Why Slavery in America?
Does the Bible approve of slavery and did the founders use the Bible to justify slaveholding in the new country? The short answers are “No” and “Probably”.
Slavery was common from the ancient to the modern world. Rome may not have been built in a day, but no matter how long it did take, it also took slaves. From Genesis in the Old Testament through Revelation in the New, the Bible is full of references to slavery, and so, the argument goes, since slavery is mentioned in the Bible it must be “OK” according to GOD, right? No. Simply because the Bible made reference to man’s bad behavior does NOT mean GOD approved of the action.
Some of the early slaves in the Colonies were not of African descent, but of European. Men and women wishing to come to the new world were taken on as indentured servants; people who would sell their labor to a company or an owner who would then use their manpower for a specific period of time as bond for their passage and board. The first Africans to land in the British Colonies were in Jamestown, estimated to be sometime between 1619 and 1623. What is not certain is whether they were captured slaves or indentured servants. There are records in the 1630’s and 1640’s that indicate Africans in the New World probably were more like indentured servants than slaves. Still, a more important question to be answered is this: why Africans?
War, commodities, and commerce were all drivers of slavery. It was common practice throughout the world to take slaves as wealth-building commodities. This was not limited solely to European or ancient warfare, but also between tribes in Africa. Sudanese kings would trade captured persons as slaves and, seeing how profitable slave-selling could be, began to capture persons outside of warfare to sell to the Muslims in northern Africa. When the Portuguese landed in Africa in approximately 1444, they took back to Portugal African slaves that they had purchased from African owners. Slave trading between the Portuguese and Muslims soon became a lucrative business for the kings of Africa.
Slave trading and use of slaves all over the world was commonplace and lucrative. Since the southern climate of the Colonies was tropical, African slaves, who were both hardy and readily available, were bought from West Indian and Brazilian slave markets until approximately the early 1700’s, when the Colonial south setup slave markets to maintain their own slave trade. The slave trade and the purchase and use of slaves became one of the major points of contention when the new country was formed.
The first attempt at forming a new government was memorialized in the Articles of Confederation, which much to the anger of some of the contributors, allowed for slavery in the new country. Political battles over slavery occurred for the next twenty years under the Articles of Confederation. Slave holding states wanted to keep their slaves for economic and political power while most of the lesser populated, non-slaveholding states saw slavery as a moral issue that had not been dealt with the in the Articles and should not to be tolerated in the new Constitution. The new Constitution was signed and ratified, but the debate regarding slavery was far from over. Elections were held and representation sent to Congress, but the continued argument over the bondage of humans would cause the end to many lifelong friendships and the fracturing of political parties due to conscience and morality.
The passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 (which created the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska and allowed them to decide whether they wanted to be a free or slave states) was the last straw for abolitionist members of the Whig and Free Democrats parties. They left their respective parties and formed the new Republican Party. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first Republican President with a clear eye to abolishing slavery in the United States. Lincoln abhorred slavery but also abhorred the idea of the Union dissolving. Struggling to hold the Union together while gathering political will and backing to end slavery, the Republicans, with Lincoln as President, witnessed the disintegration of the Union. Some of the slaveholding states seceded making conflict inevitable and on 12 April, 1861, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun.
The war raged on until, in 1862, the Union forces began to get the upper hand over the Confederates. Lincoln seized his opportunity and signed an Executive Order freeing all slaves in Confederate States unless those states returned to the Union by 1 January 1863. Those states that continued in rebellion lost their right to hold slaves in 1863, when a final Executive Order, the Emancipation Proclamation, was signed by Lincoln. By April 1865, Lincoln was dead but the Union was preserved and his desire to end slavery in the United States was achieved.
So, the question still remains: Did any of the founders use the Bible as justification for keeping slaves? Did they ascribe to GOD the right to own slaves? The prevailing scholarship says that some did, while others used the same Bible (and sometimes the same text) to rebut the owning of another human being. The Bible, however, is clear – slavery was a fact of the ancient world and as such, GOD used that fact to make His points.
What remains remarkable, however, is that an institution that existed for thousands of years prior to the birth of The United States in 1776, was eliminated within 100 years of its founding BECAUSE of the Bible, not in spite of it. Lincoln did so in 1863 by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, invoking the will of GOD in a closing statement, “…I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God” as support for his decision. The founders displayed their flawed humanity by compromising on what some saw as unconscionable. But they also showed wisdom by creating a mechanism in the Constitution for amendment, allowing for a future generation to abolish slavery.
The overarching principles expounded in the scriptures had triumphed and slaves were recognized as men, created in the image of GOD and should therefore be seen as “brothers and sisters” , and not as possessions. Though not a perfect country with a perfect history, the United States and Americans from every background have a remarkable ability to strive for good. We try, which cannot be said for other cultures in history. One hundred and forty-five years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and only forty-five years after the passing of the Civil Rights Amendment, this country that was split by its moral conscience over the owning of human beings as slaves, elected a black man as its President. What existed for thousands of years around the world came to an end in a new country that had new ideas about freedom and liberty.
Kathleen Meesey
Colorado Springs, CO
1 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1i2994.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/02/AR2006090201097.html
2 Text of Emancipation Proclamation, September 1862
3 Galatians 4:31, New Living Translation, “So, dear brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman; we are children of the free woman.”
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