The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Others however maintain that for one man to be another’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character [belonging by nature to others] and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether all slavery is against nature.&nbsp; And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically.&nbsp; Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient [since slavery is economically necessary to support the city-state]; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Proper treatment of servants [slaves] consists in using no violence towards them, and in hurting them even less, if possible, than our own equals.&nbsp; For it is his way of dealing with men whom it is easy for him to wrong that shows most clearly whether a man is genuine or hypocritical in his reverence for justice and hatred of injustice.&nbsp; He, therefore, that in dealing with slaves proves himself, in his character and action, undefiled by what is unholy or unjust will best be able to sow a crop of goodness, — and this we may say, and justly say, of every master, or king, and of everyone who possesses any kind of absolute power over a person weaker than himself.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But let us remember that we must have regard for justice even toward the humblest.&nbsp; Now the humblest station and the poorest in fortune are those of slaves; and they give us no bad rule who bid us treat our slaves as we should our employees: they must be required to work; they must be given their dues.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We all spring from the same source, have the same origin; no man is more noble than another except in so far as the nature of one man is more upright and more capable of good actions ... Heaven is the one parent of us all, whether from his earliest origin each on arrives at his present degree by an illustrious or obscure line of ancestors ... Whether your line before you holds freedman or slaves or persons of foreign extraction, boldly lift up your head, and leap over the obscure names in your pedigree; great nobility awaits you at its source.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.&nbsp; It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave ... Treat your inferiors [slaves] as you would be treated by your betters ... Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Not a single slave is to be found among them [Essenes], but all are free, exchanging services with each other, and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely for their injustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their impiety in annulling the statute of Nature, who mother-like has born and reared all men alike, and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in every reality.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">They [Therapeutae] do not have slaves to wait on them, as they consider that the ownership of servants is entirely against nature.&nbsp; For nature hath borne all men to be free …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">'I got me slave-girls and slaves.'&nbsp; For what price, tell me?&nbsp; What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature?&nbsp; What price did you put on rationality?&nbsp; How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?&nbsp; How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God?&nbsp; God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness.&nbsp; If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me?&nbsp; Who is his seller?&nbsp; To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself.&nbsp; For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable.&nbsp; God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself [through Jesus], when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom.&nbsp; But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.&nbsp; The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.&nbsp; It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave, because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue; not to the master, because by having an unlimited authority over his slaves he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel ... In democracies, where the laws ought to use their utmost endeavors to procure as great an equality as the nature of government will permit, slavery is contrary to the spirit of the constitution: it only contributes to give a power and luxury to the citizens which they ought not to have.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt, since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money, and some that were born in his house — And I cannot help thinking, that some of those servants mentioned by the Apostles in their epistles, were or had been slaves.&nbsp; It is plain that the Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual slavery, and though liberty is a sweet thing to such as are born free, yet to those who never knew the sweets of it, slavery perhaps may not be so irksome.&nbsp; However this be, it is plain to a demonstration, that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes.&nbsp; What a flourishing country might Georgia have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago?&nbsp; How many white people have been destroyed for want of them, and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all?&nbsp; Had Mr. Henry been in America, I believe he would have seen the lawfulness and necessity of having negroes there.&nbsp; And though it is true, that they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will or not; I should think myself highly favored if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord ... It rejoiced my soul, to hear that one of my poor negroes in Carolina was made a brother in Christ.&nbsp; How know we but we may have many such instances in Georgia ere it be long?&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange.&nbsp; But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present [American] revolution.&nbsp; The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the master, rather than by their extirpation.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us.&nbsp; The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.&nbsp; Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The first difference which strikes us is that of color.&nbsp; Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane, between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself, whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us.&nbsp; And is this difference of no importance?&nbsp; Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?&nbsp; Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? … They have less hair on the face and body.&nbsp; They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor … They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome.&nbsp; But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing danger till it be present … They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation … Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are the equal of whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous … [but] The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I do not believe that the people of the North have any more right to say the South shall not hold slaves, than the South have to say the North shall ... After having expressed myself so freely on this subject, I do not doubt, but those who have been forward in raising their voices against the South, will cry out against me as being uncharitable, unfeeling, unkind, and wholly unacquainted with the Gospel of Christ.&nbsp; It is my privilege then to name certain passages from the Bible, and examine the teachings of the ancients upon this matter as the fact is incontrovertible that the first mention we have of slavery is found in the Holy Bible [the curse of Ham], pronounced by a man [Noah] who was perfect in his generation, and walked with God ... I do most sincerely hope that no one who is authorized from the Church to preach the Gospel, will so far depart from Scriptures, as to be found stirring up strife and sedition against our brethren of the South.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But the Church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.&nbsp; It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters.&nbsp; Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.&nbsp; They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially.&nbsp; The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their future instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.&nbsp; How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.&nbsp; Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy [civil war] … [But] let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.&nbsp; And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Our new government’s] foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.&nbsp; This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth … It is indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator [presumably as indicated by Scripture].&nbsp; It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of his ordinances, or to question them.&nbsp; For his own purposes, he has made one race to differ from another, and has made “one star to differ from another in glory.”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man.&nbsp; And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.&nbsp; The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit.&nbsp; St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave, “Not now as a servant [slave], but above a servant, a brother beloved ... both in the flesh and in the Lord” [Philemon]?&nbsp; Paul’s letter to Philemon, sometimes in the past used to justify slavery, was now given paradigmatic force against slavery.&nbsp; The [7th] commandment against theft, once used by theologians to forbid a slave to escape, was now treated as the most relevant commandment against slavery ... Awkwardness was hardly avoidable when support for the condemnation of enslavement was sought among commandments two of which had given divine approval to the institution.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? … Why isn’t that one of the Ten Commandments? “Thou shalt not own another person.”&nbsp; You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone?”&nbsp;</em></p>