book review:

[pynchonoid]

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-South at h-net.msu.edu (March, 2003)

John Patrick Daly. _When Slavery Was Called Freedom:
Evangelicalism,
Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War_.
Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2002. 207 pp. Notes, bibliography,
and index.
$45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8131-2241-4.

Reviewed for H-South by James Ivy
(jivy at mail.accd.edu), Department
of History, San Antonio College

_Agreeing to Disagree_

John Patrick Daly has written a brief book about a
large subject.
Like many historians before, he traces the ideological
roots of the
sectional conflict. Drawing upon the tracts and
sermons of prominent
southern evangelicals, he examines the defense of
slavery (and the
critique of abolitionism) that they espoused in the
decades leading
up to the Civil War. The result is a very good book,
in which he
argues that what most divided Northerners and
Southerners in these
critical years were their shared values.

Much of Daly's material in the first two chapters on
the cultural
underpinnings of antebellum society covers familiar
ground.
Americans were fervently individualistic, and they
generally
believed that hard work inevitably would result in
material reward.
Americans did not think too hard about economic
theory, but insofar
as they did, they were opposed to it. For Evangelicals
in both the
northern and southern states this led to a two-tiered
providentialism. Since material rewards were from God,
a prosperous
believer could take comfort in the fact that God
approved of the
manner in which he had acquired his wealth. Secondly,
if a nation,
or a section of a nation, prospered, then it is likely
that God
approved of social arrangements as they existed. Daly
offers a more
nuanced exposition than this, as do many of his
sources, but his
evidence suggests that many southern Evangelicals
would have been
comfortable with this simple formulation. [...]

In the early part of the century, slaveholders
could agree with critics that slavery might in a
general way be a
bad thing, but still hold that in the particular case
of a Christian
slaveholder there was no sin. They did not mean this
simply in the
sense that a benign master might meliorate the
immorality of a bad
institution. Rather, a slaveholder who imagined
himself a good
Christian would credit Providence with his possession
of slaves. If
slavery were evil, God would not reward the
slaveholder with the
acquisition of slaves or with profits of slave labor.
Moreover,
because the theology of southern Evangelicalism
stressed the
individual relation to God, the broader question of
slavery as an
institution was in important ways beside the point.
Sin was a
personal matter, not committed by systems in the
abstract.

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Evangelicals
often had been
critics of slaveholding, but as more acquired slaves,
and as more
slaveholders became Evangelicals, the criticisms were
muted. The
schisms within the Evangelical denominations in the
1840s, as
southerners actively defended slavery, heralded the
greater
sectional divisions. Obviously, Evangelical
slaveholders, who wanted
to keep their slaves, might scramble for explanations
to justify
doing so. Many did just that, and more sermons and
tracts defending
slavery as scriptural orthodoxy appeared. However,
Daly finds
Evangelicals more often employed the language of
providentialism.
The South was becoming more Evangelical and more
prosperous. At the
same time, more southerners were acquiring slaves.
Therefore, the
argument followed, God ordained slavery in the South
to reward
Christian slaveholders and to evangelize the slaves.
What their
abolitionist critics failed to understand was that
"God had
providential purposes for slavery" (p. 54). He would
not have
allowed slavery to flourish if it were not a part of
his plan. As
that plan unfolded, and more slaves and slaveholders
became
Christian, and as the South prospered, "the
evangelical rationale
for criticism of slavery dissolved" (p. 69).

It is the issue of the southerner's suspicion of
systems in the
abstract that provides the material for Daly's most
important work.
When confronted with northern criticism of slavery as
an
institution, southern proslavery apologists responded
with
incredulity. Individual slaveholders might be cruel
and sinful, they
acknowledged, but in their experience most were
Christian men,
concerned with the welfare of slaves whom Providence
had put in
their charge. "Abolitionism," Daly writes, "struck
southerners
exactly where they were least likely to listen or feel
anyone else
had the authority to speak to them, in the realm of
personal
authority" (p. 72). On the other hand, if God had
ordained slavery,
as he had both in the southern states and in biblical
history, then
reformers who arbitrarily tried to interfere with it
tried to
interfere with the providential economy.

This is the crux of the issue for Daly. Both northern
abolitionists
(and later free soilers) and southern apologists
believed that they
lived in a society in which material wealth was
evidence of God's
favor, and that human efforts to interfere with a
God-ordained free
economy only challenged the will of Providence. "Men
who did not
allow individual character to find its reward betrayed
the faith of
the age," Daly writes. "This constituted both the
antislavery
accusation against the South and the southern
denunciation of
antislavery" (p. 90) To abolitionists slavery was
self-evidently an
artificial system that interfered with the workings of
a free
economy; to slaveholders abolitionism was the same.

The radical individualism of southern Evangelicals
provided a new
element of providentialism to the scriptural defense
of slavery.
Daly examines the "Rights and Duties of Slavery"
sermons and tracts,
exemplified by James Henley Thornwell's _Rights and
Duties of
Masters_. Daly calls this and similar tracts "the most
significant
development of the final decade of proslavery writing"
(p. 112).
Thornwell, astonishingly, objected to the northern
characterization
of southern slavery as involuntary labor.  Thornwell's
objection was
predicated on the assumption that God had ordained
certain
individuals to be slaves, and that scripture required
that they
willingly accept their station. They might be
compelled to do so
despite their individual inclination, but a good
Christian slave, in
obedience to a higher authority than his corporeal
owner, would
choose to labor cheerfully. The slaveholder might
control the
slave's labor (just as a northern factory owner might
control the
labor of his employee), but the slave was free to obey
or to disobey
the biblical injunction to offer that labor willingly.
The "Rights
and Duties of Slavery" literature dissolved, at least
in the minds
of its authors, the distinction between free and
unfree labor.

The southern characterization of abolitionism as
heresy continued as
the war began. Daly cites a letter signed by 154
southern clergymen
accusing the North of "interference with the plans of
Divine
Providence" (p. 145). He also finds an explanation for
the militant
optimism of both the North and South in their
providentialist
assumptions, an experience that could be generalized
to opposing
combatants throughout history. Conversely, he sees the
southern turn
in defeat to "apocalyptic and prophetic religion" as a
result of the
shattering of their faith in simple providentialism
(p. 152). Only
then did the core values of the two regions diverge.

Slavery and antislavery apologists raged at one
another's inability
to perceive self-evident facts and principles, and to
follow simple
propositions to their obvious conclusions. Historians
at times have
seen this as evidence that northerners and southerners
used the same
words to mean different things, or that southerners
did not even
mean what they said. John Patrick Daly argues that
they indeed did
mean the same things by words like freedom and
Providence, but that
they came to different conclusions about the
implications of those
concepts for the future of the nation. [...] 


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