Using both hands, I gingerly turned the giant pages, yellowed with age, lest I should inadvertently damage the treasure of information before me. Eagerly my eyes scanned the small print for a report and an interpretation of what had happened only a few days before.
For most Americans, what happened 150 years ago this week will pass with little thought and even less reflection. Yet for many others the sound of cannon fire signaling the start of the American Civil War may yet be heard echoing through the ages. On April 10, 1861, General Beauregard, commanding Confederate troops, ordered the surrender of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. When garrison commander Major Anderson had not complied by April 12, Beauregard opened fire and the rest, as they say, is history.
Jim White
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But it was not history for those Baptists living during that time. They were living each act of the terrible drama as the script was being written. And it thrust them to center stage. What went through their minds? How did they interpret events in their time? What written records did they leave? How did they change during the course of that awful conflict?
Those questions, first sown in the occasionally fertile soil of my mind by Williamsburg pastor Jim Johnson, took root in me; and Fred Anderson, executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, provided opportunity for gleaning information in issues of the Religious Herald from that period of history.
When I arrived at the Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies on the University of Richmond campus, Fred had the 1861 volume waiting for me. The pages, roughly four times the size of the Herald today, were yellowed and split on the edges, but were otherwise in remarkable condition — a testimony to the care afforded them in the center’s archives.
It is clear from a brief examination that the potential for war hung heavily in the air and in the minds of Religious Herald editors William Sands and David Shaver, who joined Sands in 1857. In December 1860, they had published President James Buchanan’s call for a national day of prayer. And as the anxiety over succession rose to fever pitch and war seemed inevitable, the editors published a reprise of biblical arguments for slavery which had first appeared in the Herald in 1841. These views had been put forward by a pastor of multiple churches in the Culpeper area, Thornton Stringfellow, D.D. In 1861, a series of three successive issues — Feb. 14, 21 and 28 — appeared in which Stringfellow’s views were presented with neither editorial challenge nor endorsement.
At the beginning of his discourse, Stringfellow asserts, “It may be of service to my reader, if he is desirous to see this subject in the light of the Bible, to have a brief, but connected view of it from the first ray of Bible light, which is shed upon it, until the New Testament is closed” (Feb. 14, 1861, P. 25).
To distill thousands of words into just a representative few, he says in the Old Testament God endorses slavery — and he makes a forceful argument that it was not mere servanthood, but actual slavery. He cites God’s command that Noah’s son, Ham, will become slave to his brothers. “Ham, the inferior son, was subjected to slavery, and his mission involved an obligation to serve Shem, when Shem entered upon his mission in the land of Canaan …. Ham was devoted to God, not only to serve Shem while Shem was prosecuting his mission in the land of Canaan; but he was devoted to God to serve Japheth also, while Japheth was prosecuting the great mission assigned of God to him, of developing the intellectual and material treasurers of the entire globe” (ibid).
He cites examples of enslavement in the Bible and argues that Abraham owned hundreds of slaves. At last, he presents his biblical argument against assisting runaway slaves. “Sarah’s slave maid Hagar, ran away from her mistress. The Almighty sent an angel from heaven to order her back to her mistress again. Onesimus, a slave man, ran away from his Christian master, Philemon. The Apostle Paul sent this slave, when converted, back to his master again. These, I should suppose, might be taken as safe patterns to follow, unless we are better than Angels or Apostles” (Feb. 28, 1861, p. 33).
Stringfellow’s opinions were not universally held among Baptists in Virginia, but Sands and Shaver apparently saw in Stringfellow’s arguments sufficient merit to publish them during the highly anxious weeks before shots were fired.
From all indications, Stringfellow was not an evil man. He was a church planter and simultaneously served as pastor to multiple congregations. He was an evangelist who sought earnestly to see the slaves in his congregations converted. Upon his death in 1869, the Religious Herald referred to Stringfellow as “a man of high social position” possibly a reference to wealth that had included a thousand acres and many slaves prior to the War.
Likewise, the editors of the Religious Herald, by all accounts, were intelligent, Christian men motivated by the purest of intentions, not demons who tried to lead Baptists astray. And for that matter the Baptists themselves, some of whom held slaves, were not devoid of good graces. How, then, could all these genuinely fine, Christian people have been so blind when it came to slavery?
Looking back with the greater clarity of hindsight, several observations beg to be exposed. First, we must be honest about how much human beings enjoy being a part of a privileged class. Whether we are talking about the British aristocracy or inner-city drug dealers, within all human hearts is the natural temptation to put self-interest above others. At its very core, slavery was not about color — unless the color is green. It was about one group of people taking advantage of another to their own benefit and profit. Color made it very easy to identify the subservient class and keep them in their servile “places.”
A second observation is the degree to which we see in the Bible what we want to find there. Stringfellow, a plantation owner and slave holder, read the Bible and saw what was obvious to him: God condoned slavery. But Frederick Douglass read the Bible and appropriately saw a God who delivered the slaves from their bondage. He also saw Christians, especially clergy, who had strayed very far from the central truth of the gospel. Regrettably, we human beings are capable of twisting even the Bible to fit our notions of how things ought to be — and often we conclude they ought to be the way we want them to be.
It is for this reason that we must have a means of interpreting the Bible that supercedes our unconscious attempts to manipulate the message. For Baptists, the criteria by which we interpret the Bible has been that true and living Word, Jesus the Christ, as we know him through the presence of the Holy Spirit. At least until the Baptist Faith and Message was revised in 2000, that had been the criteria. This is one reason the Baptist General Association of Virginia has doggedly resisted the restatement and continues to endorse the 1963 BF&M. In the 2000 BF&M, the Bible becomes the means by which we interpret Jesus. And we have seen how wrong someone can be even though they profess to shed the light of the Bible on an issue. The 1963 statement places Jesus above the Bible, saying he is the means by which we interpret scripture.
Linked with the second observation is the third: I must interpret the Bible through my connection with Jesus Christ as revealed in the simplicity of his teaching. Stringfellow spent thousands and thousands of words reaching a false conclusion based on what he believed to be clear biblical teaching. A very simple question and an honest, straightforward answer would have negated all this: “Would I like to be a slave?” “As you would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them.”
As a principle of rightly dividing the word of truth, then, I must see the great, large, inescapable message of the Bible and not just the verses that give a partial picture. In the case of slavery, countless proof texts argue that God condoned slavery, or at least he was so indifferent that he never commanded it to be abolished. But the larger, bigger Bible is perfectly clear. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Fourth, it is humbling to observe how wrong the editor of the Religious Herald can be. Perhaps the awareness that we can be wrong is a good thing in that it engenders genuine humility. Sometimes we humans are tempted to believe we know exactly the mind of God. Although some seem not to have such qualms, I have no reason to suspect I can trust my mind to encompass such enormity. The Bible is our trustworthy guide to all truth, but I must be humble enough to admit that the trustworthy guide is much larger than my ability to comprehend it; and Jesus is much larger than that.
In future issues, as we find articles that provide insight into the thinking of our forebears pertaining to the War, we will bring to your attention writings from the Religious Herald of 150 years ago. No doubt they will not only be informative but cause further reflection.