For Granville Sharp, the man who had done the most to bring the subject of slavery to a British court, the Somerset decision meant that slavery was forbidden not only in Great Britain but in the American colonies as well. The tireless writer was quick to his pen, and with equal speed the colonial Quaker printers published his comments in the colonies. “Why is it that the poor sooty African meets with so different a measure of justice in England and America, as to be adjudged free in the one, and in the other held in the most abject slavery?” (Sharp vi). Few chose to address the question directly. Certainly not Benjamin Franklin who, writing to London’s Public Advertiser, pointed to British hypocrisy. “Pharsical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happen to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue to commerce where so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into slavery can scare be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity” (Franklin Letters 190).
The Boston Gazette had even less to say. The Gazette concluded its attention to the Somerset decision and to the slavery debate altogether with its short extract on the decision. Much of the colonial press, patriot and otherwise, followed suit.
But there can be no doubt that antislavery activity in the American colonies heated up after 1772. Activists in Massachusetts, Delaware, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were reinvigorated in their efforts to end the slave trade. Connecticut succeeded in banning the trade in 1774, and other colonies achieved partial successes before the Declaration of Independence. Both Continental Congresses, in 1774 and 1776, adopted resolutions against the slave trade. There was, indeed, a growing antislavery movement in the first half of the 1770s. Its public discourse was supported by pamphlets and newspaper essays as its leaders sought to influence public policy.
The leader of the indigenous American antislavery movement, Samuel Hopkins, achieved his greatest success with the publication of the Dialogue on Slavery dedicated to the First Continental Congress. The subsequent resolution by the Congress could only have heartened antislavery activists who saw the action as the first step to abolition in the new nation.
One of the puzzles of the American Revolution is how that early promise could turn into the compromises of the Constitutional Convention. One explanation is to examine the characteristics of the antislavery discourse in terms of the propaganda thrusts of the American Revolution. Clearly, the propaganda of the American Revolution avoided the voices of antislavery. Much of that had to do with the needs of revolutionary propaganda as viewed by Adams. What also played a role was how the antislavery movement chose to argue its case.
Despite their energy and commitment, the antislavery activists failed to make the issue integral to national identity. In terms of its communication, the failure occurred because antislavery remained in religious hands, and particular religious hands that—until the collaboration of Moses Brown and Samuel Hopkins—chose not to address political strategy. Unlike Adams, the proponents of antislavery did not adapt their religious discourse into political rhetoric. Because of the commitment to religious conscience as underpinnings of antislavery, antislavery adherents failed to make the kind of connections with the patriot propagandists that could have assisted in framing abolition as a propaganda issue.
Although antislavery activity was invigorated after the Somerset decision, Adams continued on a course that avoided a position on any aspect of antislavery except one on the slave trade, put at British feet. Not only did antislavery voices not appear in the pages of the Gazette, no discussion at all, either pro or con, found its way to the national stage provided by the Boston Gazette. Such agenda-setting from the patriots’ premiere organ could hardly encourage patriots who held antislavery views to pursue a public antislavery stand.
Instead, presumably by design, antislavery activity was left in the hands of those traditionally most associated with the development of antislavery views. The patriot silence put into high relief an antislavery discussion that was often connected to British loyalism and a religious emphasis that ignored secular concerns—the role of the freed slave in society for example—in favor of arguments of self-purification, moral suasion, and affective feeling. Antislavery in the hands of the less committed patriots, British loyalists, and the religious sects that played less, if any, political role in revolutionary politics helped insure it would never move to the patriot center stage. Meanwhile, black colonists had few opportunities to be heard on the public stage.
As we know, the most consistent lance carriers for antislavery in the revolutionary period were members of religious denominations—Quaker; the evangelical sides of the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists; and a branch of Calvinism that was not even embraced by all of New England, New Divinity. Advocates from these denominations preached, wrote, and campaigned for antislavery political action, but in the end failed to provide antislavery with enough of a broad, American public persona to go beyond local venues. Congregational adherents of antislavery, for example, most often framed their cause in terms of God’s wrath. As late as 1777, when the antislavery minister and regimental chaplain David Avery preached a sermon of thanksgiving, the war was blamed on God’s punishment for existing “sins and abominations.” Among these, “our enslaving NEGROES is not the smallest of our crying sins. Doth not this sin cry to heaven for retaliation?” (Avery 1). Such rhetoric flew in the face of revolutionary propaganda that stressed American innocence opposed to British venality and was hardly a speech to engender a fighting spirit to the Connecticut troops it addressed, most of whom who had little connection with the institution. Antislavery adherents failed to erect a banner that, like the patriot propaganda, was sufficiently encompassing, optimistic, or forward-looking to include antislavery as a revolutionary issue, or even engaging enough to lead to a spirited defense of American slavery. The emphasis remained on Congregational didacticism and Quaker sensibility, both welltrod avenues. Whether didactic or persuasive, both forms contrasted with the propaganda as practiced by the patriots and hindered the movement as a national force.
Additionally, the antislavery movement in the final years before Independence was not only in religious hands but often in religious hands that were themselves estranged from the colonial power structure, both political and religious. Quakers, the most well-known of the antislavery advocates, were considered British loyalists (McKeel), thus distancing their position on slavery from the patriot cause. The itinerant evangelical Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian preachers were regarded suspiciously by southern slaveholders and traditional churchmen even before they voiced an antislavery message. And the New Divinity sect, representing the branch of Calvinism that was most active in antislavery, was the least powerful of the larger sects when it came to influence on patriot radicals.
In colonial America, as in England, the antislavery movement was dominated by Quakers, and for most of its antislavery history, American Quakers were part of a world Quaker antislavery movement that received its leadership from the English branch. There was, indeed, an indigenous Quaker antislavery movement in the American colonies even before world Quakerism officially embraced the cause. In 1733, Nantucket’s Elihu Coleman published an antislavery pamphlet despite a general Quaker ban on antislavery publications (Coleman 1851). In 1753, just two years after Quakers had ended the ban, the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting declared slavery a sin, a year before the London Yearly Meeting issued its strong denunciation of the slave trade. In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting set in motion a campaign against slavery itself (Soderland 17, 30). This coincided with a decision made by the London Yearly Meeting that strongly advised Friends throughout the world against any involvement in the slave trades. American Quakers were quick to support the London advice, and Philadelphia Quakers in particular sought the cooperation of British Quakers in the support of the Pennsylvania Assembly’s passage of a slave import duty. Despite the leadership of American Quakers in the antislavery movement, one upshot of this Anglo-American cooperation was that the American opposition to slavery came to be considered a branch of English Quaker antislavery. The connection was further enhanced by the similarity of the antislavery argument on either side of the Atlantic. By the 1770s, little difference existed in Quaker pamphlets whether written by Englishman Granville Sharp or American Anthony Benezet.
The conflation of British and American antislavery was encouraged by Benezet, who, in 1774, sent the American Quaker, William Dillwyn off to England to make connections with British antislavery leaders. The decision removed Dillwyn, who had written one antislavery pamphlet addressing American concerns in 1774 (Dillwyn), from the American antislavery movement and likely further weakened the indigenous movement by drawing it closer to the British model. Dillwyn settled permanently in Great Britain, where he became involved in the British antislavery movement.
Benezet quickly came to the attention of Sharp and British Quaker leaders as a result of his first major pamphlet in 1762 (Benezet, Short), which set in motion the Atlantic cooperation and the publication of Sharp’s work in the colonies. Unfortunate for the American antislavery movement, however, was the fact that the English Quaker antislavery movement carried with it a clearly anti-American edge, and, as the Revolution approached, an antipatriot tinge. Sharp, in a work reprinted in Benezet’s pamphlet, could only seem careless of American sensibilities: “The boasted liberty of our American colonies, therefore, has so little right to that sacred name, that it seems to differ from the arbitrary power of despotic monarchs, only in one circumstance, viz., that is its a many-headed monster of tyranny” (Benezet, Short 13). Entrapped by a Quaker rhetoric that emphasized the guilt of slave owning in general and the guilt of American slave owners in particular, the antislavery writings appearing in colonial pamphlets and newspapers were hardly in tune with a patriot movement based on innocence and rebirth. Indeed, British antislavery activists seemed intent not only on appropriating the rhetoric of American purity but on denying any American claim to it at all, as the Somerset decision seemed to come down to the keeping of “British air” free from the contaminants of American slavery.
The man who coined that phrase and directed the case along the lines of British purity was the Somerset attorney, Francis Hargrave, who, in a pamphlet republished in the colonies, argued that the ruling protected England from the introduction of slavery from “our colonies and from foreign countries” (Hargrave 48). In stressing the role of the purity of Great Britain, Hargrave drew on a long tradition of British exploration that permitted all manner of behavior after passage “beyond the line.” Adventurers were expected to leave pagan indulgences behind them when they returned to the pristine home country. The American colonies, for all of their own self-perceptions, were not exempt from this way of thinking, and the Somerset decision suggested the American colonies posed as much of an infectious threat to the English air as the West Indies.
America as a guilty party was accepted by American evangelicals and, indeed, promoted by the emphasis on affective feeling that characterized most antislavery writing, particularly that of the Quakers (Jennings). The Golden Rule, used by so much of Quaker argument, led to a tradition of an outpouring of feeling for the unfortunate, and sentimental tradition became part of the rhetoric of antislavery up until the Civil War. As part of this tradition, Quaker writers established the African as the noble savage, an innocent in the original setting of his native land. Here, in an Eden-like Garden, the African family existed as God intended. The European was the despoiler of the Garden, breaking apart families, subjecting the African to unspeakable cruelties, and turning the African into a victim and a martyr.
But victims necessitate guilty parties and further framed the debate in sin and guilt. For the British antislavery writers, Americans, after the Somerset case, were assigned that mantle. For the British, the Somerset decision appeared to expurgate much of British guilt, and in a mood of self-congratulation after Somerset, the British were happy to move blame to American shoulders. While the view that America was a guilty nation was not so easily transplanted into patriot ideology, its reverberations were not so alien to the consciences of American evangelicals.
The Quaker discussion of antislavery was already under way by the time of the First Great Awakening in the 1740s, the event that had the most to do with the development of colonial antislavery among other Protestant sects. The new evangelicals who sought the eradication of slavery as a rejection of worldliness included Presbyterians Samuel Davis, David Rice, and Jacob Green, British-born Methodist Francis Asbury, follower of John Wesley, Thomas Rankin and Freeborn Garretson. The New England Baptists who relocated in Virginia were found among the southern antislavery evangelicals, often working in the South as itinerant preachers and becoming the target of suspicion because of their emphasis on black Christianization (Essig). Most of these traveling evangelicals were not writers of pamphlets—a loss indeed when one considers the exception to this rule, the Baptist minister, John Allen, who brought his evangelical message to Boston in the 1770s in fiery pamphlets that conjoined antislavery and patriot ideology (Allen 17). Next to the Quakers, those who were quick to the pen were the New Divinity clerics, so uncompromising in their religious views that they were regarded suspiciously by their brother Congregationalists.
Cotton Mather was the first prominent Congregationalist to address the issue of blacks in colonial society when he established his Society of Negroes, meeting Sunday nights for religious instruction as part of Mather’s campaign for the Christianization of Africans. His pamphlet on the subject sought no change in the legal status, but it is memorable for its presentation of slaves as “poor creatures,” who needed a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer and a shorter catechism “brought down to their capacity” (Mather, Negro Christianized).
As disturbing as this approach is to a modern sensibility, its ostensible emphasis (if not design) was on the perceived benefits of religion to those in bondage. This was in contrast to Samuel Sewall’s famous The Selling of Joseph that had called for the discontinuance of the slave trade on the basis of its sinfulness against white conscience. The emphasis on white sinfulness continued even when secularity was taking on an enlarged role not only in society but, as indicated by the congregations of Jonathan Mayhew and Samuel Cooper, even in church settings. For colonial Americans who were increasingly secular, concern about individual or even national sinfulness was mitigated by secular concerns that had to do with the role of the African, freed or not, in the larger society.
In its own way, the Mather pamphlet had struck out on a road that was less concerned with the sinfulness of the slave keeper than the benefit of religion to those in bondage. Mather’s successors shifted the emphasis to white sin. It needs to be considered than in doing so, African colonists largely lost the opportunity to participate in the shared world of New England religiosity and a focus in which bondsmen and women held a modicum of power in their ability to demonstrate virtue. By contrast, the emphasis on white sin bound bondspeople to white decision and had consequences for the colonial antislavery movement. In a patriot ideology of innocence, taking on the mantle of sinfulness was limited in its appeal. Further, the emphasis on white virtue had little room for black voices, since, in essence, white colonists were not so concerned with saving black souls as their own. The emphasis of antislavery as white sinfulness also stilled other voices, the voices of the enslaved and, from a practical standpoint, white writers who addressed secular concerns. Finally, the sect most connected to antislavery as sinfulness also represented a sect that was far removed from the levers of practical power.
Led by Samuel Hopkins, the New England antislavery movement in the years before the Revolution was most in the hands of the New Divinity ministers (Lovejoy), a legacy of the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening had significance for the subsequent antislavery movement as well as for the Revolution. Alan Heimert argues the Awakening divided American protestantism into two streams of thought, the rational and the evangelical, and it was from the evangelical stream that the American Revolution most owed its genesis. The propaganda of the American Revolution certainly owed a debt to the evangelical stream. Indeed, it was the form apart from the content that one scholar believes was “Evangelicism’s enduring legacy.” This was a new mode of order, Harry S. Stout writes in revisiting the Heimert thesis, “that would refine the norms of social order” (Stout 525). Chief among the characteristics of the new form was its emphasis on communication to large numbers of people who would find transformation despite a generally anonymous setting.
Unlike the tightly woven and often intergenerational congregations of the New England church, those who gathered to hear the traveling New Light preachers were likely only connected to each other by their knowledge and admiration of the man on the stump. Isolated outside the powerful skein of a New England church congregation, individuals who came to hear an itinerant preacher had no power over him, no responsibility to community, and no opportunity for individual interaction. At the same time, the worshiper had the opportunity to experience the freedom that comes with the removal of associations. Momentarily stripped of the definition given to him or her by society at large, perhaps thankfully so, and set in a context of powerlessness, the evangelical follower was presented with the evangelical tour de force of simple messages strongly spoken. Encapsulated by a simple frame that was unmitigated by community standards or critical discussion and pressured by the knowledge that the opportunity, like the preacher, was transitory, the evangelical convert had the likelihood of accepting the evangelical message in its full force, often responding with the often-noted explosion of wailing and shrieking. “It was a very frequent Thing to see an House full of Out-cries, Faintings, Convulsions and such-like both with Distress, and also with Admiration and Joy,” Jonathan Edwards reported to Boston’s New Light periodical Christian History (CH 1/15/43), published, it should be noted, by Samuel Kneeland during Edes and Gill’s apprenticeship.
The preacher on the stump was transitory, but what was long lasting was the permission given worshipers to understand God’s intention through his or her own interpretation instead of biblical or ministerial mediation. Edwards argued that God communicated to the world through natural and contemporary events that composed a divinely organized system of symbols, or, as Edwards put it, the “certain sort of Language, as it were, in which God is wont to speak to us” (Knight 532). This typology traveled from Edwards to the very non-Edwardsian church of Jonathan Mayhew, who interpreted the Boston earthquake of 1755 in terms of God’s coming retribution (Mayhew 1755:136). Thomas Prince, New Light minister of Boston’s Old South Church, reported that a thunderstorm breaking out during a church service in 1742 produced near-panic when congregants believed they were hearing God’s voice of displeasure. The congregation was panicked again when the rumblings of an earthquake “excited the shrieks of many, put many on flying out, and the Generality in Motion” (CH 2/18/43). In 1750, Bostonians struggled with the question of whether the installation of lightning rods would blunt God’s call for sinners to repent (Cohen).
The reading of God as open to anyone who could read the physical world renewed the Puritan emphasis on outside appearances and, in terms of this discussion, its implications that God would not have assigned a skin color that connoted evil without reason. It also breathed new life into the Puritan habit of understanding conspiracy by means of signs and symbols—a mode of interpretation carried into revolutionary propaganda by Puritanism’s most ardent son, Samuel Adams. Not only were his Boston Gazette essays characterized by the sure and simple language of the evangelical preachers but his dots, dashes, and exclamation points seemed an effort to replicate the emotion of the stump.
Congregational ministers originally welcomed George Whitefield and his fellow evangelicals in the preaching swath across New England. Whitefield’s emotional sermons seemed destined to revitalize the Congregational church. As it turned out, the success of the evangelicals eventually failed to strengthen traditional churches. Moreover, the ministerial elite, trained at Harvard and Yale for the most respected profession the colonies could offer, reacted negatively to the leveling aspects of these new preachers, who needed no years of education, family background, or permanent congregations to take on their powerful roles. And the emphasis on individual emotion was a disturbing portent for a leadership class that revered social order. The resulting split led to the well-known division of the New Lights and the Old Lights.
There was not so much new about the New Lights. The New Lights eschewed the Half-way Covenant as too permissive because it had found a middle ground between Calvinism’s most conservative theology, which maintained God’s only promise was to save a portion of mankind but made no promises about who would compose that portion, and the more liberal view that held men and women had some power over their salvation. Still, even Congregational ministers did not move in lockstep, and New Light theology offered a spectrum of beliefs. The “Consistent Calvinism” or New Divinity branch of the New Lights returned to a strand of Calvinism that stressed God’s absolute sovereignty in the view that a supreme God hardly needed to make bargains. Samuel Hopkins’s refutation of Mayhew’s “rational religion,” the despised Arminianism, became the defining event in shaping New Divinity as a thread separate from the New Light drift to the liberal left of “conditional Calvinism” (Conforti; Breitenbach). Adherents to the New Divinity movement not only reaffirmed the traditional covenant theology but narrowed its theology to more conservative ground. Men and women were dependent wholly on God’s will to the point that a worshiper needed to be so submissive that he or she ought to be willing to be dammed for eternity for God’s glory. It was from this most conservative and doctrinaire religious wing that Calvinistic antislavery emerged.
In terms of the political achievement of antislavery goals, this alignment of antislavery with the New Divinity branch of Calvinism posed some practical problems. First was that in attacking less conservative conditional Calvinism, New Divinity men were attacking some of Boston’s most powerful churches and home to the Boston radicals while New Divinity’s most prominent adherents were in the hamlets of frontier Connecticut and the pastorates of rural Massachusetts. It is safe to say there were no members of the patriot power elite in the impoverished congregations of Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton parish, Samuel Hopkins’s first parish in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, or among the worshipers who gathered to hear Levi Hart in Preston, Connecticut.
For the New Divinity men, there was no shame in serving the small and remote—indeed, it was a tenet of the faith that humble circumstances were essential to the virtuous life. But the consequence of New Divinity’s expression in the small and remote pastorates was to weaken its antislavery component at the center of power in Boston. Indeed, the New Divinity pastors in Boston and nearby had difficulty maintaining their positions of influence, much less promoting a political agenda. John Bacon accepted New Divinity theology only after he was installed in Boston’s Old South Church. His subsequent rejection of the Half-way Covenant led to his dismissal in 1772 (Hill 2:158–59). Andrew Eliot was pastor of New North Church with its large but lower-class congregation that was not universally behind his tenure. Eliot’s antislavery position was not as public as that of Samuel Hopkins, but he was prominent in opposing the Anglicans’ Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts by offering conversion to people of color through the Congregational organization. He early refused the gift of a slave presented by his congregation. But he was later called “Pope” and “Andrew Sly” by the unhappy church members who sought his removal (Sprague 1:420). William Gordon of nearby Roxbury’s Third Parish was a vigorous New Divinity man, antislavery activist, essay writer, patriot, and chaplain to both legislative houses in Massachusetts. However, British-born Gordon fell out of favor with American revolutionary leaders and was dismissed from his chaplaincies. He also offended members of his church and was finally dismissed from his congregation, whereupon he returned to England to write a respected history of the Revolution (Winsor 2:350). Given Gordon’s antislavery activities, John Adams’s complaint about him may suggest the role antislavery played in his patriot disfavor. Adams wrote of him in 1775: “I fear his indiscreet Prate will do harm in this city. He is an eternal Talker. Very Zealous to the Cause, and a well-meaning Man, but incautious, and not sufficiently tender to the character of our Province, upon which at this Time much depends” (Adams, Diary 2:174).
Adams also noted that Gordon was fond of thinking of himself as a “Man of Influence,” suggesting this was hardly Adams’s view. In fact, the dismissals of Gordon and Bacon represent another characteristic of New Divinity men that lessened their influence in patriot circles. Products of rural life and modest circumstance, they were men who generally lacked the powerful friends and family that advanced careers of the Old Lights. Hopkins, the leading member of the group, was the son of a miller, as was Nathaneal Emmons (Park 53). David Avery, the son of a small farmer, was originally expected to be a carpenter (Dexter 3:305–10). Without powerful friends, their political influence was further lessened by their own career visions, seeking pulpits that would provide opportunities for reflection and study rather than political or social status. Indeed, the New Divinity men, embracing the antislavery cause as another repudiation of the worldly life, welcomed the oppositional position vis-à-vis the power structure provided by an antislavery stance. Persecution for an antislavery stance was as much evidence of personal virtue as other suffering. These characteristics lessened the likelihood of New Divinity antislavery becoming an influence on a majority agenda.
Additionally, the time period of the development of New Divinity tended to play against the impact of the antislavery discussion. Tucked away in the Joseph Bellamy parsonage, New Divinity’s future leaders such as Hopkins, Edwards the younger, Ebenezer Baldwin, and Hart spent the 1760s codifying a way of thought that would lead to antislavery. But it was not until Hopkins moved to Newport, Rhode Island in 1769, that his philosophy of “disinterested benevolence” was transferred to the slavery issue. Similarly, Emmons, after completing his studies in 1769, did not receive the call to the Wrentham, Massachusetts, pastorate until 1773 (Park 53). But by the 1770s the Boston radicals had set out the revolutionary agenda on their own terms.
What was peculiar about the rejection of New Divinity from the patriot ideology was that New Divinity’s belief in the sanction and surety of a Puritan past reflected Sam Adams’s views. Adams himself was a son of the Great Awakening, coming of age during the height of its influence when he was completing his master’s degree at Harvard, although not meeting his father’s ministerial ambitions for him. It was also the time of the public humiliation occasioned by the loss of his father’s fortune at the hands, as Adams would always believe, of the colony’s later governor, Thomas Hutchinson. As his biographers agree, the influence of the Awakening, occurring at a crux of the Adams family’s crisis, seemed to establish in Adams a personality of blame, suspicion, and an exaggerated sense of morality, as described by his portrait in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates: “He had no close friends, and even those of his associates who greatly admired him regarded him with some apprehension and distrust… he disliked and feared everyone who achieved prominence in business and public life. Let any man succeed, and Adams would begin to deprecate his talents and services” (Sibley’s 10:425). So described, Adams’s personality comes close to what is put forward by Michael Zuckerman in his examination of an exaggerated sense of morality in the early American “fabrication of identity.” “They are driven to define others as adversaries,” Zuckerman writes, “as if to vindicate their own uncertain worth by assaults on those around them.” Calling on the work of social psychologists, he further notes; “They embrace identities defined primarily by their aversion to iniquity, as if to salvage a satisfactory sense of self in circumstances in which that sense is imperiled” (Zuckerman 193). In Adams’s case, these were not the traits of a generosity of spirit that would serve to encourage a change in black status. But had another confluence of circumstances occurred, Adams may have adopted New Divinity and with it, the antislavery stance.
Meantime, the consistent Calvinists who came to the fore in the generation after the Great Awakening found no ready audiences, even in the impoverished, remote posts that had difficulty finding pastors. One third of New Divinity were dismissed by their congregations at least once (Conforti, Samuel Hopkins 92–93), suggesting dissatisfaction not only with their conservatism but perhaps with their lack of other ministerial attributes. Some of the congregations’ discontent may have been related to a public speaking style that was not up to the standards of their New Light predecessors, the senior Edwards or Joseph Bellamy, and could not compete on the rhetorical stage with someone like Jonathan Mayhew, whose liberal views did not include rejection of the fiery style of the older Puritan tradition. The ministers certainly raised none of the excitement of the original New Light preachers. Eschewing emotionalism for metaphysical discussion not “readily appreciated by the common mind,” younger congregants fled from Hopkins’s ministry in Newport. “The effect of his preaching was that nearly all the young people of the town went to other churches,” a memorialist recalled, which left “a larger proportion of aged people in his congregation that I remember ever to have seen in any other” (Sprague 433). Ezra Stiles predicted Hopkins would “preach away all his congregation” (Conforti, Samuel Hopkins 101), and Hopkins was not being modest when he despaired that his congregants had to suffer “the precious truths of God delivered in so poor a manner” (HSP 1). The younger Edwards inherited none of the charisma of his father. “His manner was the opposite of attractive,” a fellow minister remembered. “In his voice there was a nasal twang which diminished the effect of his utterance. He had little or no gesture, looked about but little upon his audience, and seemed like a man who was conscious that he was dealing with abstractions” (Sprague 1:549). Emmons made a considerable reputation, but it was as a teacher of others. “His appearance was unimposing, and his voice was weak and squeaky” (Peel 104). Gordon of Roxbury was “rude and blunt in his manner” and “not interesting as a preacher” (Winsor 1:350). Thus, if considered together, the New Divinity men were men without important family backgrounds, powerful friends or colleagues, in or outside the church, who held pastorates of small and uninfluential congregations and were mediocre public speakers at a time when this was a valued attribute of leadership. Moreover, their writing styles, any more than their speaking modes, were not likely to collect adherents. Such a cluster of defining characteristics did not bode well for the success of the New Divinity antislavery stance.
Despite such obstacles, the New Divinity men were as consistent in their antislavery efforts as in other areas of theology. Hopkins began his antislavery crusade just a year after acquiring a new post in Newport, Rhode Island, and remained committed to the cause his whole life. Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Edwards’s friend and fellow Congregational pastor, Ebenezer Baldwin (whose early death at thirty-two, like the death of Otis, removed an antislavery voice) composed a series of antislavery essays, discussed later, for the Connecticut press. Levi Hart preached antislavery from his pulpit, and he and Hopkins were associates in antislavery activities for years. William Gordon was an indefatigable writer of antislavery essays. In Newburyport, a Massachusetts center of slaving activity and an exception to the remote pastorates of his New Divinity colleagues, Nathanial Niles voiced the irony of calling for liberty while denying it to others (Niles). Emmons preached antislavery throughout his long life and at the age of ninety-one, in 1835, presided over a meeting of the New York Antislavery Society (Park 445–46).
Particularly interesting is the African-American New Divinity pastor, Lemuel Haynes of Vermont. In 1776, Haynes’s first essay, “Liberty Further Extended” called for black liberty and equality along the lines of New Divinity theology, the same year as he completed his second tour as a revolutionary soldier (Saillant, Bogin, Cooley, MacLam). Like other congregationalists, the New Divinity men did not oppose independence or service to it. But, typified by David Avery, they presented an image of bastardy if a new nation emerged from colonial status sullied by slavery.
No consistent Calvinist was more important than Samuel Hopkins, who, in developing New Divinity, introduced America’s first indigenous religious thought. The development of his religious philosophy led him both to antislavery activism and a particular view of American freedom. In the early 1770s, Hopkins came to believe that separation from Great Britain should be made only on the basis of virtue rather than self-interest. Similarly, abolition demanded the same level of moral purity, and a corresponding belief in abolition became the test for the true patriot. The moral purity required of those who would demand liberty could be illustrated by an opposition to slavery. “For Hopkins the slavery issue furnished an ethical test not only of the general moral purity of the struggle against Britain but of the virtue of individual revolutionaries as well” (Conforti, Samuel Hopkins 128).
Nonetheless, Hopkins, more than any other of the New Divinity men, brought to the movement a political sense. Hopkins was willing to cross religious boundaries in order to unite the religious community under an antislavery banner, a remarkable achievement given the Congregational antipathy toward certain branches of their own sect, much less other sects. Soon after arriving at Newport, Hopkins formed an alliance with Ezra Stiles, pastor of the Second Congregational Church and no friend to New Divinity (Birdsall). But as early as 1769, Hopkins had secured an invitation to lecture in Stiles’s church (HSP 2). By the early 1770s, Stiles and Hopkins joined in efforts to launch two former slaves as African missionaries. This was a campaign that crossed New England, where it appeared on the Boston desk of Phillis Wheatley, to New Jersey, New York, and to Great Britain (serving to connect even Congregational antislavery activism to the British) (HSP 3). The proposal made it clear that support for the two men was a way to demonstrate opposition to the slave trade. Meantime, the two young men, Bristol Yanna and John Quamine, whose faith in godly intervention was undoubtedly increased when they were enabled to buy part of their freedom by winning a lottery, were schooled in theology by Hopkins and his antislavery colleague Levi Hart, concluding their studies under John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey. By Hopkins and Stiles’s later account, the campaign was on its way to completion but was sidelined by the onset of the war. By the time of the 1784 account, Quamine was dead and the donations had depreciated to a fraction of their original worth (HSP 4).
The missionary campaign led to Hopkins’s involvement in the efforts leading to Connecticut’s abolition of the slave trade in 1774. Buoyed by that success, in 1776, he wrote his famous Dialogue on Slavery dedicated to the Continental Congress as the next step in moving antislavery to a political and intercolonial audience. This broadening political awareness was demonstrated again when he expanded his antislavery circle by collaborating with Rhode Island’s Moses Brown, a convert to Quakerism after a career as a merchant and legislator in Providence (Thompson). By the early 1780s, Brown and Hopkins called for colonywide meetings of clergy of all faiths to “seek their testimony” against the trade (HSP 5). A year later Hopkins’s “Essay on the African Slave Trade” appeared in John Carter’s the Providence Gazette (ProvG 10/6; 10/13/87). Altogether Hopkins’s antislavery activities represent a remarkable politicization of a cleric who had spent the first twenty-five years of his career in obscurity.
Brown must be credited for some of Hopkins’s growing political awareness. Known in Rhode Island’s commercial and legislative circle and a member of wealthy family, Brown used his secular connections in his antislavery work and was able to enlist the local newspapers in his campaign. John Carter not only published Brown’s articles in his Gazette but also sold his pamphlets in his shop, hardly an easy position either for an avowed patriot or for a local businessman. Brown also found another newspaper outlet in Providence when Bennett Wheeler established a new journal in 1784, the United States Chronicle: Political, Commercial, and Historical (Thompson 177–78)—a newspaper, interestingly, that receives no mention in Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing. Brown’s ability to find outlets for unpopular thought must be considered part of his considerable political savvy that was not a characteristic of the late colonial antislavery movement as a whole. Unlike many of his clerical colleagues, Brown used his writings to promote political activism, sought political allies across religious lines for antislavery ends, and urged the use of the pulpit as a network for political antislavery action.
Thanks to the partnership of Brown and Hopkins, the 1780s produced a stream of Rhode Island antislavery writings (ProvG 1/22/85; 6/21/87; 9/8/87; 10/6/87; 10/13/87; USC 3/7/85; 1/12/86; 1/19/86; 8/2/87). But Hopkins, as a consistent Calvinist, continued to voice antislavery in terms of retributive New Divinity in which the depreciation of paper money was as much a reflection of God’s punishment as the plagues of Egypt. Meantime, even in Connecticut, there was evidence that the conservative message of Congregationalism was waning, not a good sign for a movement that was so closely connected to a religious sect. A newspaper correspondent wondered what the point of attending church was when “we have nothing to do with our salvation” and God found people so corrupt that “our very prayers are abominable” (Essig 105). For a nation that was turning away from a wrathful God, antislavery as an antidote for God’s wrath came to have diminishing power.
In the end, even with Brown at his side, Hopkins was not able to divert the course of the new nation, and he finally turned his energies to colonization, concluding that God had permitted the African slave trade as a way to Christianize the African continent. By the end of the 1780s, Hopkins and Brown supported the adoption of the Constitution on the basis that, without it, the existence of slavery would lead to anarchy and further diminish the chance of abolition. As David Brion Davis observed, “Instead of being the instrument for American emancipation, the slave, it appeared, had become the greatest peril to union” (299).
Even with their growing political awareness, the New Divinity and Quaker writers were not propagandists. They sought to persuade along religious lines, not force the issue regardless of means. Despite any other drawbacks, that characteristic alone disadvantaged the antislavery activists when compared to the patriot press. Although religious leaders would involve themselves in seeking political solutions and, in Rhode Island and Connecticut, at least, have some success in utilizing local venues for the discussion, the major hindrance to the broad dissemination of the antislavery discussion was the patriots’ rapid influence over the press. After 1774, newspapers increasingly aligned themselves with the patriots and a rhetoric that had no place for an antislavery discussion framed in the shame and guilt of New Divinity theology, the sentimental excesses of Quaker writing, or the lecturing of British antislavery leaders. Only in Connecticut, where newspapers were in the hands of the Congregationalist Greens, was the New Divinity slavery debate thoroughly aired in the 1770s, perhaps playing the essential role in bringing about that colony’s abolition of the trade. But the system of exchange newspapers, which had proved so helpful for the dispersal of the Boston Gazette’s revolutionary thought, would be a rare conduit for the dispersal of antislavery essays by either the New Divinity ministers or the Quaker writers.
A broader acceptance of antislavery discussion was likely at the hands of a third group of antislavery activists less easily defined than either the Quaker activists or New Divinity ministers. This was an eclectic group that included patriots such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush, Boston merchant James Swan, Baptist preacher John Allen, and even occasional satirists such as Connecticut’s John Trumbull. These writers sought to place antislavery in an emerging American ideology. That was a frame that lessened the threat of New Divinity apocalypse, distanced antislavery from the British, and tempered the Quaker sentimental tradition by finding a middle ground that did not eschew practical considerations. Nonetheless, by the mid-1770s the attempts of powerful writers as Rush and Paine were not sufficient to break the antislavery arguments out of the mold of British Quakerism or a form of Congregationalism that viewed slavery as another evidence of a slothful, secular society. Thus, dominant American antislavery rhetoric came to reflect regular characteristics: the Golden Rule, the displeasure of God, natural law as expressed by John Locke, the cult of sensibility, and the portrayal of America as corrupt and guilty. The theme of American guilt became the defining one at a time of the increasing articulation by patriots that America was already pure, even given the existence of slavery, and needed only to reject the Old World as its corrupting influence. The continuance of the slave trade was put at British feet, and thus served to exempt colonial Americans from taking on other antislavery actions on a colonywide or national level.
At the same time, proslavery argument also had regular characteristics that tended to maintain the slavery debate in the arena as defined by the Quakers and Calvinists. On occasion, relocated West Indian planters joined the debate to charge inborn racial differences. Antislavery writers who wrote in the Calvinistic and Quaker modes generally avoided such invitations to bring to the fore this most deeply felt and least eradicable prejudice. One of the remarkable aspects about Benjamin Rush’s antislavery discussion, as the next chapter explores, was that it did discuss perceptions of inborn racial difference. Although a large number of American colonists, northern as well as southern, may have held views of inborn racial difference, the argument or its response played a minor role in the slavery debate when compared to other characteristics. Jordan believes the view of black racial inferiority was changing during the revolutionary period, noting that Arthur Lee concluded his 1764 diatribe proclaiming black inferiority by indicating that lack of education might be as much to blame as inborn characteristics, although it might be noted that the pamphlet was written when Lee was in Scotland and published in London (Jordan 309). Lee’s rejection of inborn inferiority did not translate into his later antislavery views. In 1767, his newspaper essay addressed to members of the Virginia House of Burgesses called on divine retribution and natural law as reasons to oppose the institution, not equality of racial characteristics (VG-Rind 3/19/67).
This refusal of most indigenous colonial essayists, pro or con, to confront perceived racial difference worked to maintain the public slavery debate in biblical argument and ignored the practical concerns of colonists, whose understanding of blacks in terms of racial stereotypes gave them limited imagination as to the role of slaves once freed.
Almost missing from the public debate were American southerners. Only the first part of Lee’s 1767 essay was published, although even the one part played some role in Virginia’s bill a month later, laying a higher tax on imported slaves. After Lee, however, an early iron curtain descended over the southern colonies. Slave advertisements served as the public rationale for southern slavery, and the advertisements provided no room for an opposing voice. Faced with the ongoing negative portrayal of blacks in newspapers and advertisements, much less the institutional support of slavery, the slavery debate was challenged to alter notions that undergirded the institution and relegated slave and free blacks to subservient positions.