Antebellum
Presbyterian Pastor James Henley Thornwell’s understanding of
Providence envisioned no Utopian solution to slavery -- the only hope
was the gospel. He stated that “our design in giving [Africans] the
Gospel is not to civilize them, not to change their social conditions;
not to exalt them into citizens or freemen; it is to save them.”
Likewise, Robert E. Lee understood that the gentle hand of Christianity
would solve the riddle in time.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Resisting Furious Abolition Fanaticism
“Northerners
calling for an immediate end to Southern slavery seemed to forget the
long history of bondage in their own States. For generations African
slaves had toiled in each of the thirteen American colonies, purchased
from other Africans and brought in chains to the New World in the holds
of New England slave ships.
Pennsylvania’s
experience was instructive. There, long before independence, the
Quaker-dominated assembly recognized slavery and codified a rigorous
system of slave control. William Penn himself owned a dozen black
slaves and is said to have preferred them to indentured whites because
slave labor was permanent. In colonial days some Quakers expressed
misgivings, but most readily accepted slavery.
During
the American Revolution many Pennsylvania slaves ran away, some joining
the Tory cause, lured by promises of freedom should Britain win the
war. In 1780 the Pennsylvania legislature passed the gradual Abolition
Act, the first such statute in America. By its provisions all slaves
born before March first of that year remained slaves for life, while
children born to slaves after that date would be set free after
twenty-eight years of servitude.
Alexis
de Tocqueville observed that when Northern masters were faced with the
imminent prospect of having to let go of their slaves they often sold
them to new owners in States where slavery still existed.
“Consequently,” observed the Frenchman, “the abolition of slavery [in
the North] does not make the slave free but just changes his master to a
Southerner instead of a Northerner.” Southerners inclined to consider
emancipation had fewer practical choices in de Tocqueville’s view. “The
North rids itself of slavery and of the slaves in one move. In the
South there is no hope of attaining this double result at the same
time.”
Slavery
had other costs more difficult to measure. According to de Tocqueville,
writing in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s abortive 1831 slave
insurrection, the specter of revolt haunted the Southern mind.
Northerners, secure from danger themselves, freely discussed the
prospect of a race war drowning the South in blood. “In the Southern
States there is silence,” said de Tocqueville, “one does not speak of
the future before strangers . . .”
With
abolitionists calling for slavery’s violent overthrow, Southern
reaction to threatened terrorism was predictable. “The abolitionist is
as free to hold his opinions as I am to hold mine,” said [John] Randolph
of Roanoke, “But I will never suffer him to put a torch to my property,
that he may slake it in the blood of all that are dear to me.” Randolph
labeled slavery a “cancer,” but one that “must not be tampered with by
quacks, who never saw the disease or patient.”
When
Randolph died his slaves were freed, sent to farms purchased for them
in the free State of Ohio under the terms of his will. There they were
met by mob violence and forced to flee. Yet it was incessant
abolitionist propaganda that demonized Southerners and pictured their
country as fit only for destruction. “If Northern abolition action has
goaded and driven us to be also fanatical,” claimed Virginians Edmund
Ruffin, “our fanaticism has been, and is altogether defensive.”
Thornwell
categorized abolitionism as but one of the modern “isms,” a
manifestation of “a general spirit of madness” growing in
nineteenth-century America. “It is a hot, boiling, furious fanaticism,
destroying all energy of mind and symmetry of character and leaving its
unfortunate victim . . . a spectacle of pity and of dread.”
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