The Consequence of the Law of God upon Disobedience

The Quaker Benjamin Lay even kidnapped a child (temporarily) from its slave-owning parents to help them see the distress their practice caused! Thinking about the Golden Rule required people to consider how their actions impacted on others, including African slaves on the other side of the Atlantic.⁷²⁹ The Methodist, Samuel Bradburn, observed to his horror that though he had “always abhorred slavery in every shape”, he had been “in some degree accessory to the Bondage, Torture and Death of myriads of human beings by assisting to consume the produce of their labour, their tears and their blood!” He asked God’s pardon and hoped that by boycotting sugar he could “make some restitution for my former want of attention to my duty in this respect”.⁷³⁰ The emotion that attended the disgust of slavery and slave trade was so loud that Wesley prayed for the deliverance of the Africans’ souls and emancipation “Oh burst thou all their chains in sunder”, more especially the chains of their sins; Thou Saviour of all, make them free that they may be free indeed”.⁷³¹ Wesley and others knew that slave owners deprived the dissemination of the gospel to their slaves because of the fear that conversion to Christianity would undermine their slavery. The rise of antislavery movement was also traceable to the growth of converted Africans to Christianity. This is because in the 18^th-century Africans and Europeans were involved collectively in the antislavery activism. However in the 19^th -century, the white Evangelicals in the American South began to soft-peddle the social ramification of the gospel. ⁷³²

And Equiano concluded these biblical injunctions when he said: “remember the God who has said vengeance is mine, and I will repay not only the oppressors but also the justifiers of the oppressor.”⁷³⁵ And finally, another African Christian Ottabah Cugoano warned slave masters that if they did not repent, they would meet with the full stroke of the long suspended vengeance of the heaven.⁷³⁶ Many abolitionists used many mediums to fight for the abolition of slavery and particularly using pamphlets to highlight the threats of divine judgment and in one of these pamphlets Granville Sharp (1776) wrote the law of retribution: “A serious warning to Great Britain and her colonies, founded on unquestionable examples of God’s temporal vengeance against tyrants, slaveholders and oppressors”; at its close, James Ramsey (1807) published the danger of the country. ⁷³⁷

Paradoxically, the ideas of brotherhood, liberty, benevolence and judgment, which were propagated by the abolitionists and also rooted in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, seem to tolerate the institution of slavery. As Cugoano postulated, the claim that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery was the greatest bulwark of defence, which the advocates and supporters of slavery can advance. Cugoano thought that this was an inconsistent and diabolical use of the sacred writing. And he continued to say how ironic it was to see slave-traders ransacking the Pentateuch to legitimate slavery while blithely ignoring texts, which made slave trading a capital crime.⁷³⁸

“He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus chap. 21 v. 16; Deuteronomy chap. 24 v. 7).⁷³⁹ Though it was admitted that the Law of Moses did outlaw a form of slavery and it was legitimate in its time and place, however, there is a difference in the perpetual enslavement of Gentiles and the qualified servitude of fellow Jews. The enslavement of Jews was to be dissolved at the year of Jubilee and abolitionists often argued that it was “not, properly speaking slavery” – which by definition involved permanent rights of ownership.⁷⁴⁰ The enslavement of the gentiles they argued, was a peculiar punishment for exemptional wickedness and formed no precedence for other nations.

735 Equiano, O., The Interesting Narrative, 2003, p. 339.

736 Cugoano, Ottabah, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, 1787, p. 25; Anstey, R., “A Re-interpretation of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade, 1806-1807”, English Historical Review, 87, 1972, p. 313.

737 Compare Peckard, Peter, National Crimes the Cause of National Punishments, 1795, p. 17; Booth, A., Commerce in the Human Species, 1792. p. 26; Benezet, A., A Caution and a Warning, 1766, p. 33.

738 Minkema, K. and Stout, H., “The Edwardsean Tradition and Antebellum Slavery”, 2005, pp. 47-74.

739 ibid. n.736, pp. 29-30 and 64-66.

740 Bradshaw, T., The Slave Trade, 1788, p.12.

The Hebrews biblically were exhorted to remember their own bondage in the land of Egypt, and to treat their servants with same lenity they wish to experience themselves.⁷⁴¹

On the other side, the pro-slavery Christians argued that neither Christ nor the apostles acquiesced to the abolition of slavery and responded that slavery was tolerated as an evil by the early church just like the sanguinary despotism of Nero and the sport of gladiators, neither of which was expressly condemned in the New Testament.⁷⁴² Despotism and slavery were inimical to the spirit of Christianity and eventually undermined both institutions.⁷⁴³ The outlawing of slavery could not take place in the first centuries because the church was weak and slavery was integral part of the Roman economy. As Equiano observed, if Paul “had absolutely declared the iniquity of slavery…he would have occasioned more tumult than reformation”. Yet his letter to Philemon plainly showed “that he thought it derogatory to the honour of Christianity, that men who are bought with the inestimable price of Christ’s blood shall be esteemed slaves and the private property of their fellowmen”.⁷⁴⁴ Paul had pointed the way; it was for later Christians to complete the journey.⁷⁴⁵ There is agreement amongst abolitionists that Christianity was anathema to the institution of slavery. In this regard William Robertson pointed out that “the spirit and genus of the Christian religion” had systematically undermined many evils of the ancient world, including the practice of slavery. He maintained that the enslavement of fellow Christians had been widely forbidden by the church and its Bishops, so that slavery largely disappeared from Christians in Europe by the 12^th-century.⁷⁴⁶ And the Baptist, Robert Robinson argued that in the central right of communion, slaves and slaveholders ate and drank together as brethren, thereby undermining any hierarchical structure.⁷⁴⁷ The revival of slavery in the 16^th-century was therefore, a terrible setback on the application of Christian principles.⁷⁴⁸

741 Wright, C., Old Testament Ethics and the People of God, IVP, 2004, pp. 333-37; Schulter, M. and Ashcroft, J. (eds.), The Jubilee Manifesto, IVP, 2005, pp. 193-95; Sharp, G., An Essay on Slavery, 1773, p. 22.

742 Booth, A., Commerce in the Human Species, 1792, p. 26.

743 Bradshaw, T., The Slave Trade, 1788, p.13.

744 Equiano, O., The Interesting Narrative, 2003, p. 337-38.

745 Swartley, W., Slavery, Sabbath, War and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation, Harald Press, 1983, chap. 1;

Webb, W., Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Culture Analysis, IVP, 2001.

746 Robertson, W., The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, 1755, pp. 28-32.

747 Robinson, R., Slavery Inconsistent with the Spirit of Christianity, 1788, pp. 12-13, 5-8.

748 Stark, R., For the Glory of God: How Monotheism led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts and the End of Avery, Princeton University Press, 2003, chap. 4.

They also suppressed knowledge of slave rebellions and represented them as the re-emergence of the supposedly innate savageness that had been subdued but not eliminated by their subordination to so-called civilized people. In using their antics to suppress the knowledge of rebellion, they typically employed images of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes to describe slave rebellion, which they viewed as a cataclysmic disruption of the natural order. The representation of slave rebellion was a heightened state of ideological struggle between pro-slavery and abolitionists. Anti-slavery advocates used every opportunity to raise moral, ethical, political, and legal questions regarding slavery.

One newspaper writer called abolition “disorganising in the extreme”, while another officer called abolitionist a “faction that, as a U.S. American, he could wish to see destroyed”. ⁷⁴⁹

749 News coverage of the Amistad Affair was copious in newspapers of the Northern Eastern United States, New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. In particular, Abolitionist Presses, not surprisingly present the greatest debates that arose in conjunction with the Amistad, often quoting selections of newspapers from a wide area, including the slave holding-states. The emancipator and liberator provided coverage of events relating to the Amistad and extensive interpretation of those events. In addition to the newspaper, the Abolitionist press published at least five pamphlets and books on the subjects of the Amistad captives Argument of Adams, John Quincy, Argument of Baldwin, Roger S.;

Barber, John, A History of the Amistad Captives (HAC) 1840, Id. Trial of the prisoners of the Amistad (TPA), and US Congress House of Representatives, Africans taken in the Amistad (ATA). Two kinds of papers with a wider distribution than the abolitionists’ presses also covered the Amistad Story, e.g. the Penny Press, the Commercial Papers and The New York Sun. Penny Press was the first to publish official account of the rebellion together with a sensational report of a visit to the Amistad; Commercial Papers, Journal of Commerce and the Advertiser and Express, consistently covered the trials and judicial decisions, some Southern commercial papers, such as the New Orleans Picayune did no more than to note the capture of the “piratical vessel” and published the official account of the rebellion. Others, such as the Richmond Enquirer, also commented on the trials and judicial decisions but generally refused to print the particulars of debates raging in the north. With respect to the Amistad, several histories and many novels provided versions of what happened on board the schooner and in the court trials that followed. See for example, Cable & Martin (The Black Odyssey, 1977) and Owens The Black Mutiny, 1839. Information about the Amistad is available from a variety of sources, most of which discuss the trial in relation to one of the many famous white men involved in it, like John Quincy Adams of Lewis Tapan (see Able and Kinsbery, eds.); Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Echo of Lions, 1989, which she calls a none-fiction novel, focuses on and imagines a subjectivity for the captives and offers a very different view of “what happened” that was provided by Jones’s legal history; See also Strother for the role of the Amistad affair in developing the Underground Railroad. In addition, the rebellion of the Creole has proved to be an important event for African American writers, including William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, and Frederick Douglass, with her novella, The Heroic Slave, 1852. See Yarborough, pp. 176-179 for an analysis of the texts by Brown, Hopkins, and Lydia Maria Child in relation to the Heroic Slave, 1990.

In August 22, 1831, a thirty-year-old slave named Nat Turner staged a bloody slave revolt in rural Southampton Country, Virginia. Over two days, Nat and his men killed approximately 57 whites. By the time the revolt was crushed on Tuesday, August 23, 1831, an estimated 60 to 80 blacks had taken part in the uprising. The rebellion persuasively undermined the story of slave docility. ⁷⁵⁰

By 1840, the abolitionists were divided into three categories:

1. The Garrisonians, who were anti-clericalists, anti-statists and radicalists on such issues as women’s right that had driven away most churches inclined and politically motivated abolitionists of the American anti-slavery society.

2. The evangelical, who continued to work through their churches for emancipation, 3. The political abolitionists, who hoped to achieve abolition through the political process.

On the ideological spectrum from immediate abolition on the left to conservative anti-slavery on the right, it is often hard to tell where abolition (which demanded unconditional emancipation and usually envisaged civil equality for the freed slaves) ended and anti-slavery or free soil (which desired only the containment of anti-slavery) began.⁷⁵¹