Religion and Society in America

1
Religion and Society in America

• Week 6 Lecture 2
• Antislavery Reform, Secession, and Societal
  Divides Part I

2
Antislavery Reform, Secession and Societal
Divides Part I

• Introduction The Persistent Memory of War
• The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance
  of Slavery Arguments
• Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery
  Reform
• Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
  Sentiment

3
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• Memorializing the war North and South
• Battle flag issues license plates, state flags,
  college campuses
• Holidays Lee, Jackson, King Day
• Symbolic use of flags by hate groups

4
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• Naturalization Test Questions for Applicants
• An applicant for naturalization must demonstrate
  a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals
  of the history and of the principles and form of
  government in the United States
• Applicants asked 10 questions from a list of 25

5
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• Question 14 - The Civil War was fought over what
  important issues?

6
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• Answer 14 Slavery or States Rights
• In general if one asks a Northerner what was the
  principal issue they remark the former
  Southerners offer the latter
• What is historically accurate? Are these the
  only issues?
• More importantly for us, how do these issues
  relate to religion?
• What is the relationship between church and state
  in mid-19th Century America?

7
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• William H. Seward (1801 1872)
• He stirred controversy and antagonized some
  anti-foreign and anti-Catholic elements of the
  Whig party when he supported the demands of
  Catholics to have their children taught in public
  schools by teachers speaking the same language
  and sharing the same faith
• Increasingly interested in antislavery reform.
• Congressman and Secretary of State under Lincoln

8
(No Transcript)
9
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858. Seward
  suggests, They who think that it is accidental,
  unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical
  agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the
  case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict
  between opposing and enduring forces, and it
  means that the United States must and will,
  sooner or later, become either entirely a
  slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor
  nation.

10
Introduction The Persistent Memory of War

• As the New York Tribune later announced, "We are
  two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a
  people for slavery. Between the two, conflict is
  inevitable.
• Look to the issues discussed during the
  Secession Crisis and the relationship of
  Antislavery reform in shaping the national
  sentiment in 1861

11
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Scholars efforts to explain historic causation
• Differing ideologies, separate cultures, clashing
  economics, blundering and paranoid leaders,
  failed political parties, conflicting notions of
  honor, etc.

12
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Almost all historians recognize the central role
  that the institution of slavery and the concept
  of states rights played in fostering disunionist
  sentiment in the Deep South. There is no way to
  avoid these two factors, in part because the
  secession conventions and Southern political
  leaders referred to them constantly in their
  efforts to explain why their states were leaving
  the Union. Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion

13
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• What is the Secession Crisis?
• Election of Abraham Lincoln November, 1860
• The South hotly debates the meaning of election
  and merits of secession
• December 20, 1860 South Carolinians meet and
  declare Secession followed by the Deep South or
  Lower South

14
(No Transcript)
15
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• April 12, 1861 Confederates open fire on Fort
  Sumter in Charleston, SC
• Response of Federal Armies precipitates the
  secession of the Upper South (Virginia, North
  Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas)

16
(No Transcript)
17
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Meanwhile in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives
  of the Lower South meet to draft a constitution
  on February 4, 1861
• Representatives from only 6 of the nations 15
  slave states were represented (SC, GA, AL, MS,
  FL, LA)
• Preliminary constitution of the Confederacy
  drafted in four days
• February 8, 1861 twelve man committee headed by
  Robert B. Rhett appointed to create a complete
  document

18
(No Transcript)
19
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy
  declare?
• States Rights
• Preamble more perfect union is replaced by
  provision the states were acting in their
  sovereign and independent capacities to create
  a permanent federal government.
• Supremacy of states rights not complete or
  total, however
• Required oath of office for representatives to
  uphold constitution and national governments
  laws
• No state could independently ally or confederate
  with another state or power
• No coining of money independently
• No mention of the right of secession explicitly
  within document

20
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• What did the Constitution of the Confederacy
  declare?
• Slavery
• No national law could impinge on the right of
  property in negro slaves
• Preservation of slavery in territories to the
  West and South
• Dred Scott institutionalized right of owners
  to take slaves in such territories
• Assurance for the property rights of slaveholders
  regardless of the states current legal position
  concerning slavery
• Advocates to include a provision calling for the
  revival of the foreign slave were rebuffed

21
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Secession documents of state conventions reveal
  Southern fears about abolitionists
• Abolitionist conviction cut to the heart of the
  political, social, and moral convictions of much
  of the Southern leadership
• Raises questions concerning the persistent debate
  about religion and politics
• Some examples

22
(No Transcript)
23
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Robert Toombs of the Georgia Convention For
  twenty years past, the Abolitionists and their
  allies in the Northern states have been engaged
  in constant efforts to subvert our institutions
  and to excite insurrection and servile war among
  us. Toombs argued the Constitution would be
  nothing but parchment rights in the
  treacherous hands of Republicans whose avowed
  purpose is to subject our society, and subject
  us, not only to the loss of our property but the
  destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our
  children, and the desolation of our homes, our
  altars, and our firesides.

24
(No Transcript)
25
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Mississippi Convention documents Declaration of
  Immediate Causes read Our position is
  thoroughly identified with the institution of
  slavery. There is no choice left us but
  submission to the mandates of abolition, or a
  dissolution of the union, whose principles had
  been subverted to work our ruin. It declared
  the Northern abolitionist a majority who
  advocates Negro equality, socially and
  politically, and promotes insurrection and
  incendiarism in our midst.

26
(No Transcript)
27
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• February 18, 1861 Jefferson Daviss inaugural
  address delivered in Montgomery makes no mention
  of the institution of slavery only stating the
  seceded states had determined the government
  created by that compact 1776 should cease to
  exist.

28
(No Transcript)
29
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• March 21, 1861 Georgian and now Vice President of
  the Confederacy Alexander H. Stephens provided
  Southerners in Savannah a striking alternative
  view of the South compared to the argument or
  non-argument presented in Daviss inaugural The
  new Constitution has put a rest forever all the
  agitating questions relating tothe proper status
  of the negro in our form of civilization.
  Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, he asserted,
  believed that the enslavement of the African was
  in violation of the laws of nature that it was
  wrong in principle, socially, morally, and
  politicallyThose ideas, however, were
  fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the
  assumption of the equality of races. This was an
  error..

30
The Secession Crisis Locating the Importance of
Slavery Arguments

• Stephens continued by stating Our new Government
  is founded upon exactly the opposite idea its
  foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon
  the great truth that the negro is not equal to
  the white man that slavery, subordination to the
  superior race, is his natural and moral
  condition. Stephens concluded stating the
  Confederacy was the first Government ever
  instituted upon principles in strict conformity
  to the nature and the ordination of Providence,
  in furnishing the materials of human society.

31
Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery Reform

• Society of Friends (Quakers)
• Proclaim the universality of Gods love and
  equality of all humanity as recipients of divine
  love.
• Hold that physical coercion is an act of evil and
  unjust in any society
• Colonization Society founded in 1816 by Robert
  Finley a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey
  and other influential men. Loose structural
  organization allows colonizers to appeal to a
  diversity of interests

32
View of Monrovia 1856 24th Annual Report of the
Colonization Society
33
Sectarian Convictions and Early Antislavery Reform

• Encouraging developments for Colonization in
  early 19th Century
• Congresss prohibition of the slave trade in 1808
• The debates of the Virginia legislature
  concerning colonization in 1816, state bans on
  the importation of slaves
• A spike in the number of private manumissions in
  the upper South
• Henry Clay, the leader of the National Republican
  Party incorporated the scheme of colonization
  into his partys platform.
• Evangelicalism with its emphasis on personal
  accountability for sin coupled with the
  emotionally charged forum of revivalism provides
  an opening for the abolitionist message to take
  hold in wider circles

34
(No Transcript)
35
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• Shortly following the debates by the Virginia
  legislature over slavery in 1832, William Lloyd
  Garrison published his Thoughts on African
  Colonization
• The work suggested the principle of melioration
  through the removal of blacks was a libel upon
  humanity and justice--a libel upon
  republicanism--a libel upon the Declaration of
  Independence--a libel upon Christianity.

36
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• Garrisons words were without compromise. No
  longer, he exclaimed, could the institution of
  slavery be dismissed as the remnant of a foreign
  oppressorthe claim of James Monroethe
  imposition of international tradethe assertion
  of William Thorton or an insurmountable
  barrier of humanitythe reflections of Thomas
  Jefferson.
• This critique gave shape to those advocating
  immediate abolition by its resolute belief that
  contemporary Americans were responsible for the
  continuation of slavery and this was a sin.

37
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• More importantly, Garrison forwarded the novel
  assertion that instant uncompensated emancipation
  without repatriation was guaranteed by the
  semi-religious principles of the Declaration of
  Independence.

38
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• The following year the American Anti-Slavery
  Society was founded by former colonization
  advocates Arthur and Lewis Tappan, William Lloyd
  Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. Now for a new
  generation of reformers, immediate abolition and
  black equality was the only logical measure that
  would truly redeem the nation.
• The society and its largely Quaker constituency
  renounced the use of all carnal weapons to
  accomplish these directives instead encouraging
  the abolition of slavery through the potency of
  truth and the power of love.

39
(No Transcript)
40
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932)
• Born in Philadelphia an orthodox Quaker
• Took up the cause of abolition in her teens
• 1856 Contributed to Garrisons Liberator
• Goes on a speaking tour attracting large crowds
  and catches the attention of well-known female
  abolitionists such as Hannah Longshore and
  Lucretia Mott

41
Nascent Abolitionism, Garrisonians, and Public
Sentiment

• 5,000 greet her in New York City
• Lectured on the rights of women and African
  Americans by 1860s
• 1863 takes up a tour for Republican candidates
  winning over large crowds