How Baptists helped end slavery in the United States

Christians often have been reminded that some of their forebears supported slavery, but many do not know Christians ended slavery in the United States. Southern Baptists, in particular, frequently are reminded their convention began amid the defense of slavery. Yet the wider story is more complicated and more convicting. 

Many Baptists embraced, if not led, the anti-slavery campaign. That trend began to sweep Southern Baptists along with it until cultural momentum carried them in the opposite direction.  

One of the great ironies of history is that a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials was a grandfather of opposition to slavery. Puritan Samuel Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph, one of the first anti-slavery pamphlets, in 1700. After questioning whether the moral foundation of slavery was “firmly and well laid,” he wrote, “It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life.” 

At the end of the 18th century, many Congregationalists supported abolition. By that time, the true nature of slavery was becoming clear. It was not the better-than-starving or better-than-being-killed-in-war economic institution that had sometimes predominated in history. It was not Israel’s debt servitude, regulated by God’s law to avoid abuse. It was race-based, perpetual and often had its origins in man-stealing — the capture of human beings in Africa, who were then shipped to America and forced into lifelong, hereditary labor. 

John Wesley described American slavery as “the vilest that ever saw the sun.”

In the 18th century, John Wesley described American slavery as “the vilest that ever saw the sun.” Jonathan Edwards’s disciples, in particular, turned against it, although Edwards himself had household slaves. 

In 1776, Samuel Hopkins wrote “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans,” which referred to slaves as “our brethren and children.” 

Edwards’s son, Jonathan Edwards the younger, preserved his father’s orthodoxy but not his acceptance of slavery. He published his abolitionist views in “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes” and “An Address to Americans, Upon Slave-Keeping” in 1773. In a 1791 sermon titled “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade,” he denounced slavery based on Jesus’ Golden Rule. He encouraged Southern pastors to renounce slavery with the hope that just as Connecticut had been “in as great darkness concerning the rights of the Negroes, as South Carolina is now,” so “Light on that subject may be diffused gradually” in the South also. 

As it became clearer New World slavery was something categorically different from Israel’s Old Testament slavery, more Christians in America turned against it. 

Anti-slavery Baptists  

Some Baptists took up the cause against racist slavery. Isaac Backus expressed his hope that one day America would put an end to “the practice of making merchandise of slaves and souls of men.” In 1773, the Ashfield Baptists of Massachusetts became the first Baptist congregation to denounce slavery officially. In 1785, the Baptist General Committee in Virginia resolved that “hereditary slavery (was) contrary to the word of God ….” 

“Slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.”

John Leland, a son of Congregationalists from Massachusetts, moved to Virginia in 1776 to pastor Mount Poney Baptist Church in Culpeper, Va. In 1789, he wrote, “Slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government. (We) therefore recommend it to our Brethren to make use of every legal measure, to extirpate this horrid evil from the land…. .” 

Meanwhile, David Barrow, a native Virginian, gathered at Black Creek Baptist Church, where he and several members freed their slaves. In a November 1786 meeting, the church ruled slavery to be “unrighteous.” They defined slavery as a violation of the Golden Rule and freedom as “the natural and unalienable right of all mankind.” In 1808, Barrow wrote Involuntary, Unmerited, Perpetual, Absolute, Hereditary Slavery, Examined; on the Principles of Nature, Reason, Justice, Policy, and Scripture. 

In 1798, Barrow moved to Kentucky, where he eventually organized the Kentucky Abolition Society. To Barrow, and to other Baptists in the then-West, slavery, as Jonathan Edwards the younger had said, violated the Golden Rule. In 1815, Barrow corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, hoping to prod the former president into becoming involved in abolitionism. 

In antebellum Missouri, a moderate antislavery Baptist current existed around the St. Louis Baptist newspaper Western Watchman. Under William Crowell, the paper promoted gradual emancipation through colonization, printed favorable notices of Black Baptists, such as extoling the “Commendable Zeal of Colored Baptists,” and, according to Nathan Woodward, “took the antislavery position” even at the cost of its circulation. 

Back east, James Manning, founding president of Rhode Island College, later to become Brown University, freed a slave in 1770 and later joined Rhode Island antislavery efforts. By the end of the 18th century, the cultural winds seemed to be blowing strong against slavery. Manning’s successor at Brown, Francis Wayland, garnered attention for his antislavery writings. In 1845, he opposed slavery in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution. He objected to the Fugitive Slave Law and called for civil disobedience against it. Wayland’s writings were eaten up, “digested and assimilated” by an Illinois politician raised as a Baptist, Abraham Lincoln.

The Southern tragedy 

At the end of the 18th century, Baptists in the South appeared to be on the verge of adopting abolitionism and leading the South to forsake slavery. Northern Baptists already moved strongly in that direction. Each of the original 13 states was a slave state in 1776. This changed as Christians increasingly agreed and vociferously proclaimed slavery was evil. Christian abolitionists primarily transformed a country in which slavery had been legally entrenched throughout the original states into a house divided. When that movement came to the South, it should have done the same thing. 

But the culture changed and shaped Baptists in the South. Twenty years after Barrow made his stand at Black Creek, Jonathan Lankford, who grew up there and likely was influenced by Barrow’s legacy, served as pastor eight years before he resolved to refuse the ordinances to slave-owners. 

The eventual widespread acceptance of slavery by Baptists in the South was the rotten fruit of the culture conforming and deforming Christian principles.

In a sign of how Southern culture was hardening against abolitionism by the 1820s, the church eventually excommunicated Lankford for his stance, the very position their founding pastor had taken. A church that a generation earlier resolved slavery was “unrighteous” now enforced its acceptance. This suggests the eventual widespread acceptance of slavery by Baptists in the South was the rotten fruit of the culture conforming and deforming Christian principles. 

The Triennial Convention of Baptists originally sought to remain neutral on slavery, allowing both abolitionists and slavery supporters to work together for missions. But as more and more northern evangelicals opposed slavery, northern Baptists followed along. 

Finally, in 1838, Elon Galusha became vice president of the Triennial Board of Foreign Missions. While in that position, he also became president of the newly formed American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention. His outspoken denunciations of slavery provoked Southerners. He demanded immediate emancipation. 

Then, in 1844, the Triennial Board refused to appoint James E. Reeve, a Georgian and slaveholder, as a missionary. In May 1845, meeting in Augusta, Ga., Southern Baptist slavery supporters split from the Triennial Convention, founding the Southern Baptist Convention. 

Cultural Christianity and slavery 

Cultural Christianity blesses the reigning social order. It is what the Lord Jesus described as the salt that “has lost its taste …. It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” Those infected with it don’t transform culture. They bless culture, no matter what it is doing. 

The point is not “woke virtue signaling” or presentist moral superiority. The point is diagnostic: Slavery exposed where Baptists surrendered the biblical principles to local culture. 

We can see that in litmus tests — cases in which Scripture pulls one way, such as “love your neighbor,” and culture pulls another, insisting it was fine to enslave a neighbor or abort a neighbor. 

Tragically, many Baptists in the South imbibed a cultural Christianity that shames the faith today with its defenses of the indefensible. But that’s not the whole story. Other Christians, Baptists among them, changed the world and ended slavery in the United States. 

A Christian-rooted moral revolution made slavery intolerable. That’s not history-denying, self-serving boasting. It is the considered conclusion of the man who earned a Nobel Prize for his research into slavery, Robert W. Fogel. 

Baptists can be encouraged that they were a part of that moral revolution that brought, as Lincoln said, “a new birth of freedom.” 

 

John B. Carpenter is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, Va., and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack. 

 

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