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 | 1800 +: The Roman Catholic church's Sacred Congregation of the Index continued to place many anti-slavery tracts on their Index of Forbidden Books in order to prevent the public from reading them. |
| 1803: Cotton became the main U.S. export crop. |
| 1806 to 1811: Three bills were passed in England which progressively throttled the British slave trade. |
| 1807: The first black Methodist church, the African Union Church, was incorporated in Wilmington DE. |
| 1808: Import of slaves into the U.S. was criminalized. Some slaves were imported illegally up to 1860. Estimates of their number range from 250,000 to 1 million. |
| 1816: The African Methodist Episcopal Church is founded in Philadelphia PA. |
| 1818: The Chief Justice in Upper Canada (now Ontario) ruled that a runaway slave should not be returned to the U.S. |
| 1821: Benjamin Lunday, a Quaker from Ohio, started an anti-slavery newspaper "The Genius of Universal Emancipation." |
| 1821: The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is founded. |
| 1825: Fanny Wright (1795-1852), organized Nashoba. This was a training school to help slaves handle liberation from slavery. She was a religious free-thinker (secularist), and was the first American woman to personally speak out against slavery in public. |
| 1829's: Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists and Unitarians organized the "underground railway" to help slaves escape northward towards Canada and southward into Spanish held territories. 2 |
| 1829: David Walker, a free-born African-American published the first major U.S. anti-slavery publication: "The David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles Together With A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens of The World, But In Particular, And Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America." Walker died in 1830. Some suspect that a group of slave-owning Southern governors took a contract out on his life. He criticized Christian denominations for their relative silence about slavery and racism; he condemned those among the white clergy who supported slavery. 3 |
| 1830: The Plantation Mission Movement began. Methodist chapels were constructed on many plantations. |
| 1831: Nat Turner, a Baptist slave pastor, led a major sustained slave revolt in Virginia. He was inspired by the messages of the Old Testament prophets and their calls for justice. |
"...the notion that slavery was God's will gained momentum after the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831. In hundreds of pamphlets, written from 1836 to 1866, Southern slaveholders were provided a host of religious reasons to justify the social caste system they had created." 4
| 1833: Over 1,000 regional, state and city groups joined together to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. |
| 1833: The British Parliament passed a law which quickly phased out slavery in Britain and its colonies, including Canada. Slave trading by other countries was gradually snuffed out during the following 3 decades, by a series of treaties and the capture of over 1,000 slave ships by the British. |
| 1833: The Anti-Slavery Convention of 1833 was held. One of the vice-presidents was Dr. Lord, who later reversed his stance. He became an "advocate of slavery as a divine institution, and denounced woe upon the abolitionists for interfering with the will and purpose of the Creator." 4 |
| 1838: The Presbyterian church split over slavery. |
| 1839: Pope Gregory XVI wrote in Supremo Apostolatus that he admonishes and adjures "in the Lord all believers in Christ, of whatsoever condition, that no one hereafter may dare unjustly to molest Indians, Negroes, or other men of this sort;...or to reduce them to slavery..." The operative word is unjustly. The Pope did not condemn slavery if the slaves had been captured justly -- that is, they were either criminals or prisoners of war. Roman Catholic Bishops in the Southern U.S. determined that this prohibition did not apply to slavery in the U.S. To their credit, various other popes did order or otherwise influence the emancipation of slaves that they considered to be unjustly enslaved. |
| 1840: By this time, the United States had developed an obvious north/south split over slavery. The cotton-based economy of the Southern states depended largely on the low cost labor provided by the slave population. In the industrialized North, slavery had become only marginally economic. This split was reflected in the views of the various Christian denominations with respect to abolition. Many Christians in the southern states saw abolition as a massive threat to their culture and economy. They did not view slavery as a sin; their leaders were able to quote many Biblical passages in support of slavery. Many Christians in the northern states had gradually built up a revulsion towards the "peculiar institution." In opposition to slavery, they frequently quoted Jesus' statements about treating others with respect and love. |
| 1841 to 1844: The Baptist movement in the U.S. had maintained a strained peace by carefully avoiding discussion of the topic. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Board took neither a pro nor anti-slavery position. An American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 brought the issue into the open. Southern delegates to the 1841 Triennial Convention of the Board "protested the abolitionist agitation and argued that, while slavery was a calamity and a great evil, it was not a sin according to the Bible." 5 The Board later denied a request by the Alabama Convention that slave owners be eligible to become missionaries. In a test case, the Georgia Baptist nominated a slave owner as a missionary and asked asked the Home Missions Society to approve their choice. No decision was made. Finally, a Baptist Free Mission Society was formed; "it refused 'tainted' Southern money." The Southern members withdrew and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, which eventually grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. |
| 1843: Clergy and laity of the Methodist Episcopal Church left to form the Wesleyan Methodist Church in America. The split was caused primarily by the slavery issue. The church had reneged on an earlier decision to forbid members to own slaves. Church teaching and practices were two additional points of friction. The Wesleyan Methodist Church continues today as the Wesleyan Church. |
| 1843: "In 1843, 1,200 Methodist ministers owned 1,500 slaves, and 25,000 members owned 208,000 slaves...the Methodist Church as a whole remained silent and neutral on the issue of slavery." 5 |
| 1844: The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church split into two conferences because of tensions over slavery and the power of bishops in the denomination. The two General Conferences, the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) and Methodist Episcopal church, South remained separate until a merger in 1939 created the Methodist Church. The latter became the present United Methodist Church as a result of additional mergers. 7 |
| 1851: J.F. Brennan published "Bible defense of slavery." He claimed that Cain's parents were Eve and the serpent. 8 |
| 1860: Ministers and laity of the Methodist Episcopal Church's Genesee Conference in western New York state were expelled from the church for insubordination. They left to form the Free Methodist Church of North America. They split over a variety of factors, including theological disagreements, the perceived worldliness of the original church, and slavery. Their leader "...Roberts and most of his followers were radical abolitionists in the years immediately prior to the Civil War, at a time when many within the Methodist Episcopal church were hesitant in their condemnation of the practice of slavery." The denomination continues today in the U.S., Canada and in countries around the world. 9 |
| 1861: The Presbyterians were able to remain united in spite of tensions created by the slavery issue. Shortly after the Civil War began, the Southern presbyteries of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America withdrew and organized the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States (later renamed the Presbyterian Church in the United States). The split was healed in 1983 with the merger of these two bodies and the creation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). |
| 1861-1865: The Civil War (a.k.a. the war between the states) was fought. |
| 1863: President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on JAN-1. This is believed by many to have freed the slaves. Actually, it did not. Former slaves in the Northern states had already been freed; slaves in the south were part of the Confederacy, and thus immune to Union proclamations. Author Joel Panzer concluded that Catholic bishops in the U.S. at this time taught that buying and selling slaves was immoral, but merely owning a slave was acceptable to the church. Panzer considers this to be a misinterpretation of Papal teaching. 11 |
| 1865: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ended slavery. |
| 1866: The Holy Office of the Vatican issued a statement in support of slavery. The document stated that |
"Slavery itself...is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law...The purchaser [of the slave] should carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty, and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave."
Some commentators suggest that the statement was triggered by the passage of the 13th Amendment in the U.S. Others claim that the document referred only to a "particular situation in Africa to have slaves under certain conditions," and not necessarily to the situation in the U.S. 12
| 1873: Pope Pius IX was concerned about the "wreched Ethopians in Central Africa." He prayed that "Almighty God may at length remove the curse of Cham [Ham] from their hearts." God's curse on Ham was that the Canaanite people would be forever enslaved. Some theologians had long used this Biblical passage to justify enslavement of Africans. |
| 1888: Brazil became the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery. The Roman Catholic Church reversed its stance "from the affirmation to the condemnation of slavery." 10 Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to the Brazilian Bishops saying that |
"from the beginning, almost nothing was more venerated in the Catholic Church...that the fact that she looked to see a slavery eased and abolished...Many of our predecessors...made every effort to ensure that the institution of slavery should be abolished where it existed and that its roots should not revive where it had been destroyed."
This statement does not agree with the historical record. Previous church documents clearly stated that slavery was quite permissible, as long as the slave was a non-Christian and the slave's captors were fighting in a just war.
| 1917: The Roman Catholic church's Canon Law was expanded to declare a that "selling a human being into slavery or for any other evil purpose" is a crime. |
| 1965: The Vatican II document "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" stated: |
"Whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torture...whatever insults human dignity, such as...slavery, prostitution and selling of women and children...all these things and others like them are infamous...Human institutions...should be bulwarks against any kind of political or social slavery and guardians of basic rights under any kind of government."
The rejection of slavery as a profoundly immoral practice became gradually accepted by Christians throughout Western countries. This had a serious negative effect on the Christian faith. By rejecting the validity of the pro-slavery passages in the Bible, they were forced to accept that the Bible could not be considered a totally reliable guide on civil and moral topics. This created a serious disillusionment among 19th century Christians. The authority of the Bible became suspect for the first time. In the intervening years, the slavery passages became almost entirely ignored. Some translations of the Bible softened the verses by replacing "slave" with "servant." However, the Bible could no longer be fully accepted as a guide for public and personal morality, equally applicable for all societies and all eras. Some Biblical moral truths became widely accepted as true only for a specific group or for a specific time in history.
Status of human slavery today:
A return to slavery is still advocated in North America by some Reconstructionist Christians and a few racist fringe groups within the Christian Identity movement.
Slavery continues in two Muslim countries, although its existence is denied by their governments.
Human slavery was used widely by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II. The present German government has paid about 8 billion dollars in financial compensation to former slaves. Also during that war, Japan became what was probably the largest pimping operation in the world by enslaving one to four hundred thousand "comfort women" to function as sex slaves for the Japanese armed forces. The Japanese government has never offered financial compensation to the women that they abused.
Near-slavery has now replaced slavery as a source of major concern.
Related essays on this site:
| Passages condoning and regulating slavery in the Bible |
References:
- Eddie Becker, "Chronology on the history of slavery and racism," at: http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html
- William Still, "The Underground Railway," Ayer Co. May be ordered at: http://www.scry.com/ayerctlg/4416487.htm
- Haroon Kharem, "David Walker: Pioneer of Black Nationalist Thought 1785-1830"; a website at http://squash.la.psu.edu/~plarson/smuseum/americas/ (site no longer available)
- Eddie Becker, "Chronology on the history of slavery and racism: 1830 - The End," at: http://innercity.org/holt/chron_1830_end.html
- J.G. Melton, "The Encyclopedia of American Religions," Volume I, Triumph Books, (1991), Volume II, Page 5
- "Slavery and Religion in America: A time line 1440 - 1866," at: http://www.ipl.org/ref/timeline/
- J.G. Melton, op. cit., Volume II, Page 185
- Dan Rogers, "The evidence of black people in the Bible," at: http://www.wcg.org/wn/98May/all.htm
- J.G. Melton, op. cit., Volume I, Page 211
- M. Fiedler & L. Rabben, Ed., "Rome has spoken...A guide to forgotten Papal statements and how they have changed through the centuries," Crossroad, (1998) Page 81.
- Joel Panzer, "The Popes and Slavery," Alba House, (1996) Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store Some reviewers at Amazon.com commented that this book is a useful source of Papal statements on slavery. However, the author is accused of bending the truth. Highlighting one example, a reviewer wrote: "Whereas he mentions the work of the Catholic priest, Bartolomeo de las Casas, in ending the enslavement of the indigenous peoples by the Spanish colonists, Fr. Panzer is completely silent about De las Casas' suggestion that Africans be used as slaves instead."
- Leonard Kennedy, " 'The Popes and Slavery' — book review," Catholic Educator's Resource Center," at: http://catholiceducation.org/
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Copyright © 1999 to 2006 by Ontario Consultants on
Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2006-NOV-23
Author: B.A. Robinson
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