Bible Team Challenge: Lucy and Grace Ann

 

Bible Team Challenge: Lucy and Grace Ann

    In the creation of the constitution, one of the biggest and most recurring debates was whether or not to abolish slavery. Slavery was very common in the South and provided the plantation owners free/cheap labor and a lot of money. The northern states however, felt that slavery was unconstitutional and denied innocent people of basic human rights. The strongest points of discussion in this matter were those about religion. The Bible was used to create arguments both in favor of and against slavery.      

   It was argued that the Bible was in support of slavery because slaveholders were interpreting passages in the New Testament and the beginning of the Old Testament as pro slavery. Many slave owners would consider themselves to be better Christians because of the texts from the King James Bible and the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. After the slave trade, The Pope made it legal in America for Christians to be slaveowners. At first it was justified because the slaves were not Christians; they were not even considered people. Therefore, the church declared that it was ok because Christians did not own and enslave other Christians. Later on, slaveholders began to baptize their slaves and converted them all to Christianity. They had said that they were saving the souls of the enslaved and therefore owning slaves was justified by the bible.

    

    Some of the early religious antislavery arguments were due to the many slave insurrections. A well known example of this is Nat Turner's rebellion. Nat Turner was an enslaved man in the early 1800s. He along with many other slaves held an insurrection that ended with over 50 white citizens being killed. He had confessed that he had heard the voice of God telling him and his followers to take a stand. Early abolitionists used this to back up their arguments as it was proof that those in bondage were in fact unhappy and being denied basic human rights. They thought that this was the opposite of Christianity.  The Quakers were the first to speak out against slavery, other than the slaves themselves. The Quakers were a very strict group of Protestants. They said that it was like dealing with stolen merchandise. They later became an  antislavery religious sect. 

   

    After the slave trade, America became divided between the abolitionist in the church and the slaveholders in the church. Although they were first allowed to own slaves when they first came to America, in 1741, the Pope announced that no one would be able to own anymore slaves and therefore ended it in the church. While southern slaveholders were still justifying slavery through the Bible, the abolitionists were given the upper hand in this argument.