Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation

Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation PDF

Author: Daniel L. Fountain

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780807138069

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During the Civil War, traditional history tells us, Afro-Christianity proved a strong force for slaves' perseverance and hope of deliverance. In Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation, however, Daniel Fountain raises the possibility that Afro-Christianity played a less significant role within the antebellum slave community than most scholars currently assert. Bolstering his argument with a quantitative survey of religious behavior and WPA slave narratives, Fountain presents a new timeline for the African American conversion experience. Both the survey and the narratives reveal that fewer than 40 percent of individuals who gave a datable conversion experience had become Christians prior to acquiring freedom. Fountain pairs the survey results with an in-depth examination of the obstacles within the slaves' religious landscape that made conversion more difficult if not altogether unlikely, including infrequent access to religious instruction, the inconsistent Christian message offered to slaves, and the slaves' evolving religious identity. Furthermore, he provides other possible explanations for beliefs that on the surface resembled Christianity but in fact adhered to traditional African religions. Fountain maintains that only after emancipation and the fulfillment of the predicted Christian deliverance did African Americans more consistently turn to Christianity. Freedom, Fountain contends, brought most former slaves into the Christian faith. Provocative and enlightening, Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation redefines the role of Christianity within the slave community.

Holy War and Human Bondage

Holy War and Human Bondage PDF

Author: Robert C. Davis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0313065403

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Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean tells a story unfamiliar to most modern readers—how this pervasive servitude involved, connected, and divided those on both sides of the Mediterranean. The work explores how men and women, Christians and Muslims, Jews and sub-Saharan Africans experienced their capture and bondage, while comparing what they went through with what black Africans endured in the Americas. Drawing heavily on archival sources not previously available in English, Holy War and Human Bondage teems with personal and highly felt stories of Muslims and Christians who personally fell into captivity and slavery, or who struggled to free relatives and co-religionists in bondage. In these pages, readers will discover how much race slavery and faith slavery once resembled one other and how much they overlapped in the Early-Modern mind. Each produced its share of personal suffering and social devastation—yet the whims of history have made the one virtually synonymous with human bondage while confining the other to almost complete oblivion.

The War against Proslavery Religion

The War against Proslavery Religion PDF

Author: John R. McKivigan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1501728741

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Reflecting a prodigious amount of research in primary and secondary sources, this book examines the efforts of American abolitionists to bring northern religious institutions to the forefront of the antislavery movement. John R. McKivigan employs both conventional and quantitative historical techniques to assess the positions adopted by various churches in the North during the growing conflict over slavery, and to analyze the stratagems adopted by American abolitionists during the 1840s and 1850s to persuade northern churches to condemn slavery and to endorse emancipation. Working for three decades to gain church support for their crusade, the abolitionists were the first to use many of the tactics of later generations of radicals and reformers who were also attempting to enlist conservative institutions in the struggle for social change. To correct what he regards to be significant misperceptions concerning church-oriented abolitionism, McKivigan concentrates on the effects of the abolitionists' frequent failures, the division of their movement, and the changes in their attitudes and tactics in dealing with the churches. By examining the pre-Civil War schisms in the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist denominations, he shows why northern religious bodies refused to embrace abolitionism even after the defection of most southern members. He concludes that despite significant antislavery action by a few small denominations, most American churches resisted committing themselves to abolitionist principles and programs before the Civil War. In a period when attention is again being focused on the role of religious bodies in influencing efforts to solve America's social problems, this book is especially timely.

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis PDF

Author: Mark A. Noll

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-12-08

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0807877204

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Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.

Religion and the American Civil War

Religion and the American Civil War PDF

Author: Randall M. Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0195121287

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"The authors show that religion, understood in its broadest context as a culture and community of faith, was found wherever the war was found: in the armies and the hospitals; on the plantations and in the households; among all conditions of men and women, white and black."--Cover.

Christian Slavery

Christian Slavery PDF

Author: Katharine Gerbner

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-02-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0812294904

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Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

When Slavery Was Called Freedom

When Slavery Was Called Freedom PDF

Author: John Patrick Daly

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0813158516

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When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy. Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence to the grassroots assumptions of the South. The North and South shared assumptions about freedom, prosperity, and morality. For a hundred years after the Civil War, politicians and historians emphasized the South's alleged departures from national ideals. Recent studies have concluded, however, that the South was firmly rooted in mainstream moral, intellectual, and socio-economic developments and sought to compete with the North in a contemporary spirit. Daly argues that antislavery and proslavery emerged from the same evangelical roots; both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the Bible and Christian moral dictates in light of individualism and free market economics. When the abolitionist's moral critique of slavery arose after 1830, Southern evangelicals answered the charges with the strident self-assurance of recent converts. They went on to articulate how slavery fit into the "genius of the American system" and how slavery was only right as part of that system.

Slavery and Sin

Slavery and Sin PDF

Author: Molly Oshatz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0199751684

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Molly Oshatz reveals the antislavery origins of liberal Protestantism, arguing that the antebellum slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to develop new understandings of truth and morality and apply the theological lessons of antislavery to the challenges posed by evolution and historical biblical criticism.

A Visitation of God

A Visitation of God PDF

Author: Sean A. Scott

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0195395999

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When Abraham Lincoln expressed gratitude for the northern churches in the spring of 1864, it had nothing to do with his appreciation of doctrine, liturgy, or Christian fellowship. Collectively, the churches earned the president's admiration with rabid patriotism and support for the war. Ministers publicly proclaimed the righteousness of the Union, condemned slavery, and asserted that God favored the federal army. Yet all of this would have amounted to nothing more than empty bravado without the support of the men and women sitting in the pews. This outstanding book examines the Civil War from the perspective of the northern laity, those religious civilians whose personal faith influenced their views on politics and slavery, helped them cope with physical separation and death engendered by the war, and ultimately enabled them to discern the hand of God in the struggle to preserve the national Union.From Lincoln's election to his assassination, the book weaves together political, military, social, and intellectual history into a religious narrative of the Civil War on the northern home front. Packed with compelling human interest stories, this account draws on letters, diaries, newspapers and church records along with published sources to conclusively demonstrate that many devout civilians regarded the Civil War as a contest imbued with religious meaning. In the process of giving their loyal support to the government as individual citizens, religious Northerners politicized the church as a collective institution and used it to uphold the Union so the purified nation could promote Christianity around the world. Christian patriotism helped win the war, but the politicization of religion did not lead to the redemption of the state.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory PDF

Author: Steven L. Dundas

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-10

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1640125418

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Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is a hard-hitting history of the impact of racism and religion on the political, social, and economic development of the American nation from Jamestown to today, in particular the nefarious effects of slavery on U.S. society and history. Going back to England’s rise as a colonial power and its use of slavery in its American colonies, Steven L. Dundas examines how racism and the institution of slavery influenced the political and social structure of the United States, beginning with the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Dundas tackles the debates over the Constitution’s three-fifths solution on how to count Black Americans as both property and people, the expansion of the republic and slavery, and the legislation enacted to preserve the Union, including the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—as well as their disastrous consequences. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory squarely faces how racism and religion influenced individual and societal debates over slavery, Manifest Destiny, secession, and civil war. Dundas deals with the struggle for abolition, emancipation, citizenship, and electoral franchise for Black Americans, and the fierce and often violent rollback following Reconstruction’s end, the civil rights movement, and the social and political implications today. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is the story of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders; slaves and slaveholders; preachers, politicians, and propagandists; fire-eaters and firebrands; civil rights leaders and champions of white supremacy; and the ordinary people in the South and the North whose lives were impacted by it all.