (Sinha 2016: 28). Among Whites, those who were in favor of the abolition of slavery tapped into their own religiosity and religious themes to uphold antislavery views, target slaveholding Christianity and redefine the meaning of liberty. Religion is central to the history of abolitionism, because it fostered resilience, resistance and rebellion among enslaved African Americans, while providing white and black men and women with theological, organizational, rhetorical, human resources for a powerful critique of slavery. It is also because religion was very important to contemporary Americans, even more so during the Civil War and in the years preceding and following it (Butler 1990: 3).

9Many early abolitionists were white Quakers; the first antislavery society, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was founded by Philadelphian Quakers. In the colony of Pennsylvania, however, many Quakers were slaveholders. As two historians have shown, in the 1680s, ‘the newly established Quaker colony was no haven for blacks,’ and enslaved people in Pennsylvania gained their freedom by degrees.21 It was only in 1776 that the Society of Friends declared that it would disown slaveholders, four years before the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was passed by the Pennsylvania legislature (Nash and Roderlund 1991: 90). Slavery, however, had been condemned for violating Quaker beliefs as early as 1688, when four Germantown colonists voiced their protest against ‘the traffic of men-body’ and called for an immediate end of slavery. In a petition which went up to the Yearly Meeting of Philadelphia, where it was read and dismissed, Garret Hendricks, Derick op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius and Abraham op Den Graef emphasized the necessity to follow the Golden Rule—which they called a saying, but actually draws on Matthew 7:12: ‘There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are.’ The authors also pointed out the contradiction between slaveholding and Christian principles such as the condemnation of adultery.22

10The founder of Quakerism, the Englishman George Fox, never argued for emancipation or even for the end of the slave trade. Nevertheless, in the early 1670s, he spent some time in Barbados where he became aware of the reality of slavery. In 1676, inGospel Family-Order, he expressed concern over the morality and the well-being of enslaved people, calling for an amelioration of their spiritual and living conditions.23 Brycchan Carey traces the origins of Quaker anti-slavery rhetoric to a letter Fox sent in 1657, in which the latter insisted that ‘the gospel is preached to every creature under heaven; which is the power that giveth liberty and freedom, and is glad tidings to every captivated creature under the whole heavens.’24 Although the letter did not call for emancipation or abolition, it could be interpreted in a radical manner, which was what Anthony Benezet and John Woolman probably did. In 1754, both collaborated on the drafting of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’sEpistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves, ‘the strongest antislavery statement yet issued by the yearly meeting,’ according to Geoffrey Plank.25 In 1756, Woolman, the author ofSome Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes published two years before, made the decision to spread his abolitionist message to his fellow friends and to dedicate himself to antislavery. His journal entry for May 9, 1757 reproduces a conversation he had with one slaveholding Friend in Virginia, to whom he said: ‘men having power too often misapplied it; that though we made slaves of the negroes, and the Turks made slaves of the Christians, I believe[d] that liberty [is] the natural right of all men equally.’26

11The Quaker stance against slavery was theologically based on the priesthood of all believers.27 Quakers emphasized spiritual equality and claimed that everyone had access to the ‘inner light,’ in other words God’s own spirit (Carey 2012: 8). Moral suasion, which was promoted by pacifist and apolitical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, whose mother was a devout Baptist, came from the Quaker tradition. Abolitionist Quakers included Paul Cuffee, a Native American black sea captain and an early advocate for colonization with a pan-African vision, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, James and Lucretia Coffin Mott,Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Isaac T. Hopper, Levi Coffin, to name but a few. ‘Slavery is a crime against God and man,’ wrote Angelina Grimké, in herAppeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836). Moreover, the first abolitionist papers were created by Quakers—Charles Osborn, who founded the Philanthropist in 1817, Elihu Embree, the Emancipator in 1820, Benjamin Lundy, theGenius of Universal Emancipation in 1821.

12Among other Protestants, revivalism undoubtedly fueled the desire to reform society and sustained the optimistic notion that religion could achieve that goal. In 1834, Amos A. Phelps, pastor of Pine-Street Church in Boston and an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, published hisLectures on Slavery and its Remedy. The work included a ‘Declaration of Sentiments,’ which condemned both slavery and colonization and was signed by 124 ministers ‘of various denominations’ from eleven different states.28 In the ‘Address to clergymen,’ Phelps encouraged his colleagues to pray for the extinction of slavery, to preach ‘for the express purpose of arousing the public mind to thesin of [slavery],’ and ‘toinvestigate the subject,’ appealing to their responsibility and their capacity ‘to exert an extensive influence in (. . .) controlling public sentiment’ (Phelps 1834: 14). Another case in point is Charles Grandison Finney, the North’s most visible promoter of evangelical Christianity. In hisLectures onRevivals of Religion, published in 1835, Finney proclaimed that ‘slavery is, pre-eminently, the sin of the church, to which all denominations have consented.’29 In 1837, Theodore Dwight Weld, one of Finney’s converts, an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society too, and Angelina Grimké’s future husband, challenged the idea that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery. InThe Bible against Slavery, using the historical-critical method imported from Europe, he summarized the objections to the classic pro-slavery arguments, such as the curse of Ham, pointed out that slavery violated the eight and tenth commandments and forcefully argued that in the Mosaic system, persons made servants ‘became servants of their own accord,’ that they ‘were paid for their labor,’ and that they were not considered property.30 Weld, a postmillennialist, was convinced that slavery was an evil in itself and that the ‘evil of slavery,’ in Garrison’s words, had to be urgently eradicated.31 So was Maria Weston Chapman, a co-founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and a vocal Garrisonian, who in ‘Advent of Christ,’ the first song ofSongs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom, proclaimed:

The Lord will come! A dreadful form,
With wreath of flame and robe of storm:
Master and slave shall find
An equal judge of human kind.32

13For African American men and women, many of whom were actively involved in the revivals, the Christian faith was often a catalyst for both resistance and action. David Walker warned of divine punishment on America for the sins of oppression in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.33 Following in Walker’s footsteps, Maria W. Stewart grounded her claims for social justice in Biblical exegesis.34 Stewart was among the first women to speak publicly in front of a mixed audience and it was her evangelical faith which both emboldened her and provided justification for speaking out and standing for African Americans’ rights. In ‘Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,’a pamphlet written after Walker’s death and which Garrison published inThe Liberator in 1831, she claimed:

Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am firmly persuaded that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, He is able to take me to himself, as He did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.35

14Maria W. Stewart did indeed suffer. Because her public appearances were considered highly inappropriate, she was confronted with a great deal of opposition to the point that she decided to leave Boston in 1833. She, however, pursued her political activities in New York, and then in Baltimore, where she dedicated herself to the education of black children (Sinha 2016: 267–268; Richardson 1987: 27).

15In revolts and armed rebellion among enslaved African Americans, spiritual perspectives merged with secular objectives. Religion frequently provided ‘a framework through which [enslaved people] perceived what happened around them’ as James Sidbury has argued about Gabriel’s conspiracy.36 Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith who planned a major rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, and his fellow conspirators were inspired by Gabriel’s brother’s repeated references to Exodus in which God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and by the notion that they were God’s chosen people. Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter and a leader within the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, preached that God would free Africans from their captivity on American plantations. In 1822, he and a group of followers were accused of plotting a slave revolt and sentenced to death. On August 21, 1831, in Southampton, Virginia, enslaved Baptist preacher Nat Turner and his co-conspirators killed fifty-five Whites, before being tried and executed.37 In hisConfessions, published by Thomas Ruffin Gray, a lawyer, shortly after his execution, Turner claimed that the Spirit had appeared to him several times. He had visions, saw ‘white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle,’ and heard voices instructing to mount an insurrection against his white oppressors.38

16The abolitionist movement also disrupted traditional Christianity and transformed the way many related to their church and community, to the scriptures, as well as to the intimacy of their faith. Contrary to popular belief, in antebellum America, not all Quakers were partisans of the immediate abolition of slavery, or even willing to include African Americans in their meetings, and many Quakers shared with other Protestants their distrust of abolitionists. Abby Kelley Foster, Isaac and Amy Post, Lucretia Mott ‘in no way represented the typical “Friend”,’ as Ryan Jordan puts it inSlavery and the Meeting House.39 Among the Quakers who held anti-slavery views, many, like Abby Kelley Foster, left their meetings and several were disowned (Jordan 2007: 45). In 1841, the New York Yearly Meeting disowned the Hicksites Isaac T. Hopper, James S. Gibbons and Charles Marriot for their involvement in the publication of theNational Anti-Slavery Standard, the organ of the Anti-Slavery Society.40 Abolitionism created a great deal of tension among Quakers at a time when, after the Hicksite schism in 1827 over the importance of the inner light, unity became the Friends’ major concern.41 As A. Glenn Crothers has shown, effort to restore harmony within the community was often made at the expense of broader social reforms, including the struggle against slavery.42

17Within other Christian churches, there were painful divisions too. As Ira Berlin observed, there was an ‘evangelicals’ antislavery moment’ even in the South, which eventually passed: ‘The preachers’ opposition to slavery faltered under the pressure from planters and from their own quest for respectability.’43 The issue of slavery split the churches into two or more branches. In 1844, one of the youngest denominations, the Methodist Church, ceased to be a single church. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South came into existence, independently from the Northern churches and from the two black bodies—the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, formed in Philadelphia in 1816, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, founded in New York in 1821. Abolitionists founded the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1841. As for the Baptists, who had been operating as a national entity only since 1814, they separated into northern and southern bodies in 1845. Among the Presbyterians, the North-South schism officially took place in 1861 only, but the church had been torn by internal divisions since the mid-1830s. The Episcopalian Church remained passive and the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn slavery as sinful.44

18Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison are examples of Protestants whose faith changed under the influence of abolition.45 For both, some have argued, abolition was a sort of religion, and like other abolitionists, they were vocal in their criticism of Christianity. Douglass, whose complex religious views continue to puzzle scholars, exposed the hypocrisy of ‘Slaveholding Christianity’ in the appendix of his first autobiography,Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and expressed religious doubts inMy Bondage and My Freedom (1855).46 As for Garrison, he was an evangelical Christian and a fervent believer—The Liberator had a ‘Moral’ column with strong religious overtones—whose spiritual beliefs evolved throughout the decades. Faced with the hostility of many of the nation’s clergy, he grew more and more critical of the ‘pro-slavery priesthood’ and called for ‘come-outerism,’ namely the withdrawal from churches deemed proslavery (Blight 2018: 185). He also questioned several points of doctrine, including the sanctity of the Sabbath. In the 1840s, his estrangement from the clergy led him to ‘freely investigate the foundations upon which his personal beliefs were based,’ as William van Deburg has observed (van Deburg 1975: 235). In particular Garrison, with Isaac and Amy Post’s help and encouragement, explored the possibilities of Spiritualism, notably after his wife Helen’s death, hoping to communicate with her. So did such abolitionists as Sojourner Truth, the Grimké sisters, La Roy Sunderland, Lydia Maria Child, Gerrit Smith and Harriet Beecher Stowe.47

19Abolitionism fueled as it was both by the search for religious perfection and challenges to the traditional Christian moral model encouraged critics of slavery to question their faith, their churches, and their religious practices. Some Americans invented new ways of reconciling religion and their views of mankind within utopian communities inspired by Thomas Paine’s political deism and the socialism of Robert Owen and Fourier. The Society of Universal Inquiry and Reform created in Clinton County, Ohio, in 1842 by a group of Garrisonian evangelicals, Hicksite Quakers and freethinkers provided the structure for the creation of eight communities, including Skaneateles founded by John A. Collins in the State of New York, and Prairie Home founded by John O. Wattles in Ohio. The purpose was, according to the wording of the society’s constitution, to organize a social system ‘in accordance to God’s government by which equality of rights and interests shall be secured to all.’48 The communities were short-lived and none survived after 1846, but, as Auréliane Narvaez has argued, they stimulated the creation of a religion of humanity and happiness which sought to reconcile the principle of divine immanence with the idea of a transcendent deistic God. According to John O. Wattles, Augustus Wattles’ brother: ‘Divinity is humanity extended to infinity. Humanity is divinity centered in flesh.’49 Several of the prominent members of the Society of Universal Inquiry and Reform, among whom the Congregationalist John O. Wattles, the Quaker Amos Gilbert, and the freethinker Valentine Nicholson, moved towards Spiritualism in the 1850s.

20Among women in particular something else than a shift of focus took place. As many a scholar in women’s studies have demonstrated, women’s criticism of slavery became imbricated with the emerging awareness of feminist issues since it encouraged women to question their relationship to men’s authority. As Elizabeth J. Clapp has noted, ‘[women’s] religious beliefs inspired them to become campaigners, and they followed their own consciences and interpretations of the Scriptures in order to bring an end to slavery (. . .) Many anti-slavery women were both stirred to action by their religion, and frequently motivated by a desire to live out and practice the beliefs they held.’50 In the early 1830s, the right of black people and women in general to speak in public was not universally recognized. An audacious abolitionist like Maria W. Stewart, however, underlined the necessity of intersectional discourse and brought to light, in Patricia H. Collins’s words, a ‘distinctive, collective black women’s consciousness.’51 In 1832, Stewart asked: ‘Methinks I heard a spiritual interrogation—“Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman? And my heart made this reply”—“If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!”’52 In 1833, in her farewell lecture, she asserted her right as an activist, argued that it was a right that came from God and referred to a list of powerful biblical female figures: ‘What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days. Did he not raise up Deborah to be a mother, and a judge in Israel? Did not Queen Esther save the lives of the Jews? And Mary Magdalene first declare the resurrection of Christ from the dead?’53

21A few years later, Sarah Grimké, a white evangelical converted to Quakerism and a Garrisonian, found in 1838 the opportunity to reflect on her own condition as a woman and articulate what Gerda Lerner has called a ‘coherent feminist argument’ by responding to Catherine Beecher, a conservative abolitionist who defended colonization and opposed woman suffrage.54 In the first of herLetters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman, she claimed:

In examining this important subject, I shall depend solely on the Bible to designate the sphere of woman, because I believe almost every thing that has been written on this subject, has been the result of a misconception of the simple truths revealed in the Scriptures, in consequence of the false translation of many passages of Holy Writ. My mind is entirely delivered from the superstitious reverence which is attached to the English version of the Bible. King James's translators certainly were not inspired. I therefore claim the original as my standard,believing that to have been inspired, and I also claim to judge for myself what is the meaning of the inspired writers, because I believe it to be the solemn duty of every individual to search the Scriptures for themselves, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and not be governed by the views of any man, or set of men.55

22Sarah Grimké was the first Christian woman to propose a thorough feminist reading of the Bible based on her own examination of the translation. In the third letter, she concluded that ‘Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever isrightfor man to do, isrightfor woman’ (Grimké 1838:16).

23A discussion on abolitionism and religion cannot be confined to Quakerism and evangelicalism, since abolitionism was a concern for many freethinkers and religious seekers as well, several of whom took part in the various utopian communitarian experiences of the century. There was fluidity in the religious culture of the young United States, and those involved in the reform movements of the time also embarked on a variety of spiritual experiences and quests. While religion fostered resistance and rebellion, abolition encouraged believers to interrogate their faith, to question their relationship to institutionalized religion, and to renew Biblical interpretation.56 New readings of the Bible emerged with the necessity to articulate persuasive arguments to counteract the powerful pro-slavery Biblical reasoning, which rested on the curse of Ham, the mark of Cain, the fact that Jesus did not condemn slavery or the Pauline instruction that enslaved people had to obey their masters.57 Furthermore, those readings intertwined with or prompted feminist ones, as illustrated by Maria S. Stewart’s lectures, Sarah Grimké’sLetters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, or the way Sojourner Truth, who never learnt how to read, adopted a highly individualized approach to religion. According to one of her biographers, to people who questioned her about her illiteracy, Truth replied: ‘I have a Bible in me.’58

24The combination of immediate abolitionism and criticism of religion was not inherently egalitarian since ideals of true racial equality rarely coincided with the search for Christian perfection, utopian versions of religion and concerns over women’s rights. It can, however, be argued that just as abolition reshaped the meaning of freedom and consequently the notion of democracy, it empowered many American women and men, black and white, with the capacity to think and speak freely about religion. Abolition led people to openly criticize religious institutions, to estrange themselves from the religious tradition they belonged to, to reject religion, to explore spiritual or secular alternatives, or to push the boundaries of religion and create their own individualized religion. It questioned the ‘conditions of belief’ and contributed to the advent of the secular age described by Charles Taylor, in which Christian belief became ‘one option among others.’59

1Tilly Charles and SidneyTarrow. Contentious Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 2nd ed.; 11. The authors treat British antislavery as a social movement and define a social movement as ‘a sustained campaign of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities.’

2Sinha, Manisha.The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016; 590. See alsoSinha, Manisha. ‘L’abolition de l’esclavage, matrice des mouvements sociaux aux États-Unis.’Critique internationale Vol. 80, no. 3, 2018: 113–132.

3Newman, Richard S.The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; 15.

4Wyatt-Brown, Bertram.Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969; 287.

5McKanan, Dan.Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition. New York: Beacon Press, 2011. See alsoHannigan, John A. ‘Social Movement Theory and the Sociology of Religion: Toward a New Synthesis.’Sociological Analysis Vol. 52, no. 4, Religious Movements and Social Movements (Winter 1991): 311–331.Smith, Christian, ed. Disruptive Religion:The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism. New York: Routledge, 1996.Olson, Laura R. ‘The Essentiality of “Culture” in the Study of Religion and Politics.’Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Vol. 50, no. 4 (December 2011): 639–653.

6Williams, Rhys H. ‘Religious Social Movements in the Public Sphere: Organization, Ideology, and Activism,’ inHandbook of the Sociology of Religion, MicheleDillon, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; 315–16.

7Hadden, Jeffrey. ‘Religious Movements,’ inEncyclopedia of Sociology, Edward F.Borgatta and Rhonda J.V.Montegomery, eds. New York: MacMillan Co, 2000; 2356–76.

8 By referring to secular forms of religion, I followNarvaez, Auréliane.Rémanences et métamorphoses de la pensée déiste: mesmérisme, communautés utopiques et spiritualisme aux États-Unis (1794–1887). Doctoral dissertation, Sorbonne Université, 2018. For Narvaez, secular religion is a form of spirituality whose content is not theological, but which maintains some kind of transcendence (38).

9Friedman, Lawrence J.Gregarious Saints:Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Stewart, James Brewer.Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. 1976. New York: Harper Collins, 1996, rev. ed.McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, JohnStauffer and MichaelFellman, eds.Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. New York: The New Press, 2006.

10Thomas, Benjamin P. Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1950.

11Perry, Mark.Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Viking, 2001.Blight, David W.Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. See alsoMabee, Carleton, with Susan MabeeNewhouse.Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press, 1993 andRichman, Isabelle Kinnard.Sojourner Truth: Prophet of Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2016. On the paradigm of the prophet, see alsoNewman, Richard S.Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

12 On the invention of the ‘Great Awakening’ by participants in the Second Great Awakening, seeConforti, Joseph. ‘The Invention of the Great Awakening 1795–1842.’Early American Literature Vol. 26, no. 2 (Sept. 1991): 99–118. See alsoButler, Jon. ‘Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction.’The Journal of American History Vol. 69, no. 2 (1982): 305–325.

13Foster, Charles I.An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1960.

14Mathews, Donald G. ‘The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis.’ American QuarterlyVol. 21, no. 1 (1969); 27.

15McLoughlin, William G.Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978; 2, 127.

16Howe, Daniel Walker.What has God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. The Oxford History of the United States Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; 286–289, 647.

17Butler, Jon.Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; 3.

18Butler, Jon. ‘Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.’The Journal of American History Vol. 90, no. 4 (Mar. 2004); 1357. See alsoButler, Jon. ‘Born-Again History?,’ paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., 1992 (in Jon Butler's possession).

19 On the criticism of the evangelical thesis, see alsoAlbanese,Catherine.A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

20Sinha, Manisha.The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016; 2.

21Nash, Gary and Jean R.Roderlund.Freedom by Degrees:Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; 11. See alsoBenezet, Anthony,Une histoire de la Guinée. Marie-JeanneRossignol and Bertrandvan Ruymbeke,eds. [Paris]: Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle, 2018; Préface; 17.

22Society of Friends. Germantown, Pa. Germantown Friends' protest against slavery. Facsimile. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.See alsoCarey, Brycchan.From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012.

23Fox, George.Gospel family-order, being a short discurse [sic] concerning the ordering of families, both of whites, blacks and Indians. [London, 1676]. [Philadelphia], Reprinted [by Reinier Jansen], 1701.

24Fox, George.To Friends Beyond The Sea, That Have Blacks And Indian Slaves (1657). InFox, George. The Works of GeorgeFox. Philadelphia: Marcus T. Gould and New York, Isaac T. Hopper, 1831; Number CLIII, Volume VII; 144–145. SeeCarey, Brycchan. ‘“The Power that Giveth Liberty and Freedom”: The Barbadian Origins of Quaker Antislavery Rhetoric, 1657-76.’ ARIEL Vol. 38, no. 1 (January 2007): 27–48. Carey 2012: 43.

25Plank, Geoffrey. ‘Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and Praise,’ inThe Atlantic World of Anthony Benezet,1713–1784: From French Reformation to North American Quaker Antislavery Activism.Rossignol, Marie-Jeanne and Bertrand,Van Ryumbeke, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2017; 93.

26Woolman, John. The Journal of John Woolman. With an Introduction of John G. Whittier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909; 115.

27Frost, J. William, ed.The Quaker Origins of Antislavery, Norwood, Penn.: Norwood Editions, 1980.

28Phelps, Amos A.Lectures on Slavery and its Remedy. Boston: New England Anti-Slavery Society, 1834; 11.

29Finney, Charles Grandison. Lectures onRevivals of Religion. New York, 1835; 278. On Finney’s involvement in the abolitionist cause, seeFitzGerald, Frances.The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017; 35 sq.

30Weld, Theodore Dwight.The Bible against Slavery: An Inquiry into the Patriarchal and Mosaic System on the Subject of Human Rights. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1837. On Biblical exegesis and nineteenth-century innovations in American interpretation of the Bible, seeHarrill, J. Albert, ‘The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate.’ Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation Vol. 10, no. 2 (2000): 149–186. Harrill argues that the anti-slavery debate paved the way for the reception of German higher criticism in the United States.

31Garrison, William Lloyd.No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery. New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1854.

32Chapman, Maria Weston. Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom. Boston: I. Knapp, 1836; 10.

33Walker, David.Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Boston, 1829.

34 Margaret Washington argues that Maria Stewart’s preaching embraced ‘a gendered socioreligious perspective.’Washington, Margaret. ‘Religion, Reform and Antislavery,’ inThe Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History, EllenHartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G.Materson eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; 422.

35Stewart, Maria W. ‘Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.’ The Liberator,8 October 1831.InMaria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. MarilynRichardson, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; 28–42. See alsoCooper, Valerie C. Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible and the Rights of African Americans. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011; 1.

36Sidbury, James.Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997); 82. See alsoRaboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; 147.

37Egerton, Douglas R.He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.Scully, Randolph Ferguson.Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.Santoro, Anthony. ‘The Prophet in His Own Words: Nat Turner's Biblical Construction.’The Virginia Magazine of History and BiographyVol. 116, no. 2 (2008): 114–149.

38The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray. Richmond, 1832; 8–10.

39 On Quaker divisions, seeJordan, Ryan P. Slavery and the Meetinghouse:The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–1861.Bloomington: Indiana University, 2007. See alsoAngell, Stephen W. and PinkDandelion,eds.The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; 356–357.

40Barbour, Hugh,et al. Quaker Crosscurrents: Three Hundred Years of Friends in the New York Yearly Meetings. With a Foreword of Martin E. Marty. [Syracuse, NY]: Syracuse University Press, 1995; 186–187.

41 On the Hicksite schism, seeDorsey, Bruce. ‘Friends Becoming Enemies: Philadelphia Benevolence and the Neglected Era of American Quaker History.’Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 18, no. 3 (1998): 395–428.

42Crothers, A. Glenn. Quakers Living in the Lion's Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730–1865.Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012; 138.

43Berlin, Ira.Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003; 118.

44Ahlstrom, Sidney.A Religious History of the American People. Vol. 2. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1975; 105–114. See alsoOast, Jennifer. ‘“The Worst Kind of Slavery”: Slave-Owning Presbyterian Churches in Prince Edward County, Virginia.’The Journal of Southern History Vol. 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 867–900.

45van Deburg, William L. ‘William Lloyd Garrison and the ‘Pro-Slavery Priesthood’: The Changing Beliefs of An Evangelical Reformer, 1830-1840.’Journal of the American Academy of ReligionVol. 43, no. 2 (Jun. 1975): 224–237.Ernest, John. ‘Crisis of Faith in Douglass’s Work,’ inCambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, Maurice S.Lee, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 65.Davis, Reginald F.Frederick Douglass: A Precursor of Liberation Theology.Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005.

46Douglass, Frederick.Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845; 118.Douglass, Frederick,My Bondage and My Freedom. New York, Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855; 234–235. See alsoHutchins, Zachary McLeod. ‘Rejecting the Root: The Liberating, Anti-Christ Theology of Douglass’sNarrative.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 68, no. 3 (2013): 292–322, and Blight 2018: 515.

47Braude, Anne.Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; 27.Cox, Robert S.Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. On Truth, seeRaynaud, Claudine. ‘Sojourner Truth : foi chrétienne, abolitionnisme, féminisme.’ Études théologiques et religieuses 94: 2 (2019): 231–252.

48 Anon. ‘Social Reform and Human Progress.’Vermont Telegraph, February 8, 1843. Quoted in Narvaez 2018: 330. John A. Collins, John O. Wattles, Orson S. Murray, Abraham Brooke, Valentine Nicholson, Hiram Mendelhall were among the founders. SeeHamm, Thomas D.God's Government Begun: The Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform, 1842–1846.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

49Wattles, John. ‘Reform and Reformers.’The Regenerator, January 29, 1844. Quoted in Narvaez 2018: 353.

50Clapp, Elizabeth J., ‘Introduction,’ inWomen, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865, Elizabeth J.Clapp and Julie RoyJeffrey, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; 2.

51Collins, Patricia Hill.Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2000; 98.

52 ‘A Lecture by Maria W. Stewart, given at Franklin Hall. Boston, September 21, 1832,’ inPamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860, first edition,Richard Newman,Patrick Rael,Phillip Lapsansky, eds.New York: Routledge, 2001.

53 ‘Mrs. Stewart's Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,’ 1833. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835), inSpiritual Narratives. Sue E.Houchins, ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1988; 72–82.

54Lerner, Gerda.  The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; 5.

55Grimké, Sarah. ‘Letter I: The Original Equality of Women.’Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman. Boston: I. Knapp, 1838; 4.

56Stowe, Harriet Beecher, who was a Presbyterian, the daughter and wife of an evangelical preacher, also criticized the churches. SeeHovet, Theodore R. ‘The Church Diseased: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Attack on the Presbyterian Church.’ Journal of Presbyterian History (1962–1985) Vol. 52, no. 2 (1974): 167–187. On her ‘personal journey’ and rewriting of ‘the Scriptural story,’ seeEvans, Curtis. ‘“The Chief Glory of God [Is] in Self-Denying, Suffering Love!”: True Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ The Journal of Religion Vol. 92, no. 4 (2012): 498–514.

57Goldenberg, David M.Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2017. See also Harrill 2000.

58 On Truth and the Bible, see Mabee 1995: 234.

59Taylor, Charles.A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Ending Slavery

Ending Slavery