Kirkpatrick, Frank G. "Religious
Abolitionists in the Amistad Era: Diversity in Moral Discourse." The
Connecticut Scholar: Occasional Papers of the Connecticut
Humanities Council (1992) no.10: 44-63.Religious Abolitionists in the Amistad Era:
Diversity in Moral Discourse
Frank G. Kirkpatrick
The level and substance of moral discourse in America today is, at best, confused, and at worst, destructive of any unifying conception of common civility. One need only refer to the passionate sloganeering surrounding abortion to feel the truth of this assertion. And it seems that discourse derived from a traditional (Jewish or Christian) religious perspective more often contributes to the overheated rhetoric of moral jousting than it does to enlighten or temper it.
Abolition and the Amistad Affair
The anniversary of the Amistad incident reminds us that the conflict of passions involved in moral discourse in a nation divided over substantive issues is no new phenomenon in American history. I want to examine the religious and moral convictions of those abolitionists who provided the context for, supported, or were directly involved in the defense of the captives of the Amistad. Religiously grounded abolitionism, especially of the sort known as "evangelical" was about as popular then in many established circles as evangelically based challenges to so-called secular morality are today. I don't mean to propose the substance or validity of the abolitionists' cause as equivalent to that of the various crusades of today's moral majority or the evangelical right. That is an entirely different debate. Rather, I want to maintain that there are instructive parallels between the ways in which the framing of moral debate took place then over the issue of slavery and those that today focus on such issues as abortion, nuclear war, and economic and racial justice. From an analysis of how some religious abolitionists prepared the ground for involvement in the defense of the captives of the Amistad, we might learn something about how religiously derived moral discourse reflects or diverges from the language and practices of a more secular culture it is seeking to reform. In particular, I want to explore some of the reasons why men of radically different creedal orientations (in this case Unitarian and evangelical), which were once regarded as decisive demarcations in religious debate, were able to transcend those differences because they had already reached agreement on the moral imperatives at stake in the slavery controversy.
Preparing for Legal Action
The direct role of religious abolitionists in the Amistad case has been well rehearsed by such scholars as Howard Jones. Very shortly after the capture of the Africans near Long Island became known, a New London abolitionist, Dwight P. Janes, contacted a prominent New York abolitionist, Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt had been a student in the first class at the Yale Divinity School, had been installed as the minister of the Congregational church in Stratford in 1825, and had worked for such causes as temperance and abolition from the late 1820s, serving variously as editor of the Emancipator, the New York Evangelist, and the Independent.(1)
Janes also got in touch with an anti-slavery New Haven lawyer, Roger S. Baldwin, who would later become governor of and U.S. senator from Connecticut. Convinced that the captives were not slaves, Janes urged Baldwin to conduct their defense, charging the Spanish owners of the ship with piracy, hoping thereby to free the captives and return them to Africa. The desire to return them to their native soil was carefully differentiated by these abolitionists from the goals of the American Colonization Society. The strategy of colonization was regarded by most evangelical abolitionists as morally bankrupt, reflecting a wish simply to wash white hands of complicity in the enslavement of black persons then living on American soil. But the Amistad captives had not been enslaved, and therefore their return to Africa was not to be regarded as their repatriation or colonization out of a state of bondage in the United States. Their return would be as free persons to the land whence they had been illegally kidnapped.
Helping convince Baldwin to take the case was another abolitionist, Simeon Jocelyn, a New Haven Congregational minister who had founded that city's first antislavery society, was a conductor on the underground railroad, minister of New Haven's first church for blacks(2) and, with Baldwin, a supporter of an 1831 attempt to establish near Yale College a training school where blacks could obtain "a useful Mechanical or agricultural profession." The reaction of the people of New Haven to their proposal exemplified the general attitude, even in New England, toward the efforts of the abolitionists. The Council of New Haven resolved that "the propagation of sentiments favorable to the immediate emancipation of slaves, in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto, the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating Colored People, is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States and ought to be discouraged." The resolution went on to assert that educating "Colored people" would be "incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the City," especially if a black school should be "imposed on" the community without its consent.(3)
The reasoning implicit in this resolution was typical of the attitude in the North toward even mild forms of abolitionism. Appeal was made to the stability of existing institutions and to the danger of "interference" with the internal concerns of particular sub-groups within the nation: and, of course, there was absolute rejection of any "imposition" of a project that might threaten the prosperity and self-image of the civic community. That these arguments were identical in many respects with those the Southern states were making about what they perceived to be the North's intentions regarding their sovereign soil was probably not entirely lost on the citizens of New Haven, since many of the young men they were trying to "protect" at Yale were the sons of Southern slaveowners. Of course, these arguments were not unique to the South nor to New Haven. They constituted much of the opposition to religious abolitionism and seem to reflect, often in strikingly similar language, contemporary statements opposing religiously grounded appeals for social transformation, whether from the religious right or the religious left. Even today, the most commonly heard rhetoric against religiously framed moral alternatives set before the American public is that which repudiates any suspicion of "imposition" of views not shared by the majority of the community because they would not be in the best interests--that is, the prosperity--of that community.
The Amistad Committee
Following Baldwin's agreement to take the case, Connecticut abolitionists then made a major catch. They secured the active support of Lewis Tappan who, like his brother Arthur, was one of the most influential religious abolitionists in America. The Tappan brothers were successful New York merchants who had become involved in abolitionism in the mid-1820s as a result of their deep evangelical faith. Their commitment to the cause was often far more radical and progressive than that of many of their more timid evangelical brothers and sisters. Lewis agreed to support the captives of the Amistad and formed what became known as the "Amistad Committee," consisting of himself, Joshua Leavitt, and Simeon Jocelyn. The Committee would both raise money for the defense and look after the needs of the captives. It would also seek ways to publicize the case so as to gain support for immediate emancipation of all those held in bondage throughout the nation.
Seeking someone to speak the language of the captives, Tappan found some Africans living in New York and brought them to the New Haven jail, where the captives were being held. He also visited the captives on at least three different occasions and seems to have corresponded with them frequently.(4) In addition, he hired divinity students from Yale College to begin instructing or missionizing the captives in the Christian faith. He even preached to them at his first meeting, a sermon which, of course, they had no way of understanding. A typical evangelical abolitionist, he never entirely separated the cause of liberation from that of spiritual (meaning Christian) salvation. "Oh," he is reported to have said, "for the gift of tongues to communicate to them the unsearchable riches of Christ!"(5) He also seems to have had a hand in bringing some Yale faculty members to meet the captives, including Josiah W. Gibbs, a Professor of Sacred Literature in the newly established Yale Divinity School. Gibbs had been a preacher in New Haven, a scholar of Biblical languages, and librarian of Yale College. From his meetings with the Amistad captives he compiled a vocabulary of various African dialects.(6) Joining Gibbs from the Seminary was George E. Day, an assistant instructor, who found that his religious instruction was well received by the captives, whom he regarded as excellent pupils.(7) Another Seminary instructor, A.F. Williams, commented that "the Ethiopians are indeed a people not far below if not equal or even superior in intellect to most nations of the earth."(8)
Tappan was naturally aware of the importance of gaining church people's support for highly suspect abolitionism. When the captives were released from jail and taken to live on a farm in Farmington, their religious instruction continued, with an eye toward their becoming Christian missionaries on their return to Africa. And it seems that, at least at first, the Mendi captives made an attempt to impress their teachers with their grasp of the essentials of the Christian faith. In a delightful letter to John Quincy Adams, who had been instrumental in arguing the case before the Supreme Court, one of the younger captives, eleven-year-old Kale, wrote that they were reading all the time, including "Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John". He also lamented that many people were saying that the Mendi people had no souls. Why, then, Kale asks plaintively, "we feel bad, we got no souls? We want to be free very much . . . Mendi people think, think, think . . . Mendi people have got souls. We think we know God punish us if we tell lie . . . What for Mendi people afraid? Because they got souls."(9)
Conscious, of course, of the general publicity value of the captives' plight, Tappan devoted a great deal of his time to writing and publishing articles about them and their situation. These were apparently effective in gaining support for the captives from some segments of the population not previously committed to anti-slavery. He made the cause of the captives, in the term of Wyatt-Brown, a "safe" one,(10) presumably because their release would not automatically commit their more conservative defenders to the immediate abolition of those Africans in America who were "legally" enslaved.
Black Participation: The Missionary Theme
With the successful termination of the court case, the Amistad Committee secured funds for the return of the captives to Africa. Their return was tied to the establishment of a "Mendi Mission" and they were accompanied by two Christian missionaries, James Covey the interpreter, and two black lay teachers. This Christian outpost in Africa was later supported by the American Missionary Association, which Tappan had helped bring into being by merging it with the Amistad Committee.
It is significant that one of the supporters of the effort to link the return of the captives to the Christianizing of Africa was the black pastor of the First Colored Congregational Church in Hartford, the Rev. James W.C. Pennington. It was from his congregation that the two black teachers were sent on the return voyage, one of whom, Mrs. Henry R. Wilson, had been brought up in Brooklyn, CT, the town in which one of the major abolitionists in Connecticut, Samuel May, had started his career.(11)
Pennington, Jehiel C. Beman, and the latter's son, Amos G. Beman, were the most important black abolitionist clergy in Connecticut during the height of the anti-slavery crusade. Like Tappan, they embraced an evangelical credo and a commitment to its implementation in moral reform activity.
Pennington, born to slave parents, eventually became free, and in 1835 moved to Connecticut. Barred from Yale Divinity School because of his color, he sat in on courses at the College and eventually, in 1838, was ordained. In 1840 he became the pastor of the Fifth [Colored] Congregational Church in Hartford.(12) By 1841 he had established the Union Missionary Society to assist the Amistad captives. Pennington was also deeply involved in the temperance movement, co-founding the Connecticut State Temperance Society in 1835. He eventually became quite active, not only in American abolitionist groups, including the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society (founded in 1838) but also in the British Isles. Pennington was strongly integrationist as well as pacifistic. Like white abolitionist evangelicals, he was drawn to moral reform activity because of a fundamental conviction that salvation by divine grace alone must culminate in a color-blind society. In a speech in London (1843) to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery society, he said, in true evangelical style,
It has pleased God to make me black and you white, but let us remember, that whatever be our complexion, we are all by nature labouring under the degradation of sin, and without the grace of God are black at heart.... I know of no difference between the depraved heart of a Briton, an American, or an African.... There is only one mode of emancipation from the slavery of sin ... and that is by the blood of the Son of God.... Whatever be our complexion, whatever our kindred people, we need to be emancipated from sin, and to be cleansed from our pollution by the all-prevailing grace of God.(13)
Pennington's clerical colleague, Amos G. Beman, also adopted an evangelical approach
to moral reform. Beman's father, Jehiel, who had been pastor of an African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church in Middletown, was an abolitionist who supported what many
white evangelicals regarded as the extremist position of William Lloyd Garrison.(14) Amos Beman, having experienced
racial discrimination at Wesleyan University, was privately tutored and eventually
accepted for ministry by the Congregational Hartford North Association in 1838. In
June of that year he became the evangelist for the Temple Street Colored Congregational
Church in New Haven (founded by Amistad activist Simeon Jocelyn), and in 1841 was
named its pastor. (The installation sermon was given by James Pennington.) While
avoiding "hysterical revivalism,"(15) Reman was influenced by the evangelical idea that one
must strive to eradicate selfishness and manifest benevolence to being in general
(the evangelical ethic formulated by Jonathan Edwards). Like Pennington, Beman devoted
his benevolent activity primarily to anti-slavery, temperance, and pacifist movements.
He believed that black persons had a moral obligation to reform themselves. He preached
against alcoholic consumption, theatre-going, and the use of tobacco. He argued that
if black persons could show themselves morally pure to white society, they would
have a powerful claim for enfranchisement(16) While his first reform work was in the area of temperance
(he co-founded the Connecticut State Temperance Society for Colored People in 1836),
he became increasingly involved with abolitionist groups. With Lewis Tappan he helped
found, and later served on the executive committee of, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society. He recommended disobedience of the Fugitive Slave Law and made his church
a station on the underground railroad. Nevertheless, Beman's evangelicalism included
a commitment to non-violence and, as president of the 1843 National Convention of
Colored Citizens in Buffalo, he helped defeat a resolution offered by Henry Highland
Garnet which was construed as endorsing violence in the overthrow of slavery.(17)
Although the work of Pennington and Beman brought to the abolitionist crusade a voice
from the black experience, it is significant that this voice spoke the same moral
and theological language used by Tappan and other white abolitionist evangelicals.
Black evangelicals like Pennington and Beman, while having undergone a profoundly
different racial experience from that of their white colleagues, shared a common
moral discourse and commitment to the eradication of slavery. The freeing of the
Amistad captives and support for their return to Africa, in part to engage in missionary
work, symbolizes this common evangelical heritage.
Upon arrival in Africa, it has been reported, Cinque, the leader of the revolt and
of the group throughout its captivity, abandoned Christianity, although toward the
end of his life he acted as interpreter for the mission station. Margroo, or Sarah,
became a teacher at the mission and Bartlett claims that the son of one of her pupils
eventually entered Yale Divinity School and "manifested a fair degree of ability."(18)
Engraving of the West African Mission House and Chapel from a drawing by the missionary Rev. J.S. Brooks. From a publication of the American Missionary Society, Vol. I, No. 10, August, 1856.
The Underlying Moralities
So much for the bare-bones narrative of the involvement of abolitionists in the Amistad
case. What I now want to focus on is the moral thinking that underlay it, especially
as it reflected a convergence of views from two very different theological directions,
the evangelical and the rationalist. The significance of the theological differences
in the first half of the nineteenth century is probably less apparent today than
it was then. During the waning days of Puritanism in New England, a rational or common-sense
reaction to Puritanism's theological paradoxes and affront to the dictates of logic
had begun to coalesce in the movements known as Unitarianism and its offshoot, Transcendentalism.
Unitarianism
Adherents of Unitarianism, which itself soon became a denomination, received their
name from their repudiation of the doctrine of the Trinity far what they regarded
as its obscurity and rational contradictions. At the heart of their resistance to
the divine obscurantism of Puritan orthodoxy was the conviction that God and human
beings shared a common nature such that rational persons could understand and respond
appropriately to moral commands God had chosen to embed in human nature. One important
result of this outlook was the Unitarian conviction that if human beings acted rationally
and in accord with the principles of nature, especially as these encouraged further
learning and education, they could not help but develop an innately good, not depraved,
moral character. Indeed, the development of moral character became the byword of
Unitarian morality, so much so that some Unitarians, the most notable being their
titular theologian William Ellery Channing, would have difficulty responding to the
issue of slavery. They could never treat it solely as an evil institution,
since they could always find examples of admirable moral character in both
slaveowners and slaves. The Unitarian outlook was, for the most part, more optimistic
about human nature and its moral progress through the ages than the theology of Calvinism
or of Unitarianism's nineteenth-century rivals, the evangelicals. Concepts such as
radical sin or depravity did not find an easy place in the Unitarian mind. Consequently,
many Unitarians were hard pressed to respond to institutional evil, which was inherently
more intractable than the imperfectly developed moral character of those who controlled
the institutions: people could be educated and reformed by personal appeal and rational
argument, whereas institutions seemed to be changed only by political manipulation
and coercion.
Although Channing never condoned slavery, he was relatively late in speaking out
against it and when he did, in his book Slavery, published in 1835, long after
the more evangelically inclined had begun their anti-slavery crusade, his tepid approach
upset even his life-long Unitarian fellow minister and former student, Connecticut
abolitionist Samuel Joseph May. As May pointed out, Channing abhorred slavery but
recoiled from the harsh and stinging invective and radical tactics of such abolitionists
as Garrison, and even May himself. May notes that Channing had a "great aversion
to excited speeches and exaggerated statements, and . . . a peculiar distrust of
associations."(19) May charged
Channing with making it appear, with respect to slavery, that there could be a sin
without a sinner. "He says that the character of the master and the wrong done
to the slave are distinct points, having little or no relation to each other. He
therefore did not 'intend to pass sentence on the character of the slaveholder'."(20)
Unitarians like Channing, while certainly not supportive of slavery, generally lacked
a passion of outrage against it, probably because they could not conceive of something
as irrational as slavery lasting a moment after its irrationality had been exposed
to the light of reason. Nor could they embrace tactics which in any way overrode
the moral sensibilities of either slave or slaveowner. They had an extreme aversion
to the denunciations and aggressive actions of the abolitionists, especially to their
call for "immediate emancipation," because of the social chaos they believed
it would bring in its wake. People with developed moral character could solve the
problem without resort to disorder if passion was restrained.
Evangelicalism
At the other end of the theological spectrum were the evangelicals, some heirs of
the old Puritanism but many more immediately influenced by the revivalism of the
first and second Great Awakenings. Evangelicals stressed the necessity of a personal
rebirth of the human soul out of its depravity under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
They understood the importance of passion in rousing the corrupt spirit to the promptings
of God, because they also knew the inadequacies and self-delusions to which human
reason is susceptible. In particular, they understood the urgency of cleansing the
nation of the obstacles to conversion and themselves of any lingering proclivity
to lapse into indifference to the new life they had been given by God. From within
the heart of evangelicalism came a powerful, dynamic, and often overwhelming urgency
to be about the business of moral reform, both of themselves as individuals, of the
nation, and eventually of the world. As one evangelical put it, "However terrible
the strain we rejoice that we are doing our part toward the moral conquest of the
world."(21)
Many scholars have pointed out some of the more radical consequences of this
evangelical position with respect to moral reform.(22)
First, the renewal experience itself liberated the converted from all labeling of
human beings. In the "glory pen," the place in which all those seeking
conversion were expected to gather in the frontier revivals, blacks and whites, men
and women, young and old, would meet as equals in the Lord. This experience at the
very least suggested that traditional distinctions based on subservience of blacks
to whites, women to men, and children to adults were not absolute and, in God's eyes
at any rate, insignificant and not defining of the essential identity of the individual.
Many carried this suggestion further, to the point of entirely rejecting these traditional
social distinctions of the society in which they still lived. For many evangelicals,
slavery became a clear and obvious example of a distinction and a subservience which
had no justification whatsoever in the light of God's coming kingdom. As such it
must be resisted root and branch by those who were committed to proclaiming and advancing
that kingdom. As Donald M. Scott has pointed out, at the core of the dedication of
the evangelical warrior against slavery, there was
a demanding inner spiritual discipline and an equally compelling need for continuing moral activism. Rebirth had broken their bondage to sin, but continuing triumph over it could only come if their striving toward perfect holiness–a frame free of sin and filled with evangelical concern to redeem the world–was unrelenting. Religious conversion is frequently accompanied by a sense of transcendence over the world, the feeling that one now possesses a timeless relationship to God and has entered a mode of being in which worldly conditions no longer have real significance. . . . [T]hey were as much obliged to combat the sinful world as they were to rid themselves of all remnants of sin. Rebirth . . . created intense hatred of. . . [sin] as the horrendous bondage from which they had been delivered and against which they had been called to wage unrelenting war. It was in such activism that they both realized and intensified their identity as reborn Christians and agents of God's ultimate millennial purpose.(23)
Evangelical opposition to slavery was based primarily on the belief that it was
inherently selfish and that selfishness was the cardinal sin against the exclusive
power of God in matters of salvation and meaning in human life. The alternative to
selfishness was benevolence: a primary concern with everything other than the self,
beginning with God but including the universe which God had created. As Jonathan
Edwards had put it in the eighteenth century's first Great Awakening, benevolence
was toward "being in general." Slavery was clearly the embodiment of selfishness:
it existed in order to satisfy the desires of particular persons, the slaveowners,
and especially their sexual lusts.
For many evangelicals, one of the most odious things about slavery was its association
with great wealth. Wealth was associated with pride and reliance on human power rather
than divine grace. Poverty was seen to be more appropriate for those who stood against
the world once they had received the gift of rebirth in the spirit. The luxury which
enabled the slaveowner to purchase slaves and the even greater luxury which the work
of slaves enabled him to enjoy, stood as marked rebukes to the human obligation to
serve the Lord in simplicity and modesty. It was also pointed out endlessly in evangelical
sermons against slavery that the wealth which permitted and was increased by slavery
encouraged the slaveowner and his family to become vain, idle, and slothful. The
children of planters, one evangelical wrote, contracted sinful habits because they
were "freed from hard labor, by having slaves to labor for them . . . ,"
an exemption that allowed them time to indulge in sports, balls, and other diversions
of the "high life."(24)
Naturally, as the second Great Awakening began to spread evangelical belief throughout
the South, the initial radical stance against slavery by Southern evangelicals was
softened, to avoid offending many of those more prominent slave-owning families who
had been won over to the more personal, individualistic dimensions of evangelicalism.
But the evangelical attitude toward slavery never entirely shed itself of its belief
that slavery was both a personal and a social sin and that the nation which permitted
it stood under the judgment of God. And that judgment could not be stayed simply
by developing the individual moral character of slave and slaveowner.
In one of the strongest charges against slavery, two evangelical sisters, Angelina
and Sarah Grimke, struck at the roots of a defense of slavery based on an argument
from moral character which had been put forward by a South Carolinian Presbyterian
minister, James Thornwell. Thornwell had argued that both slave and master had essential
moral rights that slavery could never abridge. The master's rights were those of
domination, the slave's those of obedience. In God's eyes, according to Thornwell,
as long as the slave performed his moral obligation in the "contingent"
circumstances of slavery, he would be as much rewarded in heaven as the master for
performing his moral obligations in the contingent circumstances of ownership. The
Grimkes regarded this statement of the supremacy of moral character over all so-called
contingent (meaning political, economic, and social) circumstances as a gross violation
of God's lordship over the whole of the created order and an unwarranted separation
of moral character from the social context in which that character was to be nurtured
and to express itself.(25)
For the evangelical, slavery was an affront to the sovereignty of God and to the
divine demand for holiness throughout the entire creation, including both individuals
and communities.(26) The logic of
the evangelical position, therefore, led to the demand for immediate abolition, regardless
of practical consequences. To compromise even one day with a manifest evil was unconscionable
and possibly even fatal to the salvation of one's immortal soul. For the evangelical,
the urgency of the fight against slavery was the urgency of eternity and bore the
significance of the divine imperative.
Lewis Tappan was an exponent of this evangelical opposition to slavery (as well as
to many other national sins that obstructed God's intention to cleanse the nation
and inaugurate His kingdom). Like Samuel J. May, Tappan was an early follower of
William Ellery Channing, but he soon became dissatisfied with Unitarians' indifference
to or even hostility toward revivals and social outreach, especially missions. He
converted to evangelicalism, stressing the fact of human sin, its need to be redeemed
by the Holy Spirit, and the importance of hell as a threat to bad moral conduct.
He criticized Unitarians for praying too little, preaching without "fire and
conviction," following too much the fashions of the world, and shying away from
fearless commitment to morality and piety.(27)
Lewis was at first less committed, however, to following the extreme application
of morality than his brother Arthur. He did not embrace William Lloyd Garrison as
closely as Arthur did, but was eventually won over to immediatism and perfectionism
by his brother's example and by the insistent encouragement of one of the greatest
of the evangelical abolitionists, Theodore D. Weld.(28)
Once convinced of the national moral sin of slavery, Lewis was often ahead of other
white abolitionists in attacking racial prejudice. He expected that in a racially
unbiased society, there would be intermarriage, which seemed not to concern him at
all, provided the partners were religiously united.(29)
His concern for evangelical orthodoxy was so strong that he even opposed the appointment
of Samuel May, a Unitarian, as an official agent of the New England Antislavery Society.(30) At one point, Tappan did acknowledge
that his conversion to evangelicalism, while leading him to be "zealous for
the truth, anxious for the conversion of men, [and] liberal in supporting the institutions
of religion," had not given him "that benevolence of heart . . . that love
for fellow-Christians, and that compassion for sinners, that Jesus inculcated."(31) Nevertheless, he never entirely
abandoned his belief that Unitarians were insufficiently aware of the need to be
true "stewards of the Lord."(32)
He did not like their rational emphasis on moral self-sufficiency, on individualism.
He was convinced that the works of righteousness were to be done through God's grace
and as part of the divine work in bringing in the kingdom, not simply because they
were expressions of the human spirit or part of its self-fulfillment Ultimately it
was God's power that had to be trusted to end slavery, not the works of human beings,
no matter how righteous their cause.
It would be hard to imagine how someone with the passionate urgency of an evangelical
and someone with the rational sensitivity of a Unitarian could find common ground
and common moral language to join forces in the fight against slavery. And yet, in
Connecticut we do find just such a confluence of moral discourse. While the participants
did not join forces in the Amistad case, since one of them had already left
the state for a parish in upstate New York, we have in Samuel Joseph May, Unitarian
clergyman in the northeastern Connecticut village of Brooklyn, and Luis Tappan, leader
of the Amistad Committee, two persons of equal antipathy toward slavery and
equal commitment to radical steps to secure its abolition.
May was born into a Unitarian family, was a student and close friend of William Ellery
Channing, and became the first Unitarian clergyman in Connecticut. He subscribed
fully to many of the Unitarian doctrines, abandoning the orthodox evangelical belief
in the divine inspiration of scripture, the miracles of Jesus, the doctrine of the
Trinity, the vicarious punishment of Jesus for all humankind, and the depravity of
human nature. Man is made in the image of God, according to May, and is "a partaker
of the Divine nature,"(33)
a view tantamount to heresy to a true evangelical. Jesus, our brother, has shown
the way to salvation and we have both the obligation and the ability to achieve that
state for ourselves. The role of religion is to help us in that endeavor. May saw
his role as clergyman to "lead men to transcendental self-fulfillment"(34) and to expound from the pulpit
"the rights of man."(35) May
was not as concerned with reshaping the political structure of America as he was
with leading; the individual to self-realization, and his approach to the slavery
question was basely on "moral and religious means and instruments."(36)
May had little interest in the fine points of theological argument. He was indifferent,
by and large, to the issues of salvation which the evangelicals thought hinged on
the proper interpretation of scripture and strict adherence to the merits of Jesus
as Lord and Savior for all persons. May's focus was not so much on the necessity
of a conversion experience and the life that follows it as on the life that we have
to live here and now, even in–-perhaps especially in–-the absence of an evangelical
moment of spiritual rebirth. Extremely tolerant of divergent theological views, May
opened his church to whoever wanted to attend. Theologically he was thoroughly representative
of the rational, liberal creed of Unitarianism.
Nevertheless, it could be argued that May's real religion was the development of
a human community in which all persons would be fulfilled and live in justice and
peace with one another. This was certainly consistent with the Unitarian insistence
that all persons were "brothers" under the same God and with its emphasis
on the dignity of each person's moral character. Citing his reasons for helping found
in 1833 (along with Simeon Jocelyn, later of the Amistad Committee) the New
Haven Antislavery Society, May declared that abolitionists were committed to the
cause "because we are men, and therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything
that concerns humanity."(37)
In fact, May took this emphasis to an extreme that shocked some of his fellow Unitarians
and led him to decry the temporizing he saw in some of them, including Channing,
on the issue of slavery. He even said at one point that he felt more at home with
an abolitionist who was not a Unitarian than he did with a Unitarian who was not
an abolitionist.(38)
May was one of the first Connecticut clergymen to embrace the work and person of
Garrison, whom he called "among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our
race."(39) Given his rational
leanings as a Unitarian, it is ironic that he describes his first encounter with
Garrison as one in which, echoing evangelical language, his "soul was baptized
in his spirit." He had now become "a disciple and fellow-laborer."
Garrison had convinced him that "immediate, unconditional emancipation, without
expatriation, was the right of every slave, and could not be withheld by his master
an hour without sin."(40) And
he could occasionally veer toward the evangelical notion of divine retribution being
delivered upon the nation for its sin unless people responded with the passion of
reform. But even here his language never quite touched all the points in the evangelical
indictment of national sin and divine wrath. May once said: "Would to God that
a deeper emotion could be sent throughout our land, until all the people thereof
shall be roused from their wicked insensibility to the most tremendous sin of which
any nation was ever guilty, and be impelled to do that righteousness which alone
can avert the just displeasure of God."(41)
But note that "insensibility" is used rather than "depravity,"
and God's wrath is called "displeasure." These subtle differences are typical
of the distinction between the moral discourse of the rational liberal and the impassioned
language of the evangelical.
Nevertheless, while his Unitarian convictions could permit him to acknowledge that
some slaveowners' lack of knowledge of their sin might mitigate their degree of guilt
for owning slaves, May was a forceful opponent of slavery, and especially of the
racial prejudice which underlay and was fostered by it. He could never allow questions
of moral character to qualify his implacable hostility to the institution itself,
though it is true that he gradually came to distrust institutional attempts to abolish
slavery and to rely, as Unitarians tended to do, upon individual action. Speaking
to the Non-Resistance Society in 1839, he said, "I find that I place every year
less value on organization, as I more clearly discern the power that rests in the
individual."(42)
Yet, like Tappan and the Grimke sisters, though without their evangelical world-view,
May was able to see beyond the mere wrong of holding others in chains to the prejudice
which would not be removed simply by the abolition of slavery and to the common humanity
which people of black and white skins shared. May pointed out that racial prejudice
was augmented by the "vague consciousness of the wrong" which whites knew
they were doing to blacks, precisely because people "dislike those most, whom
they have injured most."(43)
He argued that racial differences were due primarily to environmental and economic
factors, could accept that in a bias-free society blacks would rise or fall on their
own individual merits, and explicitly disavowed any concern about racial inter-marriage.
One of May's first overt involvements in racial matters was in the Prudence Crandall
affair, in nearby Canterbury, which certainly must have played a role in sensitizing
much of Connecticut to the issue of racial prejudice in the Amistad incident.
May was one of the few people in the town to defend Crandall's school.(44)
Just three years after this incident, May began receiving fugitive slaves in Brooklyn
as one stop on the underground railway. Later, as principal of a school in Lexington,
Massachusetts, he insisted that qualified black students be admitted and, after going
to Syracuse, he was among those resisting the fugitive-slave law. His language on
this legal issue rivaled the passion of the evangelicals on spiritual issues: "We
must trample this infamous law under foot ... be the consequences what they may....
It will agitate the country, as it has never been agitated before, and if we
do right, it will hasten rather than retard the consummation, of the anti-slavery
reform. I rather covet than dread the conflict."(45)
Slavery was "the worst system of iniquity the world has ever known."(46) Nevertheless, May's most frequently
stated objection to slavery was its inconsistency, not with the transcendent justice
of God but with principles the founding fathers had assumed were inherent in nature
and set forth in, for example, the Declaration of Independence. And his attack on
fellow Unitarians for not supporting the anti-slavery movement was based on their
failure to live up to the full significance of their claim that all persons share
in the divinity of human nature, not that all persons exist under the judgment of
God and receive through conversion the same saving grace.
Conditions of Convergence
In the end, what do we learn from the different moral languages of the evangelical
and the rationalist as they respond to a common moral issue? First, it is clear that
on this particular issue, slavery, the different forms of moral discourse devolved
from a common antipathy to the practice of holding human beings in bondage. In this
sense, the languages were shaped, at least in part, by a conviction that a particular
practice is unacceptable, offensive, or wrong. What the different moral languages
did was to express the different underlying reasons for a basic conviction and the
implications of acting upon it. Second, it is clear that in some very deep sense
a fundamental moral value was imperilled by the very existence of slavery, and that
value was the right of persons to live free from enslavement by others. Neither the
evangelical nor the rationalist questioned the human right of freedom from bondage
by other human beings.
Third, it is clear that both moral languages located that human right of freedom
in reality itself: it was not a right which could be negotiated on political or pragmatic
grounds. It was not what Thornwell called a "contingent" right: it was
an essential right because it was rooted in reality as such. Fourth, how the right
of freedom was rooted in reality was somewhat differently conceived by the two positions.
For the evangelical, an acting, dynamic, divine Being held this right for human beings
over them as a divine imperative and insisted that they would be held accountable
for conforming to it. But, and here is the crucial point, for the Unitarian, God
had implanted this right in the structures of reality, especially in human
nature itself, which Unitarianism understood as a more complete, less broken, embodiment
of God's intentions. In this sense, May could speak more often of humanity than he
did of God, because for him humanity was the repository of God's nature. The Unitarian
took divine immanence more seriously than divine transcendence. The
evangelical had a more vivid sense of God as a distinct, though hardly removed, personality,
to whose moral intentions each human being must pay careful and continuous attention.
For the evangelical, divine transcendence reflected a tension between this
world and the next. This tension forced the evangelical to be suspicious of any morality
based solely on natural principles without the infusion of divine grace and power.
Nevertheless, reference to God in and of itself, and theological differences over
the exact relation of God to the world, did not fundamentally change the moral positions
taken on the slavery issue. This seems to suggest that theological differences which
do not question the reality of God may ultimately affect only the language
one uses to express the underlying reasons one has for taking a moral stand; that
is to say, because God has either empowered me through specific divine importations
of grace to act in this way or because God has made it part of the very nature of
things that I do this if I want to be in conformity with my own nature.
Fifth, the passion one expends on a moral issue is not solely a result of one's passionate
relation to the divine nor of the place one feels passion should have in the shaping
of a mature moral personality. May's passion against slavery was the equal of that
of any evangelical, even though it did not proceed from an equally impassioned sense
of a relationship to a living, judging God. But it is certainly true that, on the
whole, the evangelicals approached the issue of slavery far more passionately than
did the rationalists.
Are we to conclude, then, that theological or creedal differences are irrelevant
in establishing differences in moral position but significant for creating differences
in moral reasoning and rhetoric? Theological differences do matter in articulating
the bases of moral action. When those differences are fundamental, as between a belief
that God or the structures of reality will sustain loving action and a belief that
selfishness is the ultimate force of the universe, the moral positions that flow
from these contrasting beliefs will be radically different. On the other hand, when
the theological differences are more a question of interpreting the tactics
or forms of divine influence, the moral responses may be strikingly similar.
When the Unitarian insists that the deity has made Itself known in the human
heart and mind through the initial act of creating the structures of reality, and
the evangelical proclaims that God continues to make (Him)self known through specific
acts of redemption/revelation, the understanding of the mechanics of divine involvement
is different in each case but the content of the divine imperative may well be the
same–for example, to act benevolently toward all being.
At the same time, it may well be the case that people who accept a similar form of
divine action may disagree radically on what that action entails morally. May differed
from many Unitarians on the moral implications of God's love for humanity: he included
black persons without qualification in humanity; they often hedged their acceptance
of blacks within a deeper racism. Some evangelicals could include the whole social-economic-political
structure in the embrace of their reform, but others could restrict themselves (especially
when they were socially, economically, and politically well off) to the reform of
the individual soul. Tappan and Thornwell simply read the divine intervention's imperative
very differently, though both believed firmly in that intervention.
What the abolitionists of the Amistad era remind us, therefore, is that the
moral issues behind the moral rhetoric include not primarily the question of moral
majorities versus immoral minorities, or of God versus secular humanism. The real
moral issue, at least for those who recognize some kind of divine reality, is the
interpretation of the will or intention of the divine reality--namely, whether
it is embedded in human reality through creation, identical with it, or disclosed
in it at specific moments through revelatory acts. It is a question of what that
will includes, sustains, or rejects. It is a question of the content of the divine
will or the purpose of nature. It is a question of the scope of moral action: is
it individual salvation, personal self-realization, the redemption of the human community,
or the actualization of the entire ecological cosmos? On these questions, evangelicals
can be in as much disagreement with one another as they are with those they regard
as outside the faith.
In the Amistad case, we see a perfect example of agreement about the content
of God's will co-existing with crucial disagreement about the ways in which that
will should be implemented, as well as disagreement about the form of divine action
co-existing with agreement about what moral actions one should perform in order to
respond to the divine will. The underlying moral issues, therefore, are not the same
as the theological issues regarding the immanence or transcendence of God. The moral
issue is about the content of the divine will, whether that be known through revelation
or discovered by reason in nature. On that issue, there can be agreement in a civilized
society without consensus on the theological problem, just as there can be disagreement
even among those who hold a similar theological position. As Jeffrey Stout has argued
in a study of moral languages, "we need not agree on all matters of importance
to agree on many, and where our judgments happen to coincide, we need not reach them
for the same reasons."(47)
NOTES
1. "Joshua Leavitt," in Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, Vol. Vl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912).
2. Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37.
3. Horatio T. Strother, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 29-30.
4. Jones, 41.
5. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 207.
6. "Joshua W. Gibbs," in Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College.
7. Simeon E. Baldwin, "The Captives of the Amistad," Papers of the New Haven Historical Society, IV, (New Haven, 1888), 347.
8. Wyatt-Brown, 217
9. Baldwin, 354-55.
10. Wyatt-Brown, 209.
11. Ellen Strong Bartlett, "The Amistad Captives," New England Magazine, New Series, XXII (March-August, 1900), 88-89.
12. Information on Pennington has been drawn from Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 78-82; and especially from C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. I: The British Isles, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985),117-119.
13. Ripley, 132.
14. Material on Amos Reman has
been drawn from Quarles, 46-48, 79-80, 94, 227, Ripley, 414-415; and, especially,
Robert A. Warner, "Amos Gerry Beman--1812-1874: A Memoir on a Forgotten Leader,"Journal
of Negro History, 22 (April, 1937), 200-221.
15. Warner, 214.
16. Warner, 214.
17. Ripley, 415.
18. Bartlett, 89.
19. Samuel J. May, Some Recollections
of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1869), 172.
20. May, 178.
21. Quoted in Gilbert Hobbs Barnes,
The Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844, with a new introduction by William G. McLoughlin
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 78.
22. See especially Donald Mathews,
Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); and
Dixson Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1974) for interesting analyses of the social effects of the conversion experience.
23. Donald M. Scott, From Office
to Profession: The New England Ministry 1750-1850 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 86.
24. James D. Essig, The Bonds
of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery 1770-1808 (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1982), 54. Essig's book contains an excellent description
of how Southern white evangelicals in particular took up the fight against slavery.
25. See Frank G. Kirkpatrick, "From
Shackles to Liberation: Religion, The Grimke Sisters, and Dissent," in Yvonne
Y. Haddad and Ellison B. Findly, eds., Women, Religion, and Social Change
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 433-455.
26. It is interesting to note that
the evangelicals tended to work in groups or communities to achieve their moral objectives,
whereas many of the more rational opponents of slavery acted as individuals.
27. Wyatt-Brown, 35.
28. Wyatt-Brown, 102.
29. Ibid., 177.
30. Ibid., 185.
31. Ibid., 262.
32. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious
Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 76.
33. Jane H. Pease and William
H. Pease, Bound With Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery
Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 278. See also Thomas James Mumford,
Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874), passim.
34. Pease and Pease, 280.
35. May, 358.
36. May,
4.
37. T. Strother, 27.
38. Strother, 279.
39. May, 4.
40. May, 19. In embracing Garrison,
May became part of the rational, liberal "Boston clique" described in Friedman,
43 ff.
41. May, 22.
42. Pease and Pease, 294.
43. Pease and Pease, 283.
44. Interestingly enough, the lawyer
who had sought the dismissal of the black child from Crandall's school, Andrew Judson,
turned out to be the judge who delivered a decisive verdict in favor of the Amistad
captives a few years later. It is also interesting to note that Arthur Tappan had
told May to spare no expense in defending Ms. Crandall because he would pick up all
costs. Wyatt-Brown,91.
45. Pease and Pease, 296.
46.May, l.
47. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After
Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988),
226.
__________
FRANK G. KIRKPATRICK is Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Professor of Religion,
Trinity College, Hartford.
