Religion and Society in
America
Week 6 – Lecture 2
“Antislavery Reform, Secession,
and Societal Divides” – Part I
Antislavery Reform, Secession and
Societal Divides – Part I
• Introduction: The Persistent Memory of
War
• The “Secession Crisis”: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Sectarian Convictions and Early
Antislavery Reform
• Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and
Public Sentiment
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• Memorializing the war: North and South
• Battle flag issues – license plates, state
flags, college campuses
• Holidays – Lee, Jackson, King Day
• Symbolic use of flags by hate groups
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• Naturalization Test Questions for
Applicants
• “An applicant for naturalization must
demonstrate a knowledge and
understanding of the fundamentals of the
history and of the principles and form of
government in the United States…”
• Applicants asked 10 questions from a list
of 25
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• Question #14 - The Civil War was fought
over what important issues?
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• Answer #14 – “Slavery or States Rights”
• In general if one asks a Northerner what was the
principal issue they remark the former;
Southerners offer the latter
• What is historically accurate? Are these the only
issues?
• More importantly for us, how do these issues
relate to religion?
• What is the relationship between church and
state in mid-19th Century America?
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• William H. Seward (1801 – 1872)
• He stirred controversy and antagonized some
anti-foreign and anti-Catholic elements of the
Whig party when he supported the demands of
Catholics to have their children taught in public
schools by teachers speaking the same
language and sharing the same faith
• Increasingly interested in antislavery reform.
• Congressman and Secretary of State under
Lincoln
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858.
Seward suggests, They who think that it is
accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested
or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral,
mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces,
and it means that the United States must and
will, sooner or later, become either entirely a
slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor
nation.”
Introduction: The Persistent
Memory of War
• As the New York Tribune later announced,
"We are two peoples. We are a people for
Freedom and a people for slavery.
Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”
• Look to the issues discussed during the
“Secession Crisis” and the relationship of
Antislavery reform in shaping the national
sentiment in 1861
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Scholars efforts to explain “historic
causation”
• Differing ideologies, separate cultures,
clashing economics, blundering and
paranoid leaders, failed political parties,
conflicting notions of honor, etc.
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• “Almost all historians recognize the central
role that the institution of slavery and the
concept of states’ rights played in fostering
disunionist sentiment in the Deep South.
There is no way to avoid these two factors,
in part because the secession conventions
and Southern political leaders referred to
them constantly in their efforts to explain
why their states were leaving the Union.”
Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• What is the “Secession Crisis”?
• Election of Abraham Lincoln – November,
1860
• The South hotly debates the meaning of
election and merits of secession
• December 20, 1860 – South Carolinians
meet and declare Secession followed by
the “Deep South” or “Lower South”
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• April 12, 1861 – Confederates open fire on
Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC
• Response of Federal Armies precipitates
the secession of the Upper South
(Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Arkansas)
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Meanwhile in Montgomery, Alabama,
representatives of the Lower South meet to draft
a constitution on February 4, 1861
• Representatives from only 6 of the nation’s 15
slave states were represented (SC, GA, AL, MS,
FL, LA)
• Preliminary constitution of the Confederacy
drafted in four days
• February 8, 1861 – twelve man committee
headed by Robert B. Rhett appointed to create a
complete document
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy declare?
• States’ Rights
• Preamble – “more perfect union” is replaced by provision the states
were acting in their “sovereign and independent” capacities to create
“a permanent federal government.”
• Supremacy of states’ rights not complete or total, however
• Required oath of office for representatives to uphold constitution and
national government’s laws
• No state could independently ally or confederate with another state
or power
• No coining of money independently
• No mention of the right of secession explicitly within document
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy declare?
• Slavery
• No national law could impinge on “the right of property in
negro slaves”
• Preservation of slavery in territories to the West and
South
• “Dred Scott institutionalized” – right of owners to take
slaves in such territories
• Assurance for the property rights of slaveholders
regardless of the state’s current legal position
concerning slavery
• Advocates to include a provision calling for the revival of
the foreign slave were rebuffed
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Secession documents of state conventions
reveal Southern fears about abolitionists
• Abolitionist conviction cut to the heart of
the political, social, and moral convictions
of much of the Southern leadership
• Raises questions concerning the
persistent debate about religion and
politics
• Some examples:
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Robert Toombs of the Georgia Convention – “For twenty
years past, the Abolitionists and their allies in the
Northern states have been engaged in constant efforts to
subvert our institutions and to excite insurrection and
servile war among us.” Toombs argued the Constitution
would be nothing but “parchment rights” in the
“treacherous hands” of Republicans whose “avowed
purpose is to subject our society, and subject us, not
only to the loss of our property but the destruction of
ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the
desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.”
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Mississippi Convention document’s Declaration
of Immediate Causes read – “Our position is
thoroughly identified with the institution of
slavery. There is no choice left us but
submission to the mandates of abolition, or a
dissolution of the union, whose principles had
been subverted to work our ruin.” It declared the
Northern abolitionist a majority who “advocates
Negro equality, socially and politically, and
promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our
midst.”
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• February 18, 1861 – Jefferson Davis’s
inaugural address delivered in
Montgomery makes no mention of the
institution of slavery only stating the
seceded states had determined the
“government created by that compact
[1776] should cease to exist.”
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• March 21, 1861 Georgian and now Vice President of the
Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens provided
Southerners in Savannah a striking alternative view of
the South compared to the argument [or non-argument]
presented in Davis’s inaugural: The “new Constitution
has put a rest forever all the agitating questions relating
to…the proper status of the negro in our form of
civilization.” Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, he
asserted, believed “that the enslavement of the African
was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in
principle, socially, morally, and politically…Those ideas,
however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon
the assumption of the equality of races. This was an
error..”
The Secession Crisis: Locating the
Importance of Slavery Arguments
• Stephens continued by stating “Our new
Government is founded upon exactly the
opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its
cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery,
subordination to the superior race, is his natural
and moral condition.” Stephens concluded
stating the Confederacy was “the first
Government ever instituted upon principles in
strict conformity to the nature and the ordination
of Providence, in furnishing the materials of
human society.”
Sectarian Convictions and Early
Antislavery Reform
• Society of Friends (Quakers)
• Proclaim the universality of God’s love and
equality of all humanity as recipients of divine
love.
• Hold that physical coercion is an act of evil and
unjust in any society
• Colonization Society – founded in 1816 by
Robert Finley a Presbyterian minister from New
Jersey and other influential men. Loose
structural organization allows colonizers to
appeal to a diversity of interests
View of Monrovia – 1856 24th Annual Report of the
Colonization Society
Sectarian Convictions and Early
Antislavery Reform
• Encouraging developments for Colonization in early 19th Century
• Congress’s prohibition of the slave trade in 1808
• The debates of the Virginia legislature concerning colonization in
1816, state bans on the importation of slaves
• A spike in the number of private manumissions in the upper South
• Henry Clay, the leader of the National Republican Party incorporated
the scheme of colonization into his party’s platform.
• Evangelicalism with its emphasis on personal accountability for sin
coupled with the emotionally charged forum of revivalism provides
an opening for the abolitionist message to take hold in wider circles
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
• Shortly following the debates by the Virginia
legislature over slavery in 1832, William Lloyd
Garrison published his Thoughts on African
Colonization
• The work suggested the principle of melioration
through the removal of blacks was “a libel upon
humanity and justice--a libel upon
republicanism--a libel upon the Declaration of
Independence--a libel upon Christianity.”
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
• Garrison’s words were without compromise. No
longer, he exclaimed, could the institution of
slavery be dismissed as the remnant of a foreign
oppressor—the claim of James Monroe—the
imposition of international trade—the assertion
of William Thorton —or an “insurmountable
barrier” of humanity—the reflections of Thomas
Jefferson.
• This critique gave shape to those advocating
immediate abolition by its resolute belief that
contemporary Americans were responsible for
the continuation of slavery and this was a sin.
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
• More importantly, Garrison forwarded the
novel assertion that instant
uncompensated emancipation without
repatriation was guaranteed by the semireligious principles of the Declaration of
Independence.
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
• The following year the American Anti-Slavery
Society was founded by former colonization
advocates Arthur and Lewis Tappan, William
Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. Now for a new
generation of reformers, immediate abolition and
black equality was the only logical measure that
would truly redeem the nation.
• The society and its largely Quaker constituency
renounced the use of “all carnal weapons” to
accomplish these directives instead encouraging
the abolition of slavery through “the potency of
truth” and the “power of love.”
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
•
•
•
•
•
Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932)
Born in Philadelphia an orthodox Quaker
Took up the cause of abolition in her teens
1856 – Contributed to Garrison’s Liberator
Goes on a speaking tour attracting large
crowds and catches the attention of wellknown female abolitionists such as
Hannah Longshore and Lucretia Mott
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians,
and Public Sentiment
• 5,000 greet her in New York City
• Lectured on the rights of women and
African Americans by 1860s
• 1863 – takes up a tour for Republican
candidates winning over large crowds