When Slavery Was Called Freedom

Reviewed by: When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War Debbie A. Hanson When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. By John Patrick Daly. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002. Pp. 207, acknowledgments, epilogue, notes, selected bibliography, index.) One of the greatest quandaries facing those who teach courses dealing with the Civil War is how to explain the South’s defense of slavery, particularly its religious defense. Generally, such arguments are unduly simplified: slaveholding Southerners claimed that the Bible supported slavery and that the peculiar institution itself enabled slaves to be brought to Christ and saved from eternal damnation. While such explanations did typically play into proslavery arguments, they do not do justice to the theological complexities involved in attempts to justify slavery’s existence, however ultimately untenable such positions may be. Oversimplification of the Southern stance on slavery is, however, not at all evident in John Patrick Daly’s When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Daly’s work is admirable, both for the thoroughness of his research and for his carefully detailed history of evangelicalism and the proslavery movement, although its strength might be further bolstered by additional attention to abolitionist voices and to the beliefs and attitudes of Southerners who were not members of the clergy. As early as the preface, Daly takes care to define evangelicalism as denoting “a sweeping cultural movement that celebrated individualism and moral self-discipline, rather than to denote technical aspects of certain Protestant churches and their theology” (p. 2)—an important distinction given the current connotations of the word. He also uses the preface as an opportunity to set forth the structure of his argument, which he then proceeds to follow precisely. This is important, given that his assertions often run counter to more popular, less complicated explications of the religious proslavery position. Daly divides the Southern stance into three distinct eras, contending that in the antebellum South, the emphasis was on self-control as the avenue toward true freedom. Thus, slaveholders who behaved virtuously necessarily promoted a system of slaveholding that was seen as advantageous to everyone involved. Such slaveholders then reaped material rewards indicative of God’s approval of their efforts and of slavery itself. To argue otherwise was to question the ways of a Providence that placed everyone, including slaves, where they were meant to be and left no one, not even slaves, without the opportunity to find contentment through moral self-restraint. Daly further suggests that by 1862, when the war appeared to be going well for the Confederacy, the religious emphasis shifted toward the apocalyptic, as Southerners began looking at themselves as a “new chosen people at war for their God” (p. 146). Shortly thereafter, however, when it became clear that their cause was lost, Confederate theologians began favoring theodicy, relocating spiritual rewards to the afterlife, where their existence could not be so easily contested. By developing his argument chronologically and providing adequate historical support for his contentions, Daly is able both to ground his hypothesis sufficiently and to present it in a way that his readers can easily understand. What is less easy to comprehend is why Daly chose not to include more of the opposing abolitionist viewpoints of the time, which existed in both the North and the South. While he does mention 1831 as a turning point in proslavery arguments because of Nat Turner’s revolt and William Lloyd Garrison’s founding of the Liberator, only once does he refer to [End Page 361] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that caused great consternation on both sides of the Mason- Dixon line. Other major abolitionist voices, such as those of former slaves Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, are not heard at all. Nor is anything heard from those Southerners who were not members of the clergy. The clergy might have been the most frequent defenders of slavery, but they were hardly the only ones discussing its ethical effects. The inclusion of the viewpoints of such individuals as diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut (who not only provided a firsthand view of the political world of

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