The New York Times
Opinionator
DISUNION
The South, the War and ‘Christian
Slavery’
By THOM BASSETT
APRIL 27, 2012 12:30 PM April 27, 2012 12:30 pm
In the minds of many Southerners, the capture of New Orleans on April 25, 1862, by
Union forces was more than simply a troubling military loss. It also raised the
disturbing possibility that divine punishment was being inflicted on a spiritually
wayward and sinful Confederacy.
The loss of the South’s most important port and largest city had followed on the heels of
the loss of Tennessee’s Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February and the ignominious
retreat from Shiloh in early April. These setbacks, after the virtually uninterrupted
Southern successes of 1861, caused many across the Confederacy to wonder, in the
words of the South Carolina diarist Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, if “these reversals
and terrible humiliations … come from Him to humble our hearts and remind us of our
total helplessness without His aid.”
Such thinking was in fact typical of mid-19th-century America. With varying degrees of
sophistication and conviction, Americans believed that the fates of individuals and
nations unfolded in accordance with an unshakeable divine plan; all events, large and
small, reflected God’s will and were expressions of his favor, testing or judgment. Of
course, some, like the Confederate Edward Porter Alexander, would say of the conflict
that “Providence did not care a pin about it.” But most Northerners and Southerners
struggled throughout the Civil War to discern the purposes and intentions of their God.
While countless Union soldiers and northern civilians depended on theological
narratives to sustain them, a providential view of history particularly influenced how
Southerners reacted to and interpreted the events of the war. After all, the preamble to
the Confederate constitution, unlike the federal one it replaced, explicitly invoked “the
favor and guidance of Almighty God.” They were, Southerners believed, a people chosen
by God to manifest His will on earth. “We are working out a great thought of God,”
declared the South Carolina Episcopal theologian James Warley Miles, “namely the
higher development of Humanity in its capacity for Constitutional Liberty.”
Miles held, though, that divine mandate extended beyond simply the Confederate
interpretation of states’ rights, and that Southerners were bound by the Bible to seek
more than merely “a selfish independence.” The Confederacy must “exhibit to the world
that supremest effort of humanity” in creating and defending a society built upon
obedience to biblical prescriptions regarding slavery, a society “sanctified by the divine
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spirit of Christianity.” In short, as the Episcopal Church in Virginia stated soon after the
war began, Southerners were fighting “a Revolution, ecclesiastical as well as civil.” This
would be a revolution that aimed to establish nothing less than, in the words of one
Georgia woman, “the final and universal spread of Gospel civilization.”
This “Gospel civilization,” many believed, didn’t just permit slavery — it required it.
Christians across the Confederacy were convinced that they were called not only to
perpetuate slavery but also to “perfect” it. And they understood the Bible to provide
clear moral guidelines on how to properly practice it. The Old Testament patriarchs
owned slaves, Jewish law clearly assumed its permissibility and the Apostle Paul’s New
Testament letters repeatedly compelled slaves to be obedient and loyal to their masters.
Above all, as Southerners never tired of pointing out to their abolitionist foes, the
Gospels fail to record any condemnation of the practice by Jesus Christ.
There is consequently a fascinating, if unsettling, paradox in the efforts of slaveholders
to fulfill what they considered divinely imposed duties toward their slaves. Southern
Christians believed that the Bible imposed on masters a host of obligations to their
slaves. Most fundamentally, masters were to view slaves as fully members of their own
households and as fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord. Therefore, as the South
Carolina Methodist Conference declared before the war, masters sinned against their
slaves by “excessive labor, extreme punishment, withholding necessary food and
clothing, neglect in sickness or old age, and the like.”
Moreover, masters were not to let economic considerations govern treatment of their
slaves. Religious leaders implored slaveholders to acknowledge that marriage and the
family were divinely ordained and that, as a result, they must not separate husbands
from wives or parents from children, even when it was financially advantageous to do
so. (Almost no legislative action, however, resulted from these pleas; only the force of
conscience would determine whether these biblical prescriptions were honored.) Many
Southern Protestants advocated the repeal of laws banning slave literacy, so that slaves
could read the Bible as a means to securing their eternal salvation. Before the war these
practices were primarily justified as biblical mandates. Not coincidentally, though, they
were also held out as a means to secure happier, more productive slaves, and to defang
But beginning in the spring of 1862 and continuing even past the end of the war, the
theological significance of “Christian slavery” changed. Southern pastors and
theologians combined a providential view of history with their understanding of what
was biblically required of slaveholders to conclude that widespread failure to engage in
“Christian slavery” was a main cause of divine favor’s being withdrawn from God’s own
chosen people. In other words, they blamed the fall of New Orleans on the excesses of
slave owners — though never on slavery itself.
To be sure, these were not the only sins thought to bring down retribution on the
Confederacy. “Blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, selfishness,” the Lutheran Church of
South Carolina warned, also brought God’s punishment in the form of battlefield
setbacks, along with “avarice, hardness of heart, unbelief, and many other evils.” This
was of course a well-thumbed catalog of sins preachers in both the North and the South
had railed against for decades. But as the fighting wore on and Confederate fortunes
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darkened, Southerners grew increasingly afraid it was their treatment of slaves that
caused God to turn against them.
For example, even while he was convinced God ultimately would vindicate the
Confederacy, the influential Baptist minister Isaac Taylor Tichenor spoke for many
Southerners when he addressed the Alabama General Assembly in 1863. “We have failed
to discharge our duties to our slaves,” he charged. “Marriage is a divine institution, and
yet marriage exists among our slaves dependent upon the will of the master,” leaving
God’s command perversely “subject to the passion, avarice, or caprice of their owners.”
Similarly, the theologian and college president John Leadley Dagg saw Confederate
setbacks as “fatherly chastisements, designed for our profit.” Nevertheless, he was
insistent during the war that the failure to protect slave marriages “is only part of the
general evil. We have not labored, in every possible way, to promote the welfare, for
time and eternity of our slave population, as of dependent and helpless immortals whom
God has placed in our power and in our mercy.” In September 1862 Bishop Stephen
Elliott warned Southerners that the “great revolution through which we are passing
certainly turns upon the point of slavery, and our future destiny is bound up with it. As
we deal with it, so shall we prosper or suffer.”
A year after the war ended Dagg would insist that the Confederacy’s defeat was due to
white Southerners’ failure to take proper care of their black charges. The war was “a
scourge of God,” according to Bishop John McGill of Richmond, Va., inflicted on the
Confederacy for its failure to respect slave marriages and protect slave families.
Not all Southerners agreed. Some, like the South Carolinian Louis Blanding, simply
dismissed all efforts to explain God’s purposes in allowing the destruction of the South
as “vague scholastic playthings, fit for the keen of edge discussion and of no earthly
account.” Others, like the Tennessee diarist Eliza Fain, were mystified why God would
permit the end of slavery when the Bible so clearly justifies it; still, she concluded, “we
cannot know now, but he does and this is all we deserve to know.”
Many Southerners, though, came to embrace the interpretation of their history
suggested by Elliott and made explicit by the Reverend J.C. Mitchell. “Read the annals
of other nations,” the Alabaman admonished, “and see what destroyed them. It was not
foreign force, but internal evil.” After the war, then, for countless chastened white
Southern Christians, the evil that provoked the Lord to destroy their nation was the
myriad wrongs committed against the slaves they had kept. Vanishingly few asked
whether their true sin might be claiming to own those whom the Bible called their
brothers and sisters in Christ.
Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.
Sources: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners”; Paul
Finkelman, “Defending Slavery: A Brief History with Documents”; Eugene D.
Genovese, “A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White
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Christian South”; George C. Rable, “God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History
of the American Civil War”; Mitchell Snay, “Gospel of Disunion: Religion and
Separatism in the Antebellum South.”
Thom Bassett teaches in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant
University in Smithfield, R.I. He is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman.
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