I. Slavery and Religious Historiography in the Early Republic

Religious historiography produced and circulating in the early republic gave little attention to the history of Christianity and slavery. Slavery hardly appeared in the two most widely read church histories: German Lutheran Johann von Lorenz Mosheim's Institutes of Ecclesiastical History (1726) and the Anglican Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809)—eighteenth-century works which remained popular in the United States through the 1860s.Footnote ⁹ Other influential historiography made passing commentary on slavery in the Christian past. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) attributed the decline of slavery in Europe to “the prevailing influence of Christianity”; William Robertson, another of the philosophes, concluded in his bestselling Charles V (1769) that the “humane spirit of the Christian religion . . . contributed more than any other circumstance to introduce the practice of manumission.”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet even as these historians generally agreed that Christian principles produced a decline of slavery in Christendom, the question of slavery in the Christian tradition remained relatively undeveloped in the historiography read by Americans in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹

In contrast, African American historians in the Revolutionary and early republic eras were eager to use the Christian past to critique slavery.Footnote ¹² Authors such as Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) developed what John Ernest calls a “liberation historiography” which associated slavery with corrupt Christendom while distinguishing between the latter and the pure Christianity of the early church.Footnote ¹³ Likewise, the Methodist minister and missionary John Marrant (1755–1791) pointed to post-apostolic Christianity as evidence for racial equality.Footnote ¹⁴ Marrant, an early Black abolitionist in Boston, argued that “ancient history will produce some of the Africans who were truly good, wise, and learned men, and as eloquent as any other nation whatever.” As examples, Marrant listed a number of North African church fathers: “Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzan.”Footnote ¹⁵ These leaders of the early church exemplified the intellectual and religious capabilities of Africans and, as such, challenged racial hierarchies.

In the early republic, the history of early Christianity proved useful to Northern African Americans facing political disenfranchisement and racial discrimination.Footnote ¹⁶ The founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 exemplified a growing desire among white Northerners to create a racially unmixed nation.Footnote ¹⁷ In the face of national exclusion, African American intellectuals such as Maria Stewart and David Walker produced a historiography that demonstrated the cultural and intellectual achievements of ancient Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Early Christian history added religious weight to this argument, and North African church fathers took on symbolic status; when African Americans in the early republic named schools and societies, they frequently paid tribute to Augustine and Cyprian.Footnote ¹⁹ Jacob Oson reveals why in his Origin of the African Nation (1817): these church fathers proved that Europe and America owed a great religious debt to Africa. Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine “were all of them bishops of the church,” Oson argued, “and, therefore, may I not say that the enlightened nations consider some of them as cornerstones?”Footnote ²⁰ In the 1820s, similar arguments appeared in the African American periodical Freedom's Journal. In one article, Freedom's Journal cited Augustine's City of God as evidence of Africa's religious and cultural influence on Europe.Footnote ²¹ Another three-part essay argued that early church history proved the intellectual and spiritual capacity of Africans, reminding readers “that the gospel was first received in the burning sands of Africa with great eagerness.”Footnote ²²

In contrast, white antislavery authors lagged behind when it came to recognizing the resources available in the Christian past which could be used to further their argument. Although some, such as British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, noticed that leading histories of Christianity presented the faith as working against slavery, church history only emerged in white antislavery discourse after the founding of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator in 1831.Footnote ²³ Among the leaders of this renewed abolitionism was David Lee Child (1794–1874), a journalist and lawyer who founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society along with Garrison and Arthur Tappan.Footnote ²⁴ On the anniversary of its founding, D. L. Child highlighted the achievements of past Christians, arguing that they recognized the slavery of Greece and Rome to be antithetical to Christian values—despite its being relatively humane in comparison to modern slavery—and thus sealed its fate: “Christianity abolished it.” According to D. L. Child, early Christians recognized the incompatibility between freedom in Christ and enslaving other persons and “set their bondsmen free.”Footnote ²⁵ The history of early Christianity, in D. L. Child's account, put American Christians to shame.

D. L. Child's argument reached a broader audience when it was picked up by his wife Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880). By the 1830s, she enjoyed a literary reputation for her novels, prescriptive literature, and her bimonthly publication Juvenile Miscellany. In 1833, her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans called for immediate emancipation and racial equality. In the appeal, she quoted from her husband's speech, arguing that the early church recognized that the teaching of Christ required manumission. The work provoked such a widespread negative reaction that shortly after its publication she was forced to close the Juvenile Miscellany due to canceled subscriptions.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout her career as a religious historian, L. M. Child remained interested in the history of Christianity vis-à-vis slavery, devoting significant space to the question in her 1855 The Progress of Religious Ideas.Footnote ²⁷

If Lydia and David Child brought Christian history to the attention of white abolitionists, Bela Bates Edwards (1802–1852) provided the cause with substantial historical ammunition. Edwards, an evangelical Congregationalist, was a scholar, editor, and active reformer who founded the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Slave, the American Missionary Association, and the American Quarterly Observer, and in 1844 took over the Bibliotheca Sacra, a leading theological publication of the day.Footnote ²⁸ In the fall of 1835, Edwards produced an article titled “Roman Slavery,” and the following January, he wrote another on medieval slavery, both published in the Biblical Repository (a predecessor of Bibliotheca Sacra). Edwards, who taught Hebrew and sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary, was familiar with religious historiography and in these articles drew Gibbon, Robertson, other European historians, and church fathers into an argument about Christian history and slavery.Footnote ²⁹

As a life-long abolitionist, Edwards was eager to demonstrate Christianity's tendencies against the peculiar institution. In his first article, Edwards argued that while Christianity did not directly end Roman slavery, “its whole spirit and genius are adverse to slavery, and it was the most powerful of all the causes . . . which finally extinguished the system throughout Europe.” Edwards reproduced quotations from various early Christian writings, highlighted Constantine's promotion of laws for more equal treatment of slaves, and argued that manumission increased after the establishment of Christianity.Footnote ³⁰ In his second article, Edwards argued that Christianity continued to work against slavery throughout the Middle Ages. “In the darkness and confusion which reigned from the 4^th to the 12^th century,” Edwards allowed, “we might expect that such an institution as slavery would flourish.” However, medieval Christians slowly recognized that slavery was incompatible with their faith, Edwards argued, as evidenced by manumission becoming “an act of highly meritorious piety.” As the institution's “contrariety to the precepts of the New Testament was gradually seen,” slave laws grew increasingly humane and the number of slaves declined.Footnote ³¹ In these two articles, Edwards presented a well-documented account of early and medieval Christianity working to slowly dismantle slavery.

Edwards enjoined no responses from proslavery historians or theologians, even as he provided useful historical arguments for later theological criticisms of slavery. His research was excerpted in several New England newspapers, cited in abolitionist pamphlets and books, and referenced by quite a few antislavery authors throughout the 1840s and 1850s, including Albert Barnes, John Gregg Fee, Francis Wayland, Jonathan Blanchard, Charles Elliott, and Alexander Campbell.Footnote ³² Yet, as Campbell's citation of the articles makes clear, Edwards's historical argument did not necessitate radical abolition. The Restorationist leader pointed out that Edwards's research showed that slavery was only reformed, not abolished, in the primitive church.Footnote ³³ For those like Campbell—who opposed slavery but refused to join the abolition movement and would not discipline proslavery ministers in their denominations—Edwards's research seemed to offer good historical justification for taking a moderate, gradualist approach to ending slavery.

II. Pope Gregory XVI Enters the Debate

By the late 1830s, Christian history was a common feature of religious antislavery arguments. African American authors appealed to the early church—particularly to North African church fathers—both to demonstrate their intellectual and spiritual equality with Anglo-Americans and to associate racial equality with pre-Constantinian Christianity. White abolitionists, in contrast, drew on eighteenth-century historians to argue that Christian principles slowly worked their way through the early and medieval church to limit, if not completely abolish, slavery in Europe. These antislavery narratives went generally uncontested until the 1840s, when proslavery authors began to realize the importance of attending to slavery in Christian history.

These proslavery accounts of the Christian past emerged in response to the publication and reception of In supremo apostolates, an encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI (1765–1846). Written in 1839, Gregory XVI's letter strongly condemned the modern slave trade while making historical claims about Christianity's opposition to slavery. “When the light of the Gospel first began to diffuse itself,” Gregory XVI proclaimed, oft-enslaved Africans “felt their condition among Christians very much alleviated.” According to the Roman pontiff, early Christians—such as Gregory of Nyssa and Clement of Rome—worked for the manumission of slaves, and Christian principles eventually ended slavery in Europe. Gregory XVI added his name to a list of predecessors who condemned the modern slave trade, while calling Catholics around the world to repent of this practice “altogether unworthy of the Christian name.”Footnote ³⁴

The encyclical quickly stirred up controversy in the United States. It was reprinted in abolitionist periodicals, and Gregory XVI even enjoyed that most elusive commendation of popes when praised by several Quaker activists.Footnote ³⁵ William Lloyd Garrison published the encyclical in the March 13, 1840 edition of the Liberator and fourteen years later quoted the encyclical again to shame Americans by pointing out that even “Papal-ridden Italy” opposed slavery.Footnote ³⁶ The encyclical found its way into congressional arguments. William Slade (1786–1859), U.S. Representative and eventual governor of Vermont, cited it in his 1840 speech to Congress on abolition. An anti-slavery Whig, Slade called the United States to join “the great movement of Christendom against slavery which has been going on for centuries.” He argued that those who defended slavery set themselves against the emancipatory power of Christianity in history—a historical movement most recently expressed in Gregory XVI's encyclical—which he hoped would have a “tremendous effect against slavery . . . in Brazil, the Spanish West Indies, and the United States.”Footnote ³⁷

While antislavery Northerners celebrated the pope's account of Christian history, others saw the encyclical, and its republication by abolitionists, as a portent of rising fanaticism.Footnote ³⁸ Secretary of State John Forsyth (1780–1841) attached the entirety of the encyclical to an address given in August 1840 to Georgian voters after the Whigs’ presidential nomination of William Henry Harrison—who would challenge the incumbent administration which Forsyth served. A Jacksonian Democrat and slaveholder, Forsyth speculated that the British government was acting as the “agent of the Pope, in presenting an apostolic letter on slavery to some of the Spanish American States.” With the 1833 British abolition of slavery in recent memory, Forsyth imagined a conspiracy of Rome and Britain building an antislavery faction in U.S. politics. British interference in the slave trade in the Americas, Forsyth explained, gave Northern abolitionists the courage to nominate Harrison despite the protests of Southern Whigs. According to Forsyth, these British machinations and the papal encyclical—together “a compound of ignorance, folly, and insolence”—represented nothing less than a foreign intrusion into American party politics.Footnote ³⁹ He warned Georgia's voters that a Harrison presidency would see such fanaticism brought into power.

Proslavery authors could not let Gregory XVI's historical claims go unanswered. Faced on one side with abolitionist enthusiasm for the encyclical and on the other with nativist concern that Roman Catholics would subvert American rights, Southern Catholics quickly argued that their religion did not and never had opposed slavery.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most notably, John England (1786–1842), the first Roman Catholic bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, entered the fray. According to historian Patrick Carey, Bishop England served as “a national spokesman and apologist for the compatibility of Catholicism and American democratic traditions” over the twenty-two years of his episcopacy—founding the first Catholic newspaper with a national reach, addressing Congress in 1826, and establishing a number of religious orders and educational institutions.Footnote ⁴¹ He represented and advocated an American Catholicism that was both pro-republican and pro-Enlightenment.Footnote ⁴²

In October 1840, Bishop England wrote a series of letters to Forsyth reassuring the Secretary of State that neither the pope nor the tradition condemned the institution of slavery itself—only the slave trade.Footnote ⁴³ Bishop England was bothered by slavery as practiced in the South but believed that slaveholding in the abstract was neither at odds with tradition nor scripture. In his letters to Forsyth, he defended the institution on historical and theological grounds.Footnote ⁴⁴ He quoted heavily from the works of Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Pope Gelasius I, arguing that these church fathers taught that slavery was lawful and that the spiritual freedom of the Gospel did not dictate physical freedom from slavery. He mined patristic writings, reproducing quotes that seemed to permit slaveholding while insisting that the early church completely endorsed slavery. According to Bishop England, manumission was neither mandated by early Christian teaching nor commanded by later church authorities. As Christianity expanded throughout Europe, he concluded, it only made slavery less severe, not less common. Bishop England then argued for the perpetuity of Christian slaveholding throughout the Middle Ages, pointing out that the church never officially condemned ownership of slaves but only cruelty.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bishop England's proslavery interpretation of the encyclical offered an influential, if controversial, account of Christian history. His letters, published posthumously in 1844, were skewered in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. “The Bishop of Charleston,” the Boston periodical sneered, “repels with suitable sensibility the calumny that Catholic Christians ever thought of doing or teaching others to ‘do as we would have them do to ourselves.’” The National Anti-Slavery Standard challenged Bishop England's translation of the Latin encyclical, providing its own reading that stressed “the important fact that Christianity did once abolish slavery.” While Bishop England insisted that the pope only condemned the slave trade, the review argued that his predecessors, including Pope Alexander III, clearly taught that every Christian was a freeman.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the National Anti-Slavery Standard pointed out, this could hardly be squared with hereditary slavery as practiced in the South.

The papal encyclical and its interpreters placed the Christian past squarely in the center of arguments over slavery. While abolitionists countered Bishop England's reading of the encyclical, proslavery authors and Southern politicians in the 1840s and 1850s seized on his arguments about the early and medieval church.Footnote ⁴⁷ Proslavery authors insisted that the pope's condemnation of the slave trade did not contradict the practice and teaching of the church throughout time, while antislavery authors picked up the encyclical's narrative, arguing that Christianity's historical amelioration of slavery was to be fulfilled in present-day abolition. After the encyclical, competing accounts of church history frequently appeared in religious arguments over slavery and all the more as Protestant denominations splintered and split over the question.

III. Contested Traditions and Denominational Schisms

By the 1840s, the question of slavery threatened to divide the nation along sectional lines, as Southern secessionists and radical Northern abolitionists alike called for disunion, and the second party system began to fragment over the question of slavery's expansion into the West.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political division was mirrored in the ecclesiastical world. By 1845, the three largest Protestant denominations—Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—had split over slavery.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the wake of these denominational schisms, Christianity's historic relationship to slaveholding became all the more controversial, and pro- and antislavery Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists turned to church history to justify their position to their intradenominational opponents.

Perhaps the most theologically thoughtful of these exchanges was the 1844 epistolary debate between Rhode Island Baptist Francis Wayland (1796–1865) and his South Carolinian counterpart Richard Fuller (1804–1876). Wayland, moral philosopher and president of Brown University from 1826 to 1855, believed slavery to be evil but opposed the methods of radical abolitionists, while Fuller held that the institution was not immoral per se. Fuller was a lawyer, nationally known Baptist minister, and slaveholder who, in the same year as this debate, helped to found the Southern Baptist Convention.Footnote ⁵⁰ The two Baptists published their correspondence over the morality of slavery in Philadelphia's Christian Reflector. Notable for its irenic tone, the debate exemplified the difficulty that otherwise like-minded evangelical Protestants had in agreeing on the meaning of scripture.Footnote ⁵¹ Fuller's and Wayland's exchange was published as a book in 1845 and widely reprinted, going through five editions in its first two years.Footnote ⁵²

In addition to debating biblical teaching on slavery, Wayland and Fuller argued over Christian tradition. In the seventh letter, Wayland brought history into the question after acknowledging that the New Testament gave no clear precept against slavery, which would have produced an insurrection. Instead, Christ intended to bring slavery to an end through the gradual influence of Christian morals. Then, citing Bela Bates Edwards's article, Wayland argued that this in fact was what occurred: “As the gospel spread from city to city, and began to exert an influence upon the public mind, the laws respecting slavery were gradually relaxed . . . until, throughout the whole empire, slavery was at last abolished.” Wayland quoted Clement, Paulinus, Cyprian, Ambrose, and other church fathers to “illustrate the manner in which the early church interpreted the teaching of the gospel respecting slavery, and also the effect which this teaching had upon their practice.” Christian principles “once abolished slavery,” Wayland proclaimed, and “have almost done it for the second time.”Footnote ⁵³

In response to Wayland's appeal to tradition, Fuller marshalled evidence both from patristic teaching and Christian precedent. Fuller picked up on John Chrysostom's commentary on 1 Corinthians 7, one of the scriptural references most contested in the antebellum debate: “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? Care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (1 Corinthians 7:20–22). This passage appeared to enjoin slaves to be content while also affirming the superiority of freedom. According to the fourth-century bishop Chrysostom, however, Paul meant in this passage that “slavery is no harm but rather an advantage,” as it helped the slave disregard “riches and wrath and all other the like passions.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Chrysostom's interpretation, unpopular with the Protestant reformers, was generally out of favor by the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ Further, Chrysostom's Homilies posed problems for slaveholders, as elsewhere in this work the bishop instructed Christians to educate their slaves and manumit them as soon as possible.Footnote ⁵⁶ As nineteenth-century scholars noted, Chrysostom's corpus of teaching by no means supported slavery.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet Fuller, and subsequent proslavery exegetes after him, quoted Chrysostom's commentary at length.Footnote ⁵⁸

Fuller also responded to Wayland with a proslavery reading of Christian history, countering that “during the apostolic periods, and for centuries after, the most holy men and martyrs held slaves.” At no point did Christianity abolish slavery, Fuller insisted, but rather “infused its mild and benevolent spirit into the institution, making it quite a different thing.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Fuller's historical argument drew criticism and a lengthy rebuttal from a number of antislavery authors, including Albert Barnes (1798–1870). Barnes, a New School Presbyterian and one of the era's best-selling biblical commentators, took umbrage with Fuller's claim that Christendom never abolished slavery.Footnote ⁶⁰ Barnes published a long rejoinder, Scriptural Views on Slavery, in which he drew on Bela Bates Edwards, Gibbon, and patristic authors to show that Christianity effectively abolished slavery in Europe.Footnote ⁶¹ Six years later, in 1852, Barnes's antislavery work was quoted by Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”Footnote ⁶²

Baptists were not alone in arguing over the Christian past. Among Presbyterians during the 1840s, antislavery clergy appealed to church history when they censured slaveholders or excluded them from holding ministerial office. The abolitionist John Gregg Fee (1816–1901) refused to extend fellowship to slaveholders, a stance that ultimately led to his separation from the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky in the 1840s. In 1848, Fee used Christian history to defend his position, arguing that early Christians had not tolerated slavery in the church and citing a host of church fathers as evidence.Footnote ⁶³ Proslavery Presbyterians, in turn, argued that such church discipline not only disregarded the authority of scripture but also departed from Christian precedent. For example, William Graham, a New School Presbyterian in Cincinnati, argued that abolitionists purported to judge the biblical authors, the church fathers, and the entire church throughout time.Footnote ⁶⁴ Graham's anti-abolitionist book led to his suspension by the New School Synod in Cincinnati; when he was reinstated after appealing, this in turn caused a backlash from the antislavery side of the New School, and one Presbytery broke away as a result.Footnote ⁶⁵

Denominational battles produced increasingly one-sided historical arguments from proslavery ministers. At the 1844 Methodist General Conference, James Osgood Andrew (1794–1871), a Methodist bishop from Georgia, came under sharp criticism by Northern Methodists for owning slaves. Over the protest of their Southern counterparts, Northerners passed a resolution suspending Bishop Andrew from exercising his position. In turn, Southerners, led by Henry Bidleman Bascom (1796–1850), drew up a plan to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1845, Bascom wrote a defense of the new denomination in which he argued that abolitionists set themselves in judgment over scripture and “the principal fathers and writers of the Church” who have “steadily and formally recognized the state and relations of slavery.” Those early Christians who attempted to abolish slavery, according to Bascom, were “directly condemned by nearly all the principal early and later fathers. Ignatius, Chrysostom, and Jerome especially, denounce the practice as unchristian.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Similar historical arguments came from another Methodist embittered by the schism. William Gannaway Brownlow (1805–1877), preacher and newspaperman in Kentucky, went from being an antislavery activist in the 1830s to an ardent defender of slavery by the 1850s, a shift largely due to his disillusionment with the contentious debates in the denomination.Footnote ⁶⁷ Brownlow championed the Southern Methodist church, arguing in sermons and public debates that church discipline against slaveholders was unsustainable in light of Christian history.Footnote ⁶⁸ These sorts of historical arguments continued to emerge from proslavery authors, both Northern and Southern, throughout the 1850s.Footnote ⁶⁹

Antebellum denominational arguments and schisms only encouraged further historical entrenchment. When Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists failed to win over their ecclesiastical brethren through exegesis, they insisted that tradition was on their side. Church history had implications for local and national denominational disputes. Antislavery ministers argued that the teaching of the early church and the “spirit” of Christianity throughout history justified the use of church discipline against slaveholders; proslavery clergy countered that the very same church fathers accepted slavery and that it was the abolitionists who departed from the norms of traditional Christianity.

IV. Christian History and Race-Based Slavery

Underneath arguments about the history of Christian slaveholding lay the often-implicit question of race. By the early 1850s, most religious defenses of Southern slavery assumed innate racial differences and argued that the institution was paternalistic, benefiting Africans by providing them the opportunity for religious and cultural development.Footnote ⁷⁰ John Fletcher's Studies on Slavery, which opened this article, exemplified such a paternalist reading of the Christian past. Fletcher argued that racial slavery was benevolent, citing Augustine's claim that slaves enjoyed the protection of beneficent masters. Against the general consensus of eighteenth-century historiography, Fletcher argued that early Christianity did not diminish the extent of Greco-Roman slavery but rather transformed it—a useful historical narrative for those who wanted to see Southern slavery not abolished but rather made more humane.Footnote ⁷¹

African American historians were quick to point out that church history demonstrated the absurdity of such paternalism. The interpretation of early church tradition developed by Black historians in the Revolutionary and early republic years discussed earlier in this article continued to proliferate in African American literature in the 1840s and 1850s. Early Christianity appeared in the works of a number of leading Black intellectuals, including Robert Benjamin Lewis (1802–1858),Footnote ⁷² Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882),Footnote ⁷³ and Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–1866),Footnote ⁷⁴ each of whom cited African church fathers in their arguments for racial equality. Augustine, Cyprian, Tertullian, and other early theologians of the church demonstrated the religious and intellectual capability of Africans and proved useful to early Black nationalists.Footnote ⁷⁵

Church history was a repeat topic on the pages of New York City's leading African American newspaper the Colored American. Published by a number of prominent Black intellectuals—Samuel Cornish, Charles Bennett Ray, James McCune Smith, and others—the Colored American mobilized African Americans to build schools, churches, and mutual aid societies. One article encouraged educational endeavors by setting before its readers the great saints of the Christian past: “What Cyprian, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and others, in the Church were, colored men may be again.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In another, the Colored American castigated the “learned man” who in one breath argued for the curse of Ham and, in the next, proudly quoted from Cyprian, Cyril, or Augustine—even though “they were negroes!”Footnote ⁷⁷ The article pointed out the hypocrisy of such racism: “Does this learned disciple expect to sit down with them in heaven? And will he continue to speak of their countrymen as being of a degraded caste?”Footnote ⁷⁸

The most extensive argument about church history by a Black abolitionist came from James W. C. Pennington (1807–1870).Footnote ⁷⁹ Born on a plantation in Maryland, Pennington escaped in 1827 and found a home with Quakers in Pennsylvania before settling in New York. Denied admission to Yale Divinity School, Pennington audited courses instead and became a proficient scholar in several languages. In addition to his role in founding the Union Missionary Society, his lectures on the abolition circuit, and his European trips advocating for various societies, Pennington wrote several important antislavery works, including his widely read autobiography The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849). In 1841, he published A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of Colored People, named by one scholar “his most original work.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In Text Book of the Origin and History . . . of Colored People, Pennington narrated Black experience throughout sacred history, constructing a powerful historical case that slavery was incompatible with genuine Christianity. In fact, Pennington argued: “Slavery is an institution of the dark age!” For Pennington, the Portuguese and Spanish origins of the African slave trade meant that racial slavery was a Roman Catholic aberration and thus at odds with Protestant Christianity. He explained that slavery in the New World began with Charles V. “This great patron of the mother of abomination; this stoutest of the co-workers with the Pope of Rome, in his persecution of Luther and the reformers,” Pennington wrote, “was also the first patron and patriarch of the institution which is so peculiar at the south.”Footnote ⁸¹ In a context of heightened anti-Catholic nativism, it was shrewd of Pennington to cast race-based slavery as a product of Catholic corruption.Footnote ⁸² Those who defended slavery, Pennington concluded, were “patrons of Rome and the dark age!”Footnote ⁸³ In Pennington's telling of the Christian past, Protestantism, progress, and antislavery went together.

Some white antislavery authors also distinguished between the history of slaveholding in Christendom and the more recent practice of race-based slavery.Footnote ⁸⁴ Moses Stuart (1780–1852), Congregational minister and professor of biblical literature at Andover Theological Seminary, presented a nuanced account of Christianity and slavery in his 1850 work Conscience and the Constitution. Stuart, called “the father of Biblical Science in America” for his use of German philological and critical hermeneutical methods, conceded that the Bible permitted slavery in the abstract.Footnote ⁸⁵ In fact, Stuart sided with Chrysostom and Theophylact against abolitionist readings of 1 Corinthians 7. However, he clarified that by no means did scripture allow for race-based slavery, and both Christian doctrine and Christian history taught the equality of all races: “Were not such men as Origen, and Clement of Alexandria, and Cyprian, and Athanasius, and Arius, and Jerome, and Augustine, and others like them, Africans?” Sounding much like earlier African American historians, Stuart concluded that “intellect springs up in nearly equal measures, wherever it is cultivated and called forth.” Toward these ends, Stuart urged gradual abolition and African colonization.Footnote ⁸⁶

Stuart was not the only Northerner to distinguish between claims that Christianity condemned slavery wholesale and the more specific argument that racial slavery in particular was at odds with Christian precedent. In his prize-winning legal treatise, The Law of Freedom and Bondage (1858), John Codman Hurd (1816–1892) narrated the history of Christianity and slaveholding. Hurd, a New York lawyer and legal scholar, relied on John Fletcher and Bishop England and, based on these proslavery accounts of Christian history, concluded that the early church in no way abolished slavery. However, Hurd clarified that over time Christendom did outlaw slavery of fellow Europeans. He noted the important change from Christian Europe only allowing slavery of infidels to the latter development of slavery based on racial distinctions.Footnote ⁸⁷ Fletcher's legal treatise placed abolition outside the norms of Christian history, even while highlighting differences between ancient and modern slavery. In 1877, Hurd received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Yale University for his treatise.

Some abolitionists used church history to paint racial slavery not only as anti-American but also anti-Protestant. The Connecticut physician Edward Coit Rogers (1816–1860) insisted in his Letters on Slavery (1855) that slavery was not only contradictory with Christian tradition generally but also on the wrong side of the Reformation. Rogers argued that the early church had been “wholly at war with slavery,” a claim he supported with quotations from Polycarp, Ignatius, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Cyprian, and other church fathers. As the purity of apostolic Christianity began to wane, Rogers explained, Christendom came to accept slavery through “the bulls of five Roman popes, in the most corrupt age of the church.” Racial slavery, Rogers claimed, had been created by the papacy. “Protestantism,” he argued, “in denying the despotism of the popes, denounces negro slavery.” According to Rogers, the reformers advocated the right of liberty and the equality of all. After quoting Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, the abolitionist hammered the point home: “No man then, is a legitimate protestant who lends his sanction to this infamous system.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Even as proslavery authors used patristic interpretation to support Biblical endorsement of slavery, African American and white antislavery authors pointed out that the North African heritage of many patristic theologians belied a racial hierarchy. Even if scripture and tradition permitted slavery in certain forms, antislavery authors insisted that the historical church never endorsed the institution as it existed in the South. Black and white historians in the abolitionist camp distinguished between ancient and race-based slavery, arguing that the latter was the fruit of corrupt medieval Catholicism and out of line with the history of genuine Christianity.

V. Christian History During Crisis

Abolitionism gained momentum after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, developments that proved the insidious influence of “slave power” to Northerners.Footnote ⁸⁹ As the sectional crisis came to a head, moderate antislavery authors used the Christian past to encourage Northerners that history was on their side. In 1854, church historian Philip Schaff (1819–1893) argued in his survey of church history that “the spirit and genius of Christianity . . . has in all ages, without any radical noise and revolution, or contempt for historically established legal rights and the principles of equity, urged towards the orderly constitutional abolition of slavery.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Schaff, who supported gradual emancipation, argued that this was the historic Christian position. He would repeat this gradualist argument in an article in 1858 titled “The Influence of the Early Church on the Institution of Slavery” and again in his 1861 book Slavery in the Bible. Footnote ⁹¹ For Schaff, and other gradual emancipationists, the “spirit” of Christianity ought to bolster confidence that slavery was headed toward extinction, despite evidence to the contrary.

At the same time, abolitionists in the late 1850s maintained that they stood on the right side of church history. In his 1857 The Church and Slavery, Albert Barnes expanded his earlier arguments from church history, insisting that “the general course of the Christian church has been against slavery” and arguing that Christian principles ended slavery in both the Roman and British Empires.Footnote ⁹² Other abolitionists agreed, narrating church history as the story of Christian principles of freedom and equality slowly overcoming the political and economic forces of greed.Footnote ⁹³ James W. C. Pennington, building on his prior work in the 1840s, followed a similar thread in a series of articles in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859. In this series, titled “A Review of Slavery and the Slave-Trade,” Pennington summarized the history of slavery from ancient times through the present and argued that European slavery was not abolished because of the feudal system but rather as “the natural effects of christianity.” The Christian doctrines of human equality, divine impartiality, and eternal judgment made it inevitable that Christian Europe would free its slaves. Pennington then quoted a number of abolitionist charters as “positive proof that Christianity was the only cause of the suppression of slavery” and concluded that abolition must be the natural progression of Christianity in Europe and the United States.Footnote ⁹⁴ Even as the political storm clouds grew darker, Pennington and other antislavery activists insisted that the Christian past demonstrated the inevitability of abolition.

At the same time, Christian history became all the more prominent in proslavery discourse in the late 1850s, especially in the work of legal scholars.Footnote ⁹⁵ Southern lawyers were keen to make historical arguments, particularly that Christians throughout time had carefully distinguished between the spiritual freedom of all believers and the right to physical freedom. For example, in An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery (1858), the Georgian lawyer Thomas R. R. Cobb (1823–1862) used the Christian past to support his argument for proslavery jurisprudence while another Southern lawyer, George Sawyer of New Orleans, made a similar argument from Christian history in his 1858 legal treatise, Southern Institutes; Or, An Inquiry into the Origin and Early Prevalence of Slavery and the Slave-Trade.

An evangelical Presbyterian and accomplished legal scholar, Cobb helped to codify Georgia law in the late 1850s before serving as a delegate to the state's secession convention. In An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, Cobb offered nearly six-hundred pages of legal, historical, and philosophical arguments for slavery “at the most sophisticated levels of southern thought.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The first half of Cobb's treatise traced religious and historical arguments in favor of slavery and, beginning with the early church, narrated Christian tradition on the institution. “That the true ‘heavenly freedom’ was open to all, bond or free,” Cobb argued, “was inculcated by all the Fathers.” To underscore the point, Cobb multiplied quotations from Tertullian, Ignatius, Jerome, and Ambrose on the superiority of spiritual freedom, and Augustine, Chrysostom, and others on the need for Christian slaves to remain in their condition. Cobb acknowledged “the mild and humanizing influences of Christianity” on the condition of slaves but, following Bishop England, insisted that slaveholding persisted unchecked and unquestioned throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁹⁷ Cobb's account of the Christian past provided crucial backing for his discussion of legal history. The book's synthesis of Southern proslavery thought proved widely influential, with several state supreme courts using its arguments in decisions on slavery-related cases in the late 1850s and early 1860s.Footnote ⁹⁸

Similarly, in Southern Institutes, George Sawyer argued that although some medieval Christians practiced manumission, they only did so with intellectually and morally equal races. The implication regarding Christian ownership of Africans was clear. According to Sawyer, the medieval church never encroached upon the “right” of the master to own a slave nor ever called it a sin. Quoting Constantine and Gregory the Great, Sawyer argued that church history showed “the most scrupulous observance of the right of property in the master to the service and the control of the person of the slave.” With abolitionists in mind, the lawyer posed the question: “Is the Church now more holy than in the pristine days of the Apostles?”Footnote ⁹⁹ By appealing to the early church, Sawyer played on the primitivist accounts of church history that predominated in antebellum theological discourse.

But other proslavery interpretations of the Christian past diverged from typical Protestant historical narratives. As Southern intellectuals in the late 1850s defended slavery against Northern reformers, they frequently found themselves celebrating medieval social hierarchies over and against modern notions of equality and liberty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At times, this produced readings of church history that departed significantly from Protestant norms, especially the narrative that the Protestant Reformation ended the era of Catholic tyranny and corruption. One of the most noteworthy reinterpretations came from George Fitzhugh (1806–1881), the South's leading social theorist. In his widely read Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, published in 1857, Fitzhugh made an extended case for the superiority of a hierarchical social order over the inequalities of laissez-faire capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh challenged the account of the Reformation in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), still an authoritative legal history in the 1850s. Blackstone represented the English Reformation as a crucial step in establishing the liberty of Englishmen; Fitzhugh, in contrast, argued that the Reformation undermined proper social order in England, not least by dismantling the benevolent hierarchy of church and state. He explained: “In destroying the noblest charity fund in the world, the church lands, and abolishing a priesthood, the efficient and zealous friends of the poor, the Reformation tended to diminish the liberty of the mass of the people, and to impair their moral, social and physical wellbeing.” The Reformation represented a step toward a capitalist society, which cloaked itself in the language of freedom and equality while reducing ordinary people to “slaves without masters.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Fitzhugh's criticism of the Reformation resembled arguments made by contemporary American Roman Catholics.Footnote ¹⁰³ As an Episcopalian, however, Fitzhugh distinguished the intent of the Reformation from its unfortunate legacy. “Like the American Revolution,” Fitzhugh explained, the Reformation had been distorted into “the unwilling and unnatural parent of the largest and most hideous brood of ills.” According to radical “modern philosophers,” the Reformation birthed the ideals of equality and private judgement. Such distortion led directly to the “civil discord and domestic broils” of the 1850s, he argued. The disorder, violence, and anarchy that threatened the nation, he proclaimed, were due to New England ministers preaching the supposed “right of private judgment, liberty of speech, freedom of the press and of religion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ According to Fitzhugh, Northern inequality could be blamed squarely on the Protestant Reformation. He was not the only Southerner to make this move.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In their zeal to defend slavery, proslavery authors deviated from even the most cherished Protestant historical narratives.

As secession loomed, proslavery authors insisted all the more that ecclesiastical history completely justified Christian slaveholding. Ebenezer Boyden (1803–1891), a Northerner who served for half a century as an Anglican rector in Virginia, published a vigorous condemnation of abolitionism in 1860. Boyden pointed to patristic and medieval exegesis, arguing that “for eighteen centuries there was but one interpretation . . . that slavery is an allowable institution, not a hideous sin.” Against antislavery readings of the Bible, Boyden insisted that “the Christian fathers” and even the “old Puritans” understood scripture to allow slavery. He charged abolitionists with effectively excommunicating “the whole Christian Church of the past, with the Hebrew and Patriarchal Churches [and] their own Puritan forefathers who, in fact, were pro-slavery, slave-owning, and slave-trading.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Boyden used church history to cast New England abolitionists as hypocritical moralists who denied their own past and threatened both Christian and national unity.

VI. Christian History During War

After the South seceded and the Civil War began, the meaning of the Christian past only took on greater urgency. For Confederates, church history proved useful in constructing a white Christian nationalism, particularly in the best-selling Cause and Contrast: An Essay on the American Crisis (1862). Written by Irish Catholic immigrant T. W. MacMahon, Cause and Contrast provided a historical narrative that vindicated slavery in explicitly racist terms. MacMahon endeavored to use history to demonstrate both white supremacy and the antiquity of Christian slaveholding. He insisted that early Christians embraced Roman slave codes and customs and argued that “general enfranchisement was never contemplated by the greatest and wisest of Christian writers, philosophers, law-givers, and saints.” MacMahon listed a number of patristic sources—including Athanasius, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Basil—as having been supportive of slavery.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His narrative provided a pedigree for emerging Confederate nationalism and was very well received upon its publication in 1862, selling 3,000 copies in its first week of print.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

However, the most extended wartime historical argument for Christian slaveholding came not from the South, but from John Henry Hopkins (1792–1868), bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. In December of 1860, several New York politicians wrote a letter asking Bishop Hopkins for his opinions on slavery. Hopkins, a proponent of gradual emancipation and colonization, had nonetheless been a vocal critic of abolitionism from the early 1850s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hopkins's answer was published in several New York papers and printed as Bible View of Slavery. Twenty thousand copies of the latter were distributed by the brand-new American Society for Promoting National Unity.Footnote ¹¹⁰Bible View of Slavery received immediate and outraged replies from abolitionists.Footnote ¹¹¹ When Democrats campaigning in Pennsylvania reprinted the pamphlet during the fractious election season of 1863, the backlash grew. One hundred sixty-four Episcopalian clergy in Pennsylvania, including the bishop, put their names to a public protest that accused Hopkins of “strengthen[ing] the hands of the rebellion, and weaken[ing] the hands of the government in the pending struggle.”Footnote ¹¹²

Other Northern ministers and scholars also chimed in. In 1861, Leonard Marsh (1800–1870), professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Vermont, published a scathing critique of Bible View of Slavery. Marsh argued that Hopkins had completely ignored the history of scriptural interpretation, a history which proved that the principles of scripture aimed toward abolition: “From the time of the Apostles, there has been, in the hearts of christians, a feeling, ever becoming deeper, and spreading wider, that slavery is incompatible with the spirit and principles of christianity.” According to Marsh, abolition did not have its roots in eighteenth-century innovation as Hopkins had claimed, nor in early Christian heresies, but in properly orthodox doctrine. As evidence, Marsh pointed to early Christian and medieval customs of manumitting slaves. He admitted that although Christians frequently owned slaves: “This inconsistency was felt, and . . . the christian heart acknowledged the incompatibility of slavery with Christianity.” By the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Marsh concluded: “Slavery was all but extinct in every part of Europe.”Footnote ¹¹³ Marsh, along with several other Northern ministers, directly challenged Hopkins's reading of Christian history.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Hopkins refused to back down, expanding his argument in A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery (1864). He doubled down on the proslavery reading of 1 Corinthians 7, insisting that the best scholarship on the Greek proved that “the old interpretation of St. Chrysostom is vindicated, in opposition to the majority of the modern expositors.” Hopkins cited other ancient commentators to bolster his exegetical case before turning to various patristic and medieval theologians who made a distinction between spiritual and physical freedom. He insisted on the perpetuity of Christian slaveholding, reproducing selections from various church councils to show that slavery “was acknowledged by the Church for the first nine hundred years of the Christian era . . . while not one suggestion can be found imputing sin to the relation between the master and the slave.” In fact, slaves belonged not only to ordinary Christians, but also to churches, monasteries, and clergy. Church history, according to Hopkins, proved the compatibility of Christianity and slaveholding.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Unsurprisingly, such an argument was not well-received in 1864. The North American Review lamented that “few books more saddening than this have been produced even by the party spirit of these agitated and reckless times.” The review made sure to point out a number of historical errors made by Hopkins and concluded that the bishop's reading of church history displayed “a degree of ignorance which amounts to irresponsibility.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Fellow Episcopal bishop Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe (1808–1895) published a rebuttal in 1864, castigating Hopkins for weaving “Patristic Dicta and Papal Bulls, and Conciliar Decrees, and Episcopal Pastorals” into a mantle of “antiquated excuses” to cover an enormous sin.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The most extensive response to Hopkins's historical account was written in 1864 by Daniel R. Goodwin (1811–1890), Episcopal priest and provost of the University of Pennsylvania from 1860 to 1868. Goodwin opposed slavery and endorsed African colonization, and he criticized Hopkins for assuming “that the principles, the genius and spirit and practical influence of Christianity are not and have not always been against slavery.” Goodwin set out to demonstrate the falsity of this assumption. He argued that before Constantine the church “was powerless to influence the government,” and after it was “rapidly corrupted in its moral sense by its contact with a slaveholding aristocracy.” Yet the church still abolished slavery nearly completely throughout the Roman Empire. Each of Hopkins's quotations was reinterpreted by Goodwin, including Chrysostom's “over-refinement” of 1 Corinthians 7. Goodwin then offered his own selections, including Chrysostom's attribution of slavery to “insatiable avarice and envy,” along with passages from Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Pope Gregory XVI, and the Protestant reformers. When it came to opposing slavery, “the clergy and the dignitaries of the church may often have lagged behind,” Goodwin concluded, “but the spirit of Christianity has lived in the hearts of the Christian people.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

The controversy over Hopkins illuminates several features of the debate over historic Christian slaveholding, particularly the ways in which arguments over history mirrored the basic shape of the argument over scripture. Hopkins stressed that church tradition, like scripture, did not consider slavery a sin in the abstract, insisting on a straightforward—if rather selective—appropriation of the teaching and practice of the historic church. His opponents, in contrast, prioritized the trajectory of Christian history, which they claimed moved inexorably toward emancipation. Hopkins's critics gave greater weight to the “spirit” of the Christian past than to any formal condemnation or acceptance of it. As in exegetical arguments, the fault line formed between literalist and intuitive readings.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Tellingly, even though Hopkins's historical arguments initially invoked outrage throughout the North, he emerged relatively unscathed and went on to serve as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church from 1865 to 1868.Footnote ¹²⁰ His leadership and anti-abolitionist writings helped bring about postbellum reunification between Northern and Southern Episcopalians.

As the war progressed, Northern ministers continued to justify the cause in historical terms. In May of 1863, months after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation came into effect, Congregationalist minister Joseph Parrish Thompson (1819–1879) published a fast-day sermon titled Christianity and Emancipation. To those who argued that freeing slaves went against the consensus of Christian history, Thompson replied that this confused genuine Christianity with Roman Catholicism. He explained that the early church was characterized by a “spirit of freedom and of equality” that was lost after the fourth-century establishment of Christianity. Medieval practices of slaveholding, he reasoned, should be understood as a symptom of the “apostacy of the middle ages.” The Reformation, then, was a crucial step toward freeing the slaves. While the Protestant reformers had not focused on “philanthropic reform,” Thompson argued that they recovered the “primitive” church's emphases on spiritual equality and freedom. Over time, this recovery produced emancipation.Footnote ¹²¹ Thompson's argument here reflected a typical Northern outlook in which the American ideals of equality and liberty had their roots in the Reformation.Footnote ¹²²

The end of hostilities did not mean an end to the debate. Even after the war, Southern authors continued to defend the Southern cause with Christian history. Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney (1820–1898), who served as chief of staff and chaplain for Stonewall Jackson, continued the fight in print in his Defense of Virginia (1867).Footnote ¹²³ Dabney defended slavery as not only legally and morally justified, but also confirmed by Christian tradition—a point for which he relied heavily on Hopkins's book. “Neither primitive, nor reformed, nor Romanist, nor modern divines taught the doctrine of the intrinsic sinfulness of slave-holding,” Dabney argued. “The church as a body never dreamed it.” Abolitionists, then, according to Dabney's logic, were forced to assert that Christ had “consigned seventeen centuries of Christians to a sin, and as many of slaves to a wrong, which he all along abhorred.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Dabney found it impossible to believe that Christ would have allowed the church to err for so long.

VII. Conclusion

When the embittered Dabney insisted on the absurdity of Christ allowing his church to remain in “seventeen centuries of sin,” he strained the logic of his Presbyterianism. Dabney's incredulity fit rather poorly with Protestant narratives about most of church history—but this was only one of many ironies in the debates over slavery, which saw Catholics ignoring or reinterpreting papal decrees, Episcopalians celebrating early American Puritans, Presbyterians defending medieval society while criticizing the Reformation, Baptists treating patristic exegesis as authoritative, and anticlerical abolitionists praising the pope. Not all of this irony was lost on contemporaries. As has been discussed, African American historians, in particular, took pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of proslavery authors who cited North African church fathers in their arguments for white supremacy.

Perhaps most unexpected, given the typical depiction of American Protestants as disinterested in church history, is the sheer prevalence of the Christian past in the debate. From the 1830s through the Civil War, Christians across denominations readily drew on patristic and medieval theology, argued about precedent, and even insisted on the importance of tradition. Dozens of published tracts, treatises, and sermons show that arguments over slavery were also debates about the meaning of the Christian past, and church history proliferated not only in the publications of theologians and ministers but also of lawyers, politicians, and statesmen. The popularity, frequency, and range of these historical arguments show that an era characterized as ahistorical and anti-traditional in fact saw extensive engagement with the history of Christianity. The historical components of the slavery debate suggest that much more work could be done on the broader cultural and political significance of religious tradition in nineteenth-century America.

The widespread use of Christian history modifies our understanding of the antebellum “theological crisis,” as Mark Noll describes it.Footnote ¹²⁵ Certainly, American theologians failed to overcome their disagreements in part because of widely shared hermeneutical assumptions and a kind of biblicism. However, this biblicism was not in practice defined by disregard of tradition nor inattention to history. Put another way, the theological crisis foundered not because pro- and antislavery authors ignored the Christian past but precisely because they attended to and used that past to make conflicting arguments. The historical narratives reconstructed and reinvented by each side of the debate only strengthened the conviction that theirs was a holy cause. Increasingly certain that the Bible endorsed their respective positions, pro- and antislavery Christians also believed that they were on the right side of church history. Rather than tradition and history providing resources for the resolution of the crisis, the remembered religious past only made the debate all the more intractable. Arguments over slavery show that history, much like theology, remained subservient to politics, culture, and race, illustrating both the plasticity and the limitations of historical memory. History did not bridge but instead deepened the divide between pro- and antislavery Christians.

The social memory of the Christian past reveals a complex interplay between religious texts, memory, and authority in antebellum America. In his illuminating study, Seth Perry suggests that biblicism in early America was less a reality and more a rhetorical construct. Scripture wielded its authority, Perry argues, within the lived experience of relationships, functioning more as a “site” than a “source” of authority.Footnote ¹²⁶ Perry adds to scholarship that shows how American biblicism was modified by racial assumptions and philosophical commitments.Footnote ¹²⁷ Attention to the remembered religious past further challenges the meaning of biblicism, showing that arguments over the Bible never took place in a hermeneutical vacuum but rather alongside other sources of religious knowledge. Debates over slavery saw scripture wielding authority within a long history of tradition and interpretation. Even as they insisted that they relied on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to venerable Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify the authority of scripture. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible, at least in the contentious debate over slavery, was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants had hoped. At least, it shows the inescapable quality of tradition. American Protestants never read, nor argued over, the Bible alone.