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Political Theology

James Henley Thornwell on “The Rights and Duties of Masters”: Lessons from the Civil War Era

I’m very interested in the theological debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War.  I’ve read many of the sermons, books, and tracts written by pro-slavery preachers and theologians from that era.  I find them a fascinating, and chilling, reminder of how a theological system in one era can justify something that comes to be clearly seen as an evil in another era.  Here’s the text of a paper I recently wrote on a famous sermon by James Henley Thornwell (pictured at left), titled The Rights and Duties of Masters.

Introduction

James Henley Thornwell, called by some of his contemporaries “Our Southern Giant” and “the Calhoun of the Church,” was a leading figure among Antebellum Southern Presbyterians.[1]  He served as Professor of Sacred Literature and the Evidences of Christianity at South Carolina College starting in 1840, and became a strong advocate of “Old School” Presbyterianism.[2]  He was a founder of the Southern Presbyterian Review, a prominent orthodox Presbyterian publication, and later became president of the South Carolina College, a highly prestigious position in South Carolina life at that time.[3]

Like other conservative Southern Presbyterians, Thornwell offered a vigorous theological defense of African Slavery.[4]  This defense is set out most directly in his sermon “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”[5]  Thornwell preached the Sermon on May 26, 1850 in Charleston, South Carolina, at the dedication of a church “erected for the religious instruction of the Negroes.”[6]  In many ways Thornwell’s arguments are typical of other pro-slavery preachers and theologians, but in some respects, particularly relating to his political theology, his arguments are more subtle than those of other apologists.  This paper argues that the subtleties of Thornwell’s arguments flow from his nuanced views about the relationship between faith and reason.  This study demonstrates how difficult it is to assess a pro-slavery theologian such as Thornwell from a modern perspective, and also how difficult it can be for a capable apologist such as Thornwell to notice his or her moral blind spots.

Thornwell’s Biblical But Not Biblicist Defense of Slavery

Pro-slavery apologists argued that both the Old Testament and New Testament sanctioned slavery and that the abolitionists therefore were distorting the plain sense of scripture.[7]  These arguments usually were offered in what today seem like naively Biblicist terms.  In his book A Defence of Virginia, for example, Southern theologian Robert Louis Dabney thundered that

Our best hope is in the fact that the cause of our defence is the cause of God’s Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience.  For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text.[8]

Dabney argued that the Old Testament explicitly recognized and sanctioned slavery (in the examples of the Curse on Canaan, Abraham, Hagar, the Mosaic Law, and the Decalogue), and that in the New Testament, slavery was never condemned by Christ and was approved by Paul.[9]  This was a typical laundry list of pro-slavery Bible passages.  In the literate, polemical context of the Bible wars over slavery, however, “[s]outhern preachers had to be careful with biblical citations” because “[a] mere grumble from a few congregants would send others scurrying to check their Bibles.”[10]  Thornwell knew this and tied his Biblical arguments to a broader political philosophy.

In the Sermon, Thornwell focused his Biblical arguments primarily on one passage, from Colossians 3:22 – 4:1.[11]  As Thornwell summarized this text, “[t]he Apostle briefly sums up all that is incumbent, at the present crisis, upon the slaveholders of the South, in the words of the text – Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.”[12]

Thornwell believed this command was not merely arbitrary because, although all persons, white and African alike, were equally human, God had ordained people to different stations and responsibilities.  In response to the Abolitionist argument that the relationship of master and slave violates a fundamental human right of the slave, Thornwell argued that there is a distinction between basic human rights of all persons and the rights and duties of persons within specific relationships.[13]  Paul’s injunctions to masters and slaves, Thornwell claimed, embedded a moral principle of duty particular to the roles God had providentially assigned:  “[l]et masters and servants, each in their respective spheres, be impregnated with the principle of duty . . . .”[14]  Thornwell saw this kind of difference in right and duty based on contingent relationships throughout society, such as between parent and child or husband and wife.  The slave is just another “actor on the broad theatre of life” whose reward depends on playing his role appropriately.[15]

Thornwell conceded, however, that slavery was not an intrinsic good.  “Slavery,” Thornwell argued in the Sermon, “is a part of the curse which sin has introduced into the world, and stands in the same general relations to Christianity as poverty, sickness, disease or death.”[16]  Colossians 3:22 – 4:1 encoded a form of positive law relating to a set of relationships – master and slave – that was contingent on the present fallen state of the world and that would be erased in the eschaton.  Slavery, like other differences in social condition, was “founded in a curse, from which the Providence of God extracts a blessing.”[17]

Even more directly, Thornwell conceded that the initial enslavement of Africans, like the beginnings of any enslavement, was violent and morally wrong.  But, he insisted, “the relations to which that act gave rise, may, themselves, be consistent with the will of God and the foundation of new and important duties.”[18]  In fact, Thornwell claimed, in the present fallen state of the world, “an absolute equality would be an absolute stagnation of all enterprise and industry.”[19]

Thornwell equated the demand for “absolute equality” with “[t]he agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms Europe,” a reference to the Revolutions of 1848.[20]  For Thornwell, the parties in the conflict over slavery “are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders – they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”[21]  This appeal to established order was a “central theme” in Old School Presbyterianism, and Thornwell certainly echoed this theme.[22]

Thornwell’s focus on this principle of duty appealed to the Southern honor culture and removed his Biblical reference from the category of mere Biblical proof texting.  It tied together a kind of natural law argument with Calvinist theology in a systematic defense of slavery as at least a contingent feature of some social structures.  It also allowed Thornwell to sidestep some of the roiling “scientific” arguments over the origins of Africans and to claim that in the end his intent was to defend blacks as fully human along with whites.

Thornwell’s Response to Polygenism and the Curse of Canaan

Scholarly Old School Presbyterians such as Thornwell were deeply interested in the emerging natural sciences and believed proper scientific methods would verify their beliefs about social order.[23]   Thornwell departed from pro-slavery scientists and clergy who argued that black Africans were cursed or sub-human, either because of the “curse of Canaan” or through some theory of biological polygenesis.

There was an interesting tension in Thornwell’s day between apologetics for African slavery based on polygentic theories and “Biblical” defenses of African slavery based on the “curse of Canaan.”[24]  Polygenetic theories developed by figures such as Samuel George Morton in the “American School of Ethnology” drew on the emerging evolutionary science of the day to argue that the present races had different biological origins – not a monogentic origin in a literal “Adam and Eve” – and that these differences in origin accounted for presumed differences in mental and cultural capacity.[25]  Some Southerners were happy to use these theories in their defense of African slavery, but conservative theologians and churchmen thought these theories contradicted the Biblical account of humanity’s origin in a single couple.[26]  Many of these Southern religious conservatives argued that black Africans did descend from Adam and Eve, but that the Africans were a degenerate race because of the “Curse on Canaan” narrated in Genesis 9.

Genesis 9 describes events shortly after the great flood of Noah.  The hero of flood story, Noah, plants a vineyard, gets drunk on the resulting wine, and passes out naked outside his tent.[27]  Noah’s son Ham sees Noah’s nakedness and tells his brothers, Shem and Japeth – perhaps meaning to make a scene or mock his father.  Shem and Japeth cover Noah, taking care to cover their eyes in the process.  When Noah awakes, he curses Ham’s son, Canaan:

“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”[28]

The honor culture reflected in this narrative resonated with antebellum Southern readers, who were quick to identify black Africans as Ham and Canaan’s descendants.[29]  Many Southerners adapted the New American School of Ethnology’s “scientific” views about racial differences to a genealogy that preserved Adamic monogenism with a divergence via the curse on Canaan.[30]  Some of the leading Southern theologians were reticent to make this connection, but still used this narrative as a key illustration.  Robert Louis Dabney, for example, agreed that “[i]t may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham,” but thought the actual scientific evidence lacking .[31]  For Dabney, the overall shape of the narrative was more important than the scientific details:  this was one example among many of the Bible’s moral sanction of slavery in general.

Thornwell was even more reluctant than Dabney to connect African slavery with any sort of genealogical or biological curse.  In his Sermon, Thornwell never mentioned the curse on Canaan and directly rejected polygenetic views.  Instead, Thornwell argued that “the Negro is of one blood with ourselves” and stated that “[w]e are not ashamed to call him our brother.”[32]  This reflects not only a tactical decision to “soften” Southern rhetoric, but also a commitment to integrate the Old Presbyterian theology with a form of contemporary science – that is, to reject the polygenist theories on Biblical and scientific grounds while upholding African slavery.

Thornwell stated in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Theology at South Carolina College, the “true method” of theology

is to accept the facts of revelation as we accept the facts of nature. We are by enlightened interpretation to ascertain the dicta; these are to be received without suspicion and without doubt. They are the principles of faith. Then from these principles proceed to the laws, the philosophy if you please, which underlies them, and in which they find their explanation and their unity. In this way we shall reach truth, and shall be partially able to harmonize it with all other truth.[33]

Here, Thornwell reflects a relatively strong, but not absolute, view of the “integration” of faith and reason, including of the findings of the natural sciences.  Like most of his Old Presbyterian contemporaries, Thornwell cautiously accepted the findings of the new Lyellian geology, which showed the Earth was far older than a simple reading of the Biblical records seemed to suggest.  In this sense, Thornwell’s views were consistent with his contemporary at Princeton Seminary, B.B. Warfield.[34]  Thornwell departed somewhat, however, from the synthesis of Baconian science and common sense realism characteristic of Warfield by prioritizing “faith” in his epistemology.[35]  Thornwell was careful to note that “[a]ll knowledge begins in faith; principles must be accepted, not proved, and it matters not whether you call them principles of faith or reason.”[36]

Thornwell applied his subtle understanding of faith and reason not only to the natural sciences, but also to the newly developing social sciences.[37]  The notion that society could be studied according to principles of reason rooted in faith, particularly a Calvinistic faith in the slow, inexorable, often hidden workings of providence, underpinned Thornwell’s belief that established social institutions such as slavery should not be upset by radical change.[38]  The same belief affected Thornwell’s treatment of the role of the law law in relation to slavery in the Sermon.  In his assessment of the law of slavery, the limits of Thornwell’s method are evident.  He could not countenance rapid legal change, and as a result – somewhat ironically in light of his views of scripture – he had to dance around the law’s plain meaning.

Thornwell, Slavery, and Law

For Thornwell the Bible did not sanction the ownership of one person by another person as “property.”  Rather, the Bible, and the natural law, gave the master a kind of contractual right “not to the man, but to his labor. . . .”[39]  This right came with corresponding duties, also reflected in Ephesians 4:5-9, upon the master to treat the slave properly.[40]  This relationship was not literally contractual, because it was grounded in Biblical and positive law, and the slave’s obedience, rendered in response to the moral obligation of the natural and Biblical law, could properly be considered “voluntary.”[41]  The motion of the slave’s “limbs or organs of the body” are voluntary in the literal sense, Thornwell argued, and the slave’s internal “moral character” determined whether his or her actions were “voluntary” in an ethical sense – an ethical obligation that rested entirely on the slave.[42]

Thornwell’s argument was ingenious, but it was belied by the actual law of slavery.  In the Sermon, he offered only a passing glance at “the technical language of the law, in relation to certain aspects in which slavery is contemplated” before claiming that “the ideas of personal rights and personal responsibility pervade the whole system.”[43]  The law in South Carolina and across the slave states, however, in fact held that “slaves are chattels personal,” that is, a form of personal property.[44]

The slave codes did provide some limitations on how slaves should be treated.  The slave codes also gave slaves some ability to form enforceable contracts and legitimated other aspects of commerce engaged in by slaves, but these provisions were designed to facilitate the use of slaves as business agents by the master, not to enable slaves to work for their own benefit.[45]  While the slave was in one sense a legal “person,” the ascription of personhood was not in recognition of any basic human rights, but only for the benefit of the master.  As one modern commentator has suggested, under South Carolina law and the Southern slave codes more broadly, “slavery marked an ownership so utter that the status of property was insufficient to describe it.”[46]  To the extent Thornwell actually was concerned about describing the social and legal structure of slavery in the Sermon, his description was wildly inaccurate.

Conclusion

How could a well-educated intellectual leader such as Thornwell have been so wrong about slavery?  Was he driven to self-delusion, or merely disingenuous, because of a cultural need to defend this Southern institution?[47]  In the intense hot-house of the slavery debate, some degree of delusion or dissembling cannot be discounted.  Thornwell, however, was a rigorous and meticulous person, who was well read in historical theology and classical literature and who did not shy away from controversy.  His arguments about the personhood of slaves, notwithstanding the “technical language of the law,” were rooted in deeper beliefs about the priority of the Bible, or more directly the priority of his theological system, in relation to what he considered the “scientific” understanding of society.  Careful study of Thornwell’s Sermon and its context might help us avoid overly simplistic, anachronistic judgments of Thornwell and his motives.  Perhaps also it can serve as a cautionary tale about how social, political, theological and Biblical views can converge into a system that justifies oppression.

Endnotes

[1] James O. Farmer, Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy:  James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon:  Mercer Univ. Press 1986), 41.

[2] Ibid., 57-58.

[3] Ibid., 58.

[4] See generally Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press 2006).

[5] Thornwell, James Henley, The Rights and Duties of Masters:  A Sermon Preached at the Dedication of a Church Erected in Charleston, S.C. for the Benefit of the Coloured Population (Charleston:  Steam Power Press of Walker & James 1850) (hereinafter “Sermon”).

[6] Ibid., Introduction.

[7] Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Chapter 3.

[8] Robert L Dabney, A Defense of Virginia (and Through Her, of the South) in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party (New York:  E.J. Hale & Son 1867), 21.  This book was was published two years after the conclusion of the Civil War.  Dabney had staunchly supported the Southern cause before and during the War, and hoped and believed that God would raise the South again in providential judgment against the North.  See ibid., 5.

[9] Ibid., 94-198.

[10] See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class:  History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (Cambridge:  CUP 2005), Kindle Loc. 14819.

[11] Sermon, 15.  In the modern NIV translation, Col. 3:22 and 4:1 read as follows:  “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. . . .  Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.”

[12] Sermon, 15.

[13] Sermon, 40.

[14] Ibid., 41.

[15] Ibid., 44.

[16] Sermon, 31.

[17] Ibid., 33.

[18] Sermon, 45.

[19] Ibid., 32.

[20] Ibid., 12.  For background on the revolutions in Europe during this period, see generally R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds, The Revolutions in Europe 1848-1849:  From Reform to Reaction (Oxford:  OUP 2000).  For a discussion of how these revolutions affected the views of Southern slaveholders in the U.S., see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Chapter 2.

[21] Ibid., 14.

[22] See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Inductive and Deductive Politics:  “Science and Society in Antebellum Persbyterian Thought,” The Journal of American History 64:3 (Dec. 1977), 704-722; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, ”James Henry Thornwell, Pro-Slavery Spokesman Within a Calvinist Faith,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 87:1 (Jan. 1986), 49-64.

[23] See Farmer, The Metaphysical Conspiracy, Chapter 3; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Chapter 18.

[24] See David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors:  Race, Religion & the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press 2008), 182-190.

[25] Ibid., 173-180.

[26] Ibid., 180-182.

[27] Gen. 9:20.

[28] Gen. 9:22-25.

[29] See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse:  The Biblical Justifications of American Slavery (Oxford:  OUP 2002), Chapter 4 (noting connection between Southern honor culture and the Genesis 9 narrative).

[30] Ibid.

[31] Dabney, A Defense of Virginia, 101-104.

[32] Sermon, 11.

[33] John B. Adger, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, Vol. 1, (Richmond:  Presbyterian Committee of Publication 1871), Appendix A, 582, ¶4.

[34] See Mark A. Noll & David A. Livingstone, eds., B.B. Warfield, Evolution, Science and Scripture, Selected Writings (Grand Rapids:  Baker 2000).

[35] Farmer, The Metaphysical Conspiracy, 141-151.

[36] Adger, Collected Writings, Vol. 1, Appendix A, 579, ¶3.

[37] See Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics:  Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,” 704-722; Bozeman, “Joseph LeConte:  Organic Science and a ‘Sociology for the South,’” The Journal of Southern History 39:4 (November 1973), 565-582.

[38] Bozeman, “Joseph LeConte:  Organic Science and a ‘Sociology for the South,’” 707.

[39] Sermon, 24.

[40] Ibid., 40-41.

[41] Ibid., 27.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] John Belton O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina (Columbia:  John G. Bowman 1848), 5.

[45] See ibid.

[46] John Samuel, Harpham, “Two Concepts of a Slave in the South Carolina Law of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition, May 25, 2017, available at  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1323704.

[47] Cf. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy, 196 (noting that some modern historians “have seen the proslavery argument as a clear case of self-serving rhetoric”).