HEADNOTE
Nineteenth-century religious leaders were divided as to whether slavery, as an institution or as an individual’s practice, could be compatible with Biblical teachings. one strategy for reconciling righteousness with the enslavement of African people and their descendants involved the assertion, expressed earlier in this section by Phillis Wheatley, that being enslaved provided access to religious salvation. In contrast, some religious leaders pointed to a fundamental moral conflict between Christian identity and the enslavement of humans. For example, in 1846, the Rev. Isaac Nelson, leader of a Presbyterian Church in Belfast, Ireland, tried (though unsuccessfully) to persuade his colleagues to deny American enslavers’ participation in an Evangelical Alliance meeting.
Arguments seeking either to reconcile Christianity with slavery or to demonstrate such a stance as unconscionable played out in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, an 1860 article in The Liberator, on the ‘Attitude of the “Religious” Press Towards Slavery and Anti-Slavery’, juxtaposed a pro-slavery piece appearing in The Congregationalist with what The Liberator writer argued: that true Christian civilization would not arrive in the American South until all slaves were freed.
That same year, in London, William and Ellen Craft published their memoir of a daring escape from enslavement and their transatlantic passage to freedom. Within their opening pages, the Crafts entered this ongoing debate by condemning slaveholding as un-Christian.
This entry is also included in the Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920 print anthology forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.
William and Ellen Craft, from William Still, The Underground Railroad. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), inter-page 368–9. Courtesy HathiTrust.
PART I.
“God gave us only over beast, fish, fowl,
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation. But man over man
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.” Milton.1Paradise Lost, Book 12. In quoting from such a high-culture religious source, the Crafts lend ethos to their memoir and the arguments therein.
MY wife and myself were born in different towns in the State of Georgia, which is one of the principal slave States. It is true, our condition as slaves was not by any means the worst; but the mere idea that we were held as chattels, and deprived of all legal rights—the thought that we had to give up our hard earnings to a tyrant, to enable him to live in idleness and luxury—the thought that we could not call the bones and sinews that God gave us our own: but above all, the fact that another man had the power to tear from our cradle the new-born babe and sell it in the shambles like a brute, and then scourge us if we dared to lift a finger to save it from such a fate, haunted us for years.
But in December, 1848, a plan suggested itself that proved quite successful, and in eight days after it was first thought of we were free from the horrible trammels of slavery, rejoicing and praising God in the glorious sunshine of liberty. [. . .] I have known worthless white people to sell their own free children into slavery; and, as there are good-for-nothing white as well as coloured persons everywhere, no one, perhaps, will wonder at such inhuman transactions: particularly in the Southern States of America, where I believe there is a greater want of humanity and high principle amongst the whites, than among any other civilized people in the world.
I know that those who are not familiar with the working of “the peculiar institution,” can scarcely imagine any one so totally devoid of all natural affection as to sell his own offspring into returnless bondage. But Shakespeare, that great observer of human nature, says:—
“With caution judge of probabilities.
Things deemed unlikely, e’en impossible,
Experience often shows us to be true.”
My wife’s new mistress was decidedly more humane than the majority of her class. My wife has always given her credit for not exposing her to many of the worst features of slavery. For instance, it is a common practice in the slave States for ladies, when angry with their maids, to send them to the calybuce2Prison or place of punishment sugar-house, or to some other place established for the purpose of punishing slaves, and have them severely flogged; and I am sorry it is a fact, that the villains to whom those defenceless creatures are sent, not only flog them as they are ordered, but frequently compel them to submit to the greatest indignity. Oh! if there is any one thing under the wide canopy of heaven, horrible enough to stir a man’s soul, and to make his very blood boil, it is the thought of his dear wife, his unprotected sister, or his young and virtuous daughters, struggling to save themselves from falling a prey to such demons!
It always appears strange to me that any one who was not born a slaveholder, and steeped to the very core in the demoralizing atmosphere of the Southern States, can in any way palliate slavery. It is still more surprising to see virtuous ladies looking with patience upon, and remaining indifferent to, the existence of a system that exposes nearly two millions of their own sex in the manner I have mentioned, and that too in a professedly free and Christian country. There is, however, great consolation in knowing that God is just, and will not let the oppressor of the weak, and the spoiler of the virtuous, escape unpunished here and hereafter.
I believe a similar retribution to that which destroyed Sodom3A prominent city in the Bible, destroyed for being sinful is hanging over the slaveholders. My sincere prayer is that they may not provoke God, by persisting in a reckless course of wickedness, to pour out his consuming wrath upon them.
I must now return to our history.
My old master had the reputation of being a very humane and Christian man, but he thought nothing of selling my poor old father, and dear aged mother, at separate times, to different persons, to be dragged off never to behold each other again, till summoned to appear before the great tribunal of heaven. But, oh! what a happy meeting it will be on that great day for those faithful souls. I say a happy meeting, because I never saw persons more devoted to the service of God than they. But how will the case stand with those reckless traffickers in human flesh and blood, who plunged the poisonous dagger of separation into those loving hearts which God had for so many years closely joined together—nay, sealed as it were with his own hands for the eternal courts of heaven? It is not for me to say what will become of those heartless tyrants. I must leave them in the hands of an all-wise and just God, who will, in his own good time, and in his own way, avenge the wrongs of his oppressed people.
My old master also sold a dear brother and a sister, in the same manner as he did my father and mother. The reason he assigned for disposing of my parents, as well as of several other aged slaves, was, that “they were getting old, and would soon become valueless in the market, and therefore he intended to sell off all the old stock, and buy in a young lot.” A most disgraceful conclusion for a man to come to, who made such great professions of religion!
This shameful conduct gave me a thorough hatred, not for true Christianity, but for slave-holding piety.
Source Text
Craft, William and Ellen, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860).
References
C. K. W., ‘Attitude of the “Religious” Press Towards Slavery and Anti-Slavery’, The Liberator 30.7 (17 February 1860), 28.
‘Pro-Slavery Fanaticism’, The Independent 6.293 (13 July 1854), 1.
Ritchie, Daniel, ‘Abolitionism and Evangelicalism: Isaac Nelson, the Evangelical Alliance, and Transatlantic Debate over Christian Fellowship with Slaveholders’, Historical Journal 57.2 (2014), 421–46.