This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

UNITY, DIVERSITY, AND CONFLICT IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA 77and military crisis that tore their nation apart in 1861. As the great Boston preacherPhillips Brooks commented at that time, it was farcical to observe the “shillyshallying”of his fellow Episcopalians, who seemed unsure “whether there was awar going on or not, and whether if there was it would be safe for them to sayso.” 52 The Civil War challenged the institutional fabric of Anglicanism in America.Like the American Revolution, it revealed how estranged many of thechurch’s clerical leaders were from the mainstream.Although the institution of slavery existed, stable and unquestioned, in all partsof the United States at the close of the eighteenth century, various intellectual,social, and economic factors led both to its abolition in the North and to itsexpansion in the South over the first decades of the nineteenth century. By the1830s, most members of the southern upper and middle classes were, if not slaveholdersthemselves, related by blood or marriage to slaveholders. Among churchpeople, a significant percentage of the slaveholding population in the South wereEpiscopalians, and two of the largest slaveholders in the country—Leonidas Polkof Louisiana and Stephen Elliott of Georgia—were Episcopal bishops. In the1820s and 1830s, moreover, a principled defense of slavery on religious groundsbegan to emerge in the churches. To counter the jibes of antislavery advocates,apologists for the South’s “peculiar institution” asserted that slavery was not amoral or political evil (as abolitionists claimed) but a blessing for master andslave alike. Slavery had clearly been sanctioned in biblical times, its proponentsargued, and in modern times it had become a “great missionary institution—onearranged by God,” which empowered Christians in Europe and America to rescuethe souls of thousands of Africans from heathenism. 53 In addition, because of theprovidential nature of American slavery, Christian masters and mistresses claimedthat they bore a weighty responsibility for the education and evangelization ofthe Africans they owned. 54Despite its obvious usefulness to whites in the South, the religious defense ofslavery was by no means strictly southern in origin. 55 In fact, many of its assumptionsdovetailed neatly with the social ideas of high church Episcopaliansin the North. Whereas the evangelical reform impulse of the Second Great Awakeninghelped give birth to abolitionism in the 1830s, several of the high churchparty’s key concerns—its emphasis on the church’s ancient, spiritual roots; itsconcomitant indifference to secular and political affairs; and its general disdainfor individualism and moral perfectionism—predisposed significant numbers ofEpiscopal clergy to regard anyone who condemned slavery with suspicion. Twoclergymen in the North were particularly outspoken in this regard: New Yorkpriest Samuel Seabury (grandson and namesake of the church’s first bishop), whostraightforwardly endorsed slavery in his American Slavery . . . Justified by theLaw of Nature (1861); and John Henry Hopkins, the bishop of Vermont, whoseBible View of Slavery (1861) not only affirmed the legitimacy of slaveholding butalso supported the right of the southern states to secede from the Union in itsdefense. 56 Although a few evangelical Episcopalians, such as New York judgeWilliam Jay, condemned both the inherent sinfulness of slaveholding and clergy