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Abstract
The case of James M. Pendleton (1811–1891) adds clarity to understandings of the relationship between slavery and Christianity in the nineteenth-century USA. A white Baptist minister in his native Kentucky throughout most of the antebellum period, Pendleton actively opposed slavery because he believed it an affront to biblical teaching and an economically fruitless way to order a society. At the same time, however, Pendleton also opposed abolitionist measures that called for immediate emancipation of slaves, both because he felt immediatism threatened social stability and because abolitionism appeared to flaunt what he saw as Christian orthodoxy. Pendleton's example shows why slavery was such a complicated issue for Southerners, as well as why abolitionism held so little sway among Southern evangelicals – even among those that wanted slavery ended.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Boles and Mark Noll, who provided helpful criticisms and suggestions at key instances during the development of this article. Also, I am indebted to Marion Lucas for his generosity with material related to John G. Fee. Research was aided by a Master's Thesis Fellowship from the Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. I am grateful to the Filson and its tremendously helpful staff of archivists.
Notes
1. William Sumner Jenkins' seminal chapter, ‘Moral Philosophy of Slavery’ in his Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South, 200–41, in many ways set the agenda for future scholars looking at the debate over slavery as a debate about the nature of Christianity and the role Christian doctrine should play in shaping society. More recent historians have taken Jenkins' work much further. Some of the most significant examples include, but are certainly not limited to, Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion; the collected essays in John R. McKivigan and Snay, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery; Mark A. Noll, America's God, From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, 367–401; Eugene D. Genovese, “Slavery Ordained of God”; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders, World View”.
2. James Henley Thornwell, “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery”, 4: 406.
3. See Kenneth Moore Startup, The Root of All Evil, 67–77 and Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire, 3–33.
4. For a detailed description of how evangelical proslavery was neither situated in language of ‘necessary evil’ nor ‘positive good,’ see John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom, 30–56.
5. For a cogent description of the differences between these ‘Souths’ and regional attitudes toward slavery, see William W. Freehling, The Road To Disunion, 17–19. For a dated, but incredibly valuable study of the persistence of antislavery views in Virginia churches, see Patricia Hickin, “‘Situation Ethics’ and Antislavery Attitudes in the Virginia Churches”.
6. The popular approach of Kentucky antislavery, to manumit slaves gradually and colonize them in West Africa, is detailed at length in Harold D. Tallant, Evil Necessity. Pendleton's affinity for the gradualist-colonizationist scheme always remained tacit in his antislavery writings, but he was a gradualist and associated with colonizationists, as this article will detail at length.
As anecdotal evidence that directly demonstrates Pendleton's support for colonization, it is possible that Pendleton intended to colonize the one slave he owned. According to historian Victor B. Howard, the Baptist divine inherited a slave boy from his father in the late 1840s and sought to free him for passage to Liberia. Before the boy could go, however, he died. See Victor B. Howard, “James Madison Pendleton”, 194. Howard's record differs from Pendleton's own narrative about his slave. According to Pendleton himself, the slave he acquired was a young female, whom he did not obtain until 1863, when the minister's mother died. By law, he could not emancipate the slave girl so the ‘best [he] could do was to hire her out’ and add 10 percent to whatever she earned. Pendleton wrote that he was ‘not a slave-holder morally, but legally,’ and when the institution ‘was abolished I rejoiced in the severance of the relation I had sustained to her.’ See Pendleton, Reminiscences, 127–28. Pendleton left the South in 1862, so there is some reason to believe Howard's account over that recorded in Pendleton's memoirs.
7. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, In Review of His Articles on Slavery, 10.
8. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No. 14,” The Examiner (Louisville), 8 Jan. 1848.
9. On abolitionists, the Bible, and religious arguments about slavery, see Robert Bruce Mullin, “Bible Critics and the Battle over Slavery”; for a brief summary of the central issues at stake for Christians debating slavery, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War, 494–504.
10. See James M. Pendleton, Reminiscences of a Long Life. A brief summary of Pendleton's career is recorded in Keith E. Eitel, “James Madison Pendleton”.
11. Landmarkism made several sweeping claims about the nature of Baptist Christianity. Chief among them were the rejection of the historic concept of an invisible and universal church; a view that a truly spiritual church could only be found within local, autonomous congregations; the rejection of any forms of baptism other than those performed by immersion; and the assertion that Landmarkism stood in a historic line of ‘succession’ that extended from Jesus Christ through the ‘true church’ through time to the contemporary Landmark Baptist churches. This final point, and the collective weight of the Landmark movement, drove home the notion that only Landmarkists – and no other Christian adherents, even some Baptists – were actually Christians. Landmarkism was a tremendously controversial movement with ramifications for all sorts of Baptist practices through the latter half the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.
Pendleton remains associated with Landmarkism because his tract An Old Landmark Re-set (Nashville: Graves & Marks, 1854) gave the movement its name. Pendleton was one of the three pillars in the early Landmark triumvirate; James R. Graves, longtime editor of the Tennessee Baptist, and A. C. Dayton were the other early leaders of the movement. Keith Eitel argues that Pendleton was not as thoroughgoing in his Landmarkism and suggests that Pendleton disagreed with Graves and Dayton on several key points, especially the existence of a universal church. See Eitel, “James Madison Pendleton,” 198. For more on the foundations and platforms of Landmarkism, as well as the three leaders, see the series of articles published in Baptist History and Heritage 10 (1975): James E. Tull, “The Landmark Movement: An Historical and Theological Appraisal”; Harold S. Smith, “The Life and Work of J. R. Graves (1820–1893)”; Bob Compton, “J. M. Pendleton: A Nineteenth-Century Baptist Statesman (1811–1891)”; and James E. Taulman, “The Life and Writings of Amos Cooper Dayton (1813–1865)”.
12. Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky, 53–60.
13. This is the major argument of John G. Fee, Colonization. The Present Scheme of Colonization Wrong, Delusive, and Retards Emancipation. On Barnes' hermeneutic, see Mullin, “Bible Critics and Slavery,” 222–23; and Noll, America's God, 390–6.
14. On the attitudes of conservative antislavery Kentuckians, see Tallant, Evil Necessity, 59–90. On the commitment of conservative antislavery divines to strict biblical interpretation and racialized hermeneutics, see Noll, America's God, 413–21. Fee was present at April 1849 emancipationist convention, though his calls for immediate abolition held little sway with the large number of gradualists in attendance. See Victor B. Howard, The Evangelical War against Slavery and Caste: The Life and Times of John G. Fee, 43–47.
15. William C. Buck, The Slavery Question, 3–4.
16. John G. Fee, An Anti-Slavery Manual, 7–8.
17. For more on the ‘Reformed, literal hermeneutic’ in nineteenth-century America, see Noll, America's God, 367–85.
18. Thornwell, “Relation of the Church to Slavery,” 383–85. The Synod of South Carolina unanimously approved Thornwell's paper.
19. Pendleton and his wife were regular guests of Buck's at his First Baptist Church in Louisville. See Pendleton, Reminiscences, 59–60.
20. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 200–01.
21. Buck, The Slavery Question, 10, 12. Italics from Buck.
22. Buck, The Slavery Question, 12, 15, 16, 22. Italics from Buck.
23. Buck, The Slavery Question, 22, 27–29. Italics from Buck.
24. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 200–01.
25. Buck, The Slavery Question, 4. Italics from Buck.
26. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, 2–3.
27. Buck, The Slavery Question, 9–10.
28. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, 1–4. Italics from Pendleton.
29. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, 4–5.
30. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, 9–10. Italics from Pendleton.
31. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No.7,” The Examiner (Louisville), 6 Nov. 1847.
32. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No. 9,” The Examiner (Louisville), 4 Dec. 1847.
33. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No. 13,” The Examiner (Louisville), 1 Jan. 1848. Italics from Pendleton.
34. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No. 14,” The Examiner (Louisville), 8 Jan. 1848.
35. Pendleton, Letters to Rev. W. C. Buck, p.10.
36. See Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860, 3–8.
37. Buck, The Slavery Question, 13. Italics from Buck.
38. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, quote 254, and 450–68.
39. Thomas Haskell has been the foremost critic of the argument Davis presents in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. According to Haskell, Davis' insistence on abolitionism linked to a burgeoning industrial class is misplaced. Haskell too sets capitalism at the centre of abolitionist logic, but for Haskell ‘what links the capitalist market to a new sensibility is not class interest so much as the power of market discipline to inculcate altered perceptions of causation in human affairs.’ Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” 342. The debate between Davis and Haskell, which also included John Ashworth, spanned many years and issues of the American Historical Review, but the principle material has been included in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate.
40. Kenneth Startup, “‘A Mere Calculation of Profits and Loss’: The Southern Clergy and the Economic Culture of the Antebellum North”, 218.
41. Pendleton, Reminiscences, 124.
42. Pendleton, Reminiscences, 112–13. Italics from Pendleton.
43. Robert J. Breckinridge, “Hints on Colonization and Abolition; with Reference to the Black Race”, 285, 287–89.
44. See Harold Tallant's treatment of the racism of Kentucky emancipationists in Tallant, Evil Necessity, 59–90. Perhaps the lone exception to the stricter racism of Kentucky's bulk of antislavery advocates was the abolitionist John G. Fee. Not only did he develop a singular anti-caste platform, but Fee was decidedly in favour of amalgamationist schemes, though not during the late 1840s emancipationist canvass. See Tallant, Evil Necessity, 178–80. In his anti-colonizationist book, Colonization, Fee blasted away at the perpetuation of a race-based ‘caste system’ in America. Interracial mixing was desirable for Fee: ‘Better that we have black faces than bad hearts, and reap eventually the torments of hell. We may have pure hearts if our faces should, after the lapse of a century or two, be a little tawny’ (Fee, Colonization, 27).
In 1866, Fee founded Berea College, Berea, Kentucky, as an interracial, egalitarian institution. Within a few years of its establishment, Berea's black student population reached 60 percent. See Marion B. Lucas, “John G. Fee, The Berea Exiles, and the 1862 Confederate Invasion of Kentucky”, 180. At Berea, Fee specifically hoped to encourage racial amalgamation through interracial marriage among his students. Fee's more radical position, however, was not supported by all members of Berea College's trustees. In 1872, the board adopted a resolution that, while approving of interracial marriage, said that it was not ‘desirable in general for those of either race to cultivate the most intimate social relations with those of the other sex and a different race, especially when the different in race is quite marked’ (Board of Trustee Minutes, Vol. I, 1858–1899, p.81, Box 8, RG2, Berea College Archives, Berea, Kentucky). I am thankful to Marion Lucas for directing me to Fee's stance on amalgamation and for sharing this last bit of evidence from his own research on Fee.
45. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 195; Pendleton, Reminiscences, 93.
46. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No.15,” The Examiner (Louisville), 22 Jan. 1848.
47. ‘A Southern Kentuckian’ (Pendleton), “Thoughts on Emancipation – No. 7,” The Examiner (Louisville), 6 Nov. 1847.
48. Clement Eaton, ed., “Minutes and Resolutions of an Emancipation Meeting in Kentucky in 1849”, 543–44.
49. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 193–94.
50. Journal of James Madison Pendleton, 26 April 1844, Department of Library Special Collections, Manuscripts, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.
51. C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation, 92–93.
52. Journal of James Madison Pendleton, 26, 29, 30 April 1844.
53. Goen, Broken Churches, 95–96.
54. Goen, Broken Churches, 96–97.
55. Pendleton, Reminiscences, 75–77.
56. Philip N. Mulder, A Controversial Spirit, 53. While Mulder's account is devoted mainly to eighteenth-century developments, he nonetheless provides an apt description of Baptist congregational principles.
57. John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion, 91.
58. Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860, 258–59.
59. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order,” 215.
60. Snay, Gospel of Disunion, 54. For the free blending of the Bible in natural law in the cause of abolitionism, see John G. Fee, The Sinfulness of Slaveholding Shown by Appeals to Reason and Scripture, with comments about natural law passim.
61. See J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy” (quotes from 159–60), and William Lloyd Garrison, “William Lloyd Garrison,” in A Documentary History of Religion in America to 1877 edited by Gaustad and Noll, 525.
62. Harrison, Antislavery Movement in Kentucky¸ 58–60.
63. Pendleton, Reminiscences, 93–94.
64. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 201–02; Pendleton, Reminiscences, 94, 102–03. In 1850, Pendleton did leave his Bowling Green congregation for a pastorate in Russellville, Kentucky. From all indications, this move had nothing to do with Pendleton's antislavery stance. He helped start Bethel College in Russellville, and then returned to Bowling Green's First Baptist Church in 1851.
65. Harrison, Antislavery Movement in Kentucky, 108–10.
66. Pendleton, Reminiscences, 112–14. John E. Dawson, an editor of the Alabama newspaper the South Western Baptist, charged Pendleton as an ‘abolitionist’ and argued that no person with antislavery views ought to hold a post in a Southern university. Howard, “Pendleton: Southern Crusader Against Slavery,” 206–10, discusses the great number of papers that came out against Pendleton. Interestingly, one of his main defenders was William C. Buck. Despite the public debate, the two remained friends, and Buck charged Pendleton's detractors with wrongly connecting Pendleton to John Brown.
67. See James Klotter's treatment of Robert J. Breckinridge's increasingly hardened racial views through the 1850s. Klotter, The Breckinridges of Kentucky, 1760–1981, 71.
68. Noll, America's God, 413–17.