Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America

Slavery, the system of human bondage, is as old as the human race, but slavery in the New World, though relatively recent on the chronological chart, was unique in its internal ironies, in its persistent stereotypes, in the historical scope and intensity of its social and moral effects, and in the ambivalent legacy it bequeathed concerning race and ethnicity. Being black became a prickly ideological subject, and being white, a self-justified if widely questioned moral claim. And when in the eighteenth century blacks embraced Christianity en masse for the first time, they signaled an explicit break with the establishment religion of white moral superiority. Liberation in a slave society entailed repudiating slavery and challenging the race doctrine supporting it. Protestant Christianity fissured with the emergence of a black variant calling for reform. Black Christian leaders eventually directed that reform impulse into its civil rights phase. Mainline denominations, however, held out as bastions of the old order. John Tracey, a Congregational minister from Vermont, joined by Charles Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary, for instance, wrote in the 1840s and 1850s advancing biblical and theological support for slavery and for treating abolition as heresy. Against them were ranged exslaves such as Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker whose forceful views offered a channel for black national feeling. Religion was supposed to fetter the desire of blacks for freedom and justice; instead, religion inflamed the desire for liberation and black national identity. Blacks felt empowered in their struggle to be at home in America as free and equal citizens.