17 February 2025

Slavery, The Slave Trade and Christians’ Theology – Part Two: Theological Themes

In the first article, I explored the different positions taken by Christians in America and Britain through the 17^th to 19^th centuries in regard to slavery and the slave trade (Foundations 86). In this second part, I reflect on the theological themes that framed how they thought, spoke, and acted to enable us to understand how they:

1. 1. Grasped the implications of a Christian view of human nature.
2. 2. Drew varying consequences for a Christian doctrine of God’s providence.
3. 3. Believed, in some cases, that slavery was a national sin and hence raised the likelihood, if not repented, of national judgement; and,
4. 4. In some cases, regarded slavery as a deep hindrance to the gospel, and its abolition as promising gospel prosperity.

I. Human Nature

Michael Haykin says that “what it means to be human” was “The central ethical dilemma for eighteenth–century, transatlantic British society, namely, the ethics of running the slave–trade and of owning slaves”, and it was only resolved when this question was answered (Haykin, 2011).[1] Roe notes key themes in the preaching of the Particular Baptists towards the close of the Eighteenth Century, the first of which being the inherent equality of all human beings. It appeared, for example, as the title page image of a sermon by James Dore.[2]

Their arguments sometimes were very general – John Beatson referred to the “benevolent spirit of the gospel”, saying, “Are we not under obligation to exercise the offices of kindness, independent of complexion, language, colour, religion, or any other tie than that strongest of relations – one common nature?” Robert Robinson made clear he believed that “the enfranchisement of slaves is one act of justice naturally proceeding out of evangelical doctrine”.[3] Robert Hawker (1753-1827), a vicar in Plymouth, published two relevant items. The Injustice of the African Slave Trade, Proved from Principles of Natural Equity was a sermon given in January 1789 at the height of the lobbying for the abolition of the slave trade. He later published An Appeal to the Common Feelings of Mankind on Behalf of the Negroes, in the West-India Islands in the form of “A Letter to William Wilberforce” (Roe, 2021b). He concludes that the African slave trade “is the most palpable violation of all equity, and an outrage to every law of nature, reason, and religion.”[4] The memorial to William Knibb outside Falmouth Baptist Chapel reads:

The same God who made the white made the black man. The same blood that runs in the white man’s veins, flows in yours. It is not the complexion of the skin, but the complexion of character that makes the great difference between one man and another.

This generality may have been due in part to their argument’s target being those who were not confessing Christians.

Dore perhaps had most to say on this theme. He cites the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Petition of Rights, and the Coronation Oath, waxing lyrical: “And shall we be tenacious of liberty at home, and rule with the iron rod of slavery abroad? How inconsistent! How preposterous!”.[5] On the British trade he says, “You are men: respect humanity.”[6] Of “the prince upon the throne, the peasant in the cottage, the proud European Lord, and the poor Negro slave”, we “all spring from one common stock. We took our rise from Adam, we all descended from Noah; we are all brothers and sisters, members of one great family. Let us love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous”.[7]

Are not men naturally free? Is not liberty the gift of God to every man? And can we trample on the sacred rights of the humankind without invading the prerogative of heaven? There are natural rights which belong to men, as men… Civil government is then only conducive to general happiness when it protects men in the enjoyment of their natural rights, such as their right to their lives, their liberty, the fruit of their labour, and to the use, in common with others, of air, light and water.[8]

Some in his church wrote him a letter praising his “repeated exertions to advance the cause of Humanity and Universal Freedom” and asking for “a Course of Lectures on the principles of non-conformity, and of civil and religious Liberty”.[9]

But perhaps it is in the voice of John Newton that the most telling, because most personal, words can be heard. He challenged assumptions about ethnicity and human nature. Pressed on this point in his evidence to the House of Commons in 1790, he was asked “what conclusions did you form respecting the capacity of the Negroes, compared with that of other men in the same period of society?” He replied “I always judged that with equal advantages they would be equal to ourselves in point of capacity. I have met with many instances of real and decided natural capacity among them.”[10]

The very title of Abraham Booth’s sermon – “Commerce in the Human Species” – signalled his central argument:

Be the station of an innocent Negro ever so obscure, his poverty ever so great, his manners ever so rude, or his mental capacities ever so contracted, he has an equal claim to personal liberty with any man upon earth. For the rights of humanity being common to the whole of our species, are the same in every part of the world.

For though they are ignorant of the true God, and unacquainted with our concern to promote their happiness; yet they are men, they are brethren of the human race: agreeable to that saying. God hath made of one blood all nations of men.[11]

It was at this point that Booth took sharp issue with William Rogers of Philadelphia in a letter of 1795, where he takes expressions from Rogers and responds. His irony is scathing when, on Rogers’ phrase, “We are all citizens”, he says, taking a constantly cited text and reasoning from human nature:

That is, we who have the happiness and honour of wearing not black, or mulatto,[12] but white skins, possess liberty, personal, civil and political; are capable of acquiring large property, and are eligible to the first honours in the federal government… It is indeed asserted in an old book, now but little regarded, “That God made of one blood all the nations of men”, but we, the genuine sons of liberty, will never be persuaded that our blood is specifically the same with that which flows in the veins of a black or mulatto.[13]

John Rippon’s 1807 verses following the ending of the Slave Trade included:

Let charity, benevolence,
And every smiling grace,
In golden links of brotherhood
Unite the human race.

Telling applications of this biblical principle can be found in numerous writings. Carey, for example, writes,

Barbarous as these poor heathens are, they appear to be as capable of knowledge as we are; and in many places, at least, have discovered uncommon genius and tractableness; and I greatly question whether most of the barbarities practised by them, have not originated in some real or supposed affront, and are therefore, more properly, acts of self-defence, than proofs of inhuman and blood-thirsty dispositions.[14]

James Montgomery gave it expression in his poem, “The West Indies”:

Is he not Man, though knowledge never shed
Her quickening beams on his neglected head?
Is he not Man, though sweet religion’s voice
Ne’er bade the mourner in his God rejoice
Is he not man, by sin and suffering tried?
Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died?
Belie the Negro’s powers: —In headlong will,
Christian! thy brother thou shalt prove him still.[15]

We have seen how John Newton challenged assumptions about ethnicity and human nature in ways that were central to the Christian response to slavery. Countering suggestions that “African women are negroes, savages, who have no idea of the nicer sensations which obtain among civilized people”, he responded to the House of Commons committee,

I dare contradict them in the strongest terms. I have lived long, and conversed much, among these supposed savages. I have often slept in their towns, in a house filled with goods for trade, with no person in the house but myself, and with no other door than a mat; in that security, which no man in his senses would expect in this civilized nation, especially in this metropolis, without the precaution of having strong doors, strongly locked and bolted. And, with regard to the women, in Sherbro, where I was most acquainted, I have seen many instances of modesty, and even delicacy, which would not disgrace an English woman.[16]

He insisted, in similar terms:

I have often been gravely told, as a proof that the Africans, however hardly treated, deserve but little compassion, that they are a people so destitute of natural affection, that it is common among them for parents to sell their children, and children their parents…. But… I never heard of one instance of either, while I used the coast.[17]

He was asked, “What opinion have you formed of the temper and disposition of the Negroes?” He gently reminds the committee that it would be as impossible to give “a general character” of people in Africa as it would be of the people of Europe, but that of the area he was familiar with – Sierra Leone – “The people … are in a degree civilized, often friendly, and may be trusted where they have not been previously deceived by the Europeans. I have lived in peace and safety among them, when I have been the only white man among them for a great distance.”[18] Newton often made unfavourable comparisons with the Europeans encountered by the tribes of Africa. He recalls, “The most humane and moral people I ever met with in Africa were on the River Gaboon (sic), and they were the people who had the least intercourse with Europe at the time.”[19] He had heard these people actually speak against the slave trade, and asked to illustrate, said,

One man of consequence said, “If I was to be angry, and to sell my boy, how should I get my boy back again, when my anger was gone away?” For the same reason they would not use firearms in their petty quarrels, though they had them, for they said, “If I kill a man when I am angry, I cannot bring him back to life when my anger is over.”

II. Providence

We have heard the voices of Winthrop, Thornwell, Palmer, Dabney, Girardeau, and J. W. Alexander, discerning the hand of God’s providence in the order of society in general and domestic slavery in particular. What are we to make of this? We cannot make good sense of these arguments without recognising that understandings of God’s providence were being used by them and others in several quite different ways.

In some cases, as by John Winthrop, Christians were referring in a general way to how God orders society in general, or one’s life in particular. John Newton spoke in this way when looking back on the time he had worked in the slave trade:

I felt greatly the disagreeableness of the business. The office of a gaoler, and the restraints under which I was obliged to keep my prisoners, were not suitable to my feelings; but I considered it as a line of life which God in His providence had allotted me, and as a cross which I ought to bear with patience and thankfulness till He should be pleased to deliver me from it. Till then I only thought myself bound to treat the slaves under my care with gentleness, and to consult their ease and convenience so far as was consistent with the safety of the whole family of whites and blacks on board my ship.[20]

The problem with the appeal to Providence is that it sounds little different to an appeal to custom and practice. Calvin remarks on this that,

Naturally, if men’s judgements were just, custom would be based on those that are sound. The reverse, however, has often been the case, because whatever the majority was seen to do acquired the force of customary law. Now men’s lives have never been so well ordered that most men like the best things. Thus, the individual faults of the many have produced collective error, or rather a common conspiracy in evil, which these worthies would now pass off as law[21]

William Wilberforce constantly referred to God’s providence over and in his life. A small sample of extracts from his spiritual journals will suffice. In a letter to his mother soon after word of his conversion had become more widely known, he said “It would merit no better name than desertion…if I were to fly from this post where Providence has placed me”.[22] On September 4, 1796, he gave thanks for “My being providently engag’d in the Sl: Trade Business, thro’ what we call accident, I remember well how it was. What an honourable Service”.[23] On February 22^nd, 1807, shortly before the passing of the bill outlawing the slave trade, he wrote,

Never surely had I more cause for gratitude than now, when carrying the great object of my life, to which a gracious Providence directed my thoughts twenty-six or twenty-seven years ago, and led my endeavours in 1787 or 1788. O Lord, let me praise Thee with my whole heart… Oh may my gratitude be in some degree proportionate.[24]

At the high point of his life, April 5^th, 1807, he recorded, “How wonderful are the ways of Providence! The Foreign Slave Bill is going quietly on”.[25]

We may think of this primarily as observing God’s providence working for his glory through the life of a Christian. The southern theologians appealed to providence in a rather different way as an example of national providence. “Providence has given us slavery” (Thornwell). It was a “providential trust” that should be not only conserved but perpetuated (Benjamin Palmer). In America at least, slavery was “the righteous, the best, yea, the only tolerable relation” (Dabney). Kelly’s criticism of Dabney and his fellow advocates of slavery is the least that can be said.

Dabney was not overly biblical on this subject; on the contrary, he did not go as far as the Bible should have taken him. Like all other fallen men, including theologians, he had blind spots where his devotion to the culture made it difficult for him to interpret the will of God…Undoubtedly Dabney’s greatest blind spot in this whole matter was…his underestimation of the power of the gospel in the life and culture of the blacks (which can make saints, leaders, and heroes of them as well as of any other people).[26]

Calvin wisely observed that “Although providence, when correctly understood, is an enormous help in confirming faith, there are very few who rightly comprehend or reflect on it”.[27] He concludes that “our heart is resolved on this: nothing will happen that God has not ordained”, but this does not remove the need for prudence and caution. That would be to “muddle heaven and earth”.[28] For example, he rejects the position of those who hold that “whatever does happen they so ascribe to God’s providence that they disregard the person who does the deed”.[29]

While Calvin does not address the question of slavery, he gives several case examples that may be thought analogous. For example, “If a child lets his father die without helping him, he could not, they argue, have resisted God who had decreed that this should happen.” His conclusion is that “(a)ccordingly they turn all vices into virtues, on the grounds that these serve the ordinances of God!”.[30]

Carter, writing as a black Reformed Christian and on God’s providence, insists that,

The biblical understanding of God’s sovereignty demands accepting the kidnapping and subsequent enslavement of Africans in America was according to his eternal and sovereign will. This must never be lost to us as we seek to resolve areas of racial tension and animosity in the church. If God is sovereign…then we must acknowledge that it pleased God to bring Africans to the land of America. It pleased him to use the hands and wills of sinful men to do so…Yet even though God ordained that Africans be brought to America in the hollow of slave ships this in no way absolves the Euro-American establishment of their responsibility for those horrors and subsequent degrading atrocities.[31]

He knows that some will ask, “Did this providence of God have to be worked out on the bruised and battered backs of African men and women? Did they have to bear the brunt of his bitter rod, that his purposes be revealed?”, and replies, “Who could know why God’s providence had to be so bitter? Who could venture to explain God’s ways of infinite knowledge, unsearchable wisdom, and unfathomable mercy?”[32]

III. National Sin and Judgement

John Coffey refers to “the intense providentialism of the early British abolitionists”.[33] When one turns to “abolitionist texts…here one finds an insistent testimony to human fear of divine wrath”.[34] He suggests we should understand this as a judicial providentialism – the belief that God rewarded or punished nations according to their moral character and actions. He says that this was held by a very wide range of theological positions, yet “Evangelicals held these common biblical convictions with a peculiar intensity”.[35]

A profoundly significant aspect of the Christian response to slavery and the slave trade was the way in which they applied the Bible to make sense of how slavery had been present and often unchallenged by the church for many years. Paul’s sermon to the Greeks at Athens was a central passage. That God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17.26) was often quoted, and verse 30 – “the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent” – was central to how they interpreted their times.

We have noticed how Edwards appealed to the same verse, as did John Newton, saying, “What I did, I did ignorantly.” We find the same appeal in George Bourne (1780–1845), an English-born American century abolitionist Presbyterian minister, in his 1816 work The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable.[36] However, the Particular Baptists applied it in a distinctive way, arguing that in effect God had “winked at” Christians during the years of the Gospel age when they had not understood or appreciated the evils of slavery. They used this argument to give urgency to the challenge of slavery in their own immediate times.[37] Once accepting that they no longer lived in the times of ignorance the implications appeared clear. Slavery was a sin – a national sin – and to continue in such sin would incur God’s judgement. Convinced as they were that Britain was at risk of so continuing, national repentance was called for and acts consistent with repentance.[38]

Wilberforce returned to the point year after year. In his celebrated 1789 speech, he began with a statement of collective guilt (“we are all guilty”). “In April 1791, he brought his three-hour speech to a climax by warning Parliament not to forget ‘the bounty of Providence’ or the ‘day of retribution’, and vowing ‘Never, never will we desist till we have … released ourselves from the load of guilt’”.[39] Newton wrote to Wilberforce in 1804,

Though I can scarcely see the paper before me, I must attempt to express my thankfulness to the Lord, and to offer my congratulations to you for the success which he has so far been pleased to give to your unwearied endeavours for the abolition of the slave trade, which I have considered as a millstone, of itself sufficient, to sink such an enlightened and highly favoured nation as ours to the bottom of the sea.[40]

McLeod, writing in America around the same time, linked the matter to God’s judgement:

O America, what hast thou to account for on the head of slavery!… Thou hast made provision for increasing the number and continuing the bondage of thy slaves. Thy judgments may tarry, but they will assuredly come… Even real Christians, the guilt of whose sins is removed through the atonement of Jesus, but who have learned the way of the heathen so far as to confirm to the wicked practice of buying, selling and retaining slaves, have a right to expect severe corrections.[41]

Perhaps we find the clearest account of national sins and national judgement in the sermons of Charles Spurgeon.[42] To give but two examples from 1866 and 1859:

I am not among those, as you know, who believe that every affliction is a judgment upon the particular person to whom it occurs… but we do nevertheless very firmly believe that there are national judgments, and that national sins provoke national chastisements. As to individuals, their punishment or reward is reserved for the next state; but nations will not exist in the next world: there is no such thing as a judgment of nations, as such, at the last great day; that will be the judgment of individuals one by one. The trial and punishment of nations takes place in this state, and it is here that we are to look for the judgment of God upon national sin.[43]

There is a weighing time for kings and emperors… For nations there is a weighing time. National sins demand national punishments… The guilt they incur must receive its awful recompense in this present time state… So likewise, shall it be with the nations that now abide on the face of the earth. There is no God in heaven if the iniquity of slavery go unpunished. There is no God existing in heaven above if the cry of the negro do not bring down a red hail of blood upon the nation that still holds the black man in slavery.[44]

Warning again of such judgement in a sermon in March 1881 on “Jesus at a Stand” (Mark 10.49), he says:

I have feared and trembled for my country of late lest the Lord Jesus should depart from it and take away the candlestick out of its place. More than two hundred years ago George Herbert said, when he looked upon the declining state of godliness in England, Religion stands a-tiptoe in our land… Ready to pass to the American strand…[45]

At times our Lord, as judge among the nations, arises to visit the sins of a people upon them. Patience makes room for justice, and Providence determines that guilty nations shall be scourged… No man can read our history without perceiving that among guilty nations we hold a sorrowful place; for we have had more light than any other people and have sinned against it full often.[46]

Spurgeon was taking an argument that the Particular Baptists had used. For example, John Beatson believed that nations and empires have presence only in this world, and hence “such collective bodies of men must, in their national capacity, either be punished in this world or not at all”.[47] Robinson likewise said, “The sins of individuals are not punished here, for this to them is only a state of trial: but collective bodies submit here in a state of rewards and punishments, and if there be such a thing as national sin, that is it, assuredly, which the legislature makes its own. I fear, I fear, the African slave trade is of this kind”.[48] Dore also said that they would “learn that national crimes are productive of national judgement”.[49] Beatson felt this perhaps more strongly than any of his contemporaries. He asked, what if “instead of making any reparation…the nation that was guilty reduced the whole to system, and regulated it by law”, they should have every reason to expect God’s punishment. Quoting from Jeremiah (50.33), that Babylon “took them captives, held them fast; they refused to let them go”,[50] he asks if Britain has not acted very much like Babylon.

IV. Slavery and Gospel Prosperity

A further theme in the theological position of some who spoke and acted against slavery and the slave trade was to counter the arguments of those who saw slavery as a means of bringing people under the sound and influence of the gospel. Samuel Sewall had resisted it in the following way, taking the selling of Joseph by his brothers as his text: “Evil must not be done, that good may come of it. The extraordinary and comprehensive Benefit accruing to the Church of God, and to Joseph personally, did not rectify his brethren’s Sale of him.”[51] Baxter, referring to the way slaves were treated, asked, “Doth not the very example of such cruelty… directly tend to teach them to hate Christianity, as if it taught men to be so much worse than dogs, or tigers?”[52] We saw how John Eliot also was forceful, when saying, “It seemeth to me that to sell them away for slaves is to hinder the enlargement of his kingdom.”[53]

But it was among the Particular Baptists that the strongest case would be made.[54] Carey recorded how the freeing of slaves “may prove the happy means of introducing amongst them the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ”.[55] Yet in so doing, those who take the gospel “must be very careful not to resent injuries which may be offered to them, nor to think highly of themselves, so as to despise the poor heathens, and by those means lay a foundation for their resentment, or rejection of the gospel”.[56]

John Dore insisted, that “the slave trade works against the fulfilment of gospel promises… Is it probable that the poor Negro will cordially embrace Christianity while they view it in such a horrid light in the lives of professed Christians? … What ideas must the Negroes form of that system of religion which, they naturally suppose, tolerates barbarity?”.[57] Beatson, in closing his message, linked it to the prosperity of the Gospel:

Can the Gospel be recommended to the attention of men, while you are thus buying and selling them as though they were brutes? To be depriving a people of their natural liberty, and at the same time preaching to them of spiritual liberty, would appear such gross hypocrisy… If ever then you mean to spread the Gospel of peace, wipe off this stain of infamy from the Christian name.[58]

John Liddon spoke of how the trade “prevents the introduction of Christianity into Africa, and naturally must excite strong prejudices against it amongst a people who have no idea of that strange distinction we are often obliged to make between the principles of Christianity, and the conduct of those who call themselves Christians”.[59] He later says, “if they judge the Christian religion by the conduct of those who call themselves Christians, and who are their oppressors, they must suppose it to be of all others the worst religion, to justify such enormities”.[60] Even if the Christian faith is taught by consistent Christians, and yet rejected, that does not justify action against such people. “The only arms (Christ) ever authorised his disciples to use were wisdom and innocence”.[61] “(N)either the missionary societies nor their individual agents set out with the intention of challenging the structures of colonial society”.[62] Most took the at least initial position that “the gospel would so ameliorate the condition of the slaves that slavery would ultimately wither away”.[63] But the realities of the field forced many to take more or less explicitly political stances. This was increasingly illustrated in the life of William Knibb, the Baptist missionary in Jamaica. Addressing the committee of the Baptist mission in 1832, he said “I daily and hourly feel … that the questions of colonial slavery and of missions are now inseparably connected; that British Christians must either join with me in an attempt to break the chain with which the African is bound, or leave the work of mercy and the triumphs of the Redeemer unfinished”

He insists on the connection and takes an immediatist position:

Feeling… as I do, that the African and the creole slave will never again enjoy the blessings of religious instruction, or hear of the benefits of that gospel which Christ has commanded to be preached among all nations, and which he has so eminently blessed in Jamaica, unless slavery be overthrown, I now stand forward as the unflinching and undaunted advocate of immediate emancipation.[64]

The hopefulness of the Particular Baptists was captured in John Rippon’s composition “A Song in Prospect of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” written for a sermon on Psalm 68:31 on March 27, 1807. It included one stanza:

The day has dawned, Jehovah comes
To crush oppression’s rod;
Now Ethiopia soon shall stretch
Her hands to thee, O God![65]

Present challenges

The challenges this history of the theologies adopted by those who opposed, or sometimes supported, slavery lie outside this article. I have tried a preliminary consideration of the present challenges raised by this question in a presentation at Westminster Seminary, UK.[66] They include:

1. 1. Can we gain lessons from the history of slavery regarding the involvement of Christians/churches – as Christians and as churches – in political-level interventions?
2. 2. How may Christians keep close to God while being publicly involved? 
3. 3. What position should Christians take on questions of reparations – Christians and restorative justice?
4. 4. How and what should Christians take care to remember?
5. 5. What lessons should we learn when Christians disagree?
6. 6. How should we understand and respond to instances in history when Christians fall short?
7. 7. How should we approach and apply the bible’s teaching on slavery? I mentioned in the first article that I have not addressed the exegetical questions, except insofar as they were understood and spoken to by those who figure in the articles. The endeavours of writers such as John Murray (1957) on the ordinance of labour and his Appendix D, “The Presbyterian Church in the USA and Slavery”; the commentaries of George Knight III on the Pastoral Epistles; and the discussions by Douglas Kelly (1985), are helpful, yet also illustrate the difficulties sometimes encountered in this area.[67] One of the most significant efforts to understand the teaching of Scripture was made more than 200 years ago, by Alexander McLeod (1802).[68] An important recent contribution to how Scripture was understood by the Presbyterian church in 19^th century America has been made by Alan Strange (Strange, 2024).[69]

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Footnotes:

[1] Michael Haykin, “’To promote…cordial affection for our neighbor’: Abraham Booth and his sermon against the slave trade and slavery.” in Michael A.G. Haykin with Victoria J. Haykin, eds., “The First Counsellor of Our Denomination”: Studies on the Life and Ministry of Abraham Booth (1734–1806) (Springfield, Missouri: Particular Baptist Press, 2011), 80–102.

[2] M. E. Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives: Particular Baptist Sermons on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Privately Published: 2021).

[3] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 53.

[4] M. E. Roe, ed., Let the Oppressed Go Free: Robert Hawker on the Slave Trade and Slavery. (Southampton: The Huntingtonian Press, 2021), 34-35.

[5] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 88. I have not addressed the complex question of whether and in what ways The Enlightenment shaped, knowingly or unknowingly, the thinking of Christians campaigning against slavery. Dabney, Thornwell, and those who shared his thinking, appeared to have seen a close intertwining, and one that was wholly inimical to a Christian position. Thornwell held the conviction that ‘Opposition to Slavery has never been the offspring of the Bible. It has sprung from visionary theories of human nature and society; it has sprung from the misguided reason of man; it comes as natural, not as revealed truth’, (James Henley Thornwell, “Report on Slavery” Southern Presbyterian Review 3 (January 1852), 390-1)and we have seen Dabney’s view that the Abolitionist agenda was of rationalistic origin. However, care is needed in drawing any direct line from the Particular Baptists’ preaching of the 1790s to Southern states theology seventy years later.

[6] He cites Proverbs 22:2, Malachi 2:10, and 1 Peter 3:8.

[7] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 83.

[8] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 83-84.

[9] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 71.

[10] House of Commons, Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 73 (Scholarly Resources, 1975), 140.

[11] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 178. The reference is to Acts 17:26.

[12] This, for today, offensive term was much used in the Southern States to describe persons of mixed white and black ancestry, especially a person with one white and one black parent. Analogous to how ‘Eurasian’ is used now in parts of Asia.

[13] Abraham Booth, “American Slavery” The Baptist Magazine 1839 Volume 31 (Series 4, Volume 2), 528.

[14] William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. In Which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are Considered (Leicester, 1794), 63-4. This argument was not new-born in the late 18^th Century. We saw previously that Cotton Mather wrote to similar effect when he said, ‘It has been cavilled, by some, that it is questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational Souls, or no. But let that Brutish insinuation be never Whispered any more.’ We noted also that Samuel Rutherford referred to ‘nature’s law’ when he insisted, ‘A man being created according to God’s image, he is res sacra, a sacred thing, and can no more, by nature’s law, be sold and bought, than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God.’ Richard Baxter, we have seen, wrote, ‘they are of as good a kind as you, that is, they are reasonable creatures as well as you, and born to as much natural liberty’, applying, ‘how cursed a crime it is to equal men to beasts!’ We have quoted Sewall, in 1700, writing, ‘It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life.’ 

[15] Poetry was a powerful voice in both the UK and USA. A helpful volume which provides a magisterial collection of such poetry, with 400 titles from more than 250 different writers is J. G. Basker, Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). In addition to Cowper and Montgomery, we should mention the Puritan, Michael Wigglesworth  1631-1705, Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley 1753?-1784 (‘In the context of slavery in English literature, Wheatley is the most important figure of the eighteenth century’, Basker, Amazing Grace, 170), the ‘pious Bostonian, Jane Dunlap (fl. 1765-1771), Lemuel Haynes, Hannah More (1745-1833), Olaudah Equiano (c 1745-1797) and Timothy Dwight  (1752-1817). Even B. B. Warfield tried his hand, with the ironic short piece, ‘Wanted: a Samaritan.’ The life and coming to faith of Olaudah Equiano can be read in Taylor (1999), e.g. Chapter 10.

[16] John Newton, The Posthumous Works of the Late Rev. John Newton, Volume 2 (London: W.W. Woodward, 1809), 240.

[17] John Newton, Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (London, Buckland and Johnson, 1788), 31.

[18] House of Commons, Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 73, 140.

[19] House of Commons, Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 73, 140.

[20] J. Bull, The Life of John Newton (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2007), 47.

[21] John Calvin, “Prefatory Letter to Francis I” in Institutes of the Christian Religion (Trans. Robert White; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2014), xxviii.

[22] M. McMullen, William Wilberforce: His Unpublished Spiritual Journals (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2021), 52.

[23] McMullen, William Wilberforce, 214.

[24] McMullen, William Wilberforce, 327.

[25] McMullen, William Wilberforce, 319.

[26] Douglas Kelly, “Robert Louis Dabney” in David Wells, ed., Reformed Theology in America: A History of its Modern Development (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1985), 214, 226.

[27] Calvin, Institutes,499.

[28] Calvin, Institutes,502.

[29] Calvin, Institutes,503.

[30] Calvin, Institutes,503.

[31] A. J. Carter, Black and Reformed: Seeing God’s Sovereignty in the African-American Christian Experience  (New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2016), 103-4.

[32] Carter, Black and Reformed, 110.

[33] J. Coffey, “’Tremble, Britannia!’: Fear, Providence and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1758–1807” English Historical Review Vol. 127. No. 527, 845.

[34] Coffey, “Tremble, Britannia!”, 845.

[35] J. Coffey, Difficult histories: Christian memory and historic injustice: Cambridge Papers, 29 (4) (Cambridge: Jubilee centre, 2020), 108.

[36] Bourne was known for his unyielding stance that may not have made easy allies. E.g. ‘Slavery is the Golden Calf…the Balaam, …the Achan…the Delilah…the Bathsheba…the thirty pieces of silver…that love of the present world, for which Demas forsook the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship’, and ‘slavery must be the acme of all impiety; consequently, it is impossible that a Slave-holder can be a sincere Christian’ (G. Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (Philadelphia: J M Sanderson and Co 1816), 19, 53). He happily endorsed the saying that ‘a rough truth is better than a smooth falsehood’ (p. 7). The slavery debates in the successive General Assemblies of the Presbyterian church over this period and later are traced in A. D. Strange, Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, and the Spiritual Mission of the Church (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024).

[37] Jonathan Edwards, Jun and others in America also applied the verse in this way, and it is probable that the Particular Baptists were aware of this.

[38] John Wesley also warned of God’s judgement, but of the individual. He addresses slave owners,

‘Is there a GOD? You know there is. Is He a Just GOD? Then there must be a state of Retribution A state wherein the Just GOD will reward every man according to his works. Then what reward will he render to You? O think betimes! Before you drop into eternity!’ (J. Wesley,. Thoughts Upon Slavery (Dublin, 1775).)

[39] Coffey, “Tremble, Britannia!”, 862.

[40] Newton’s position on this matter was not entirely constant. Ten years before he wrote this letter, and speaking in the context of an expected invasion of Britain by France, he preached a sermon on ‘The Imminent Danger and the Only Sure Resource of this Nation’, February 28, 1794, the day appointed for the national fast, in which he said of the African slave-trade, ‘I do not rank this among our national sins, because I hope, and believe, a very great majority of the nation earnestly long for its suppression.’

[41] A. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable: a Discourse (New York: T & J Swords, 1802), 19-20.

[42] For just three examples see his sermons on ‘The Voice of Cholera’ in August 1866 (https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-voice-of-the-cholera), ‘The Scales of Judgement’ in June 1859 (https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-scales-of-judgment)and in March 1881 on ‘Jesus at a Stand’ (https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/jesus-at-a-stand-2). These sermons can be accessed online at http://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/ (Accessed 13^th January 2025).

[43] Spurgeon, ‘The Voice of Cholera’.

[44] Spurgeon, ‘The Scales of Judgement’.

[45] Spurgeon is quoting from the poem ‘Religion Westwards Bent’, by George Herbert (1593-1633).

[46] Spurgeon, ‘Jesus at a Stand’.

[47] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 124-5.

[48] Robert Robinson, ‘Slavery inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity.’ A sermon preached at Cambridge, On Sunday, Feb. 10, 1788 (Cambridge: Printed by J. Archdeacon Printer to the University, 1788), 20.

[49] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 77.

[50] He suggests Jeremiah 50 and 51 ‘merit perusal.’

[51] Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston: printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700), 3.

[52] Richard Baxter, Baxter’s directions to slave-holders, revived; first printed in London, in the year 1673 (Philadelphia: Printed by Francis Bailey, at Yorick’s Head, in Market-Street, 1785), 5.

[53] John Eliot, “Letter from John Eliot Protesting against Selling Indians as Slaves,” n.p. [cited 28 June 2024]. Online: https://nativenewenglandportal.com/node/18119.

[54] In this connection, Coffey quotes Drescher saying, ‘the take-off of British abolitionism coincided almost exactly with the revival of the British missionary movement’ (Coffey, Difficult histories, 105).

[55] Carey, An Enquiry,79-80.

[56] Carey, An Enquiry,75.

[57] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 90. I have not addressed the question of whether preaching about slavery was, as some suggested, bringing ‘politics’ into the pulpit. The Particular Baptists offered a defence of their approach, though others were careful to deal with slavery on days other than Sunday. Roe discusses their approach in the preface to his book (Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives). Barnes expresses a position that may be thought helpful. Slavery ‘should be introduced into the pulpit, not in its political aspect, but in its bearings on religion, as one of the causes which hinder the progress and triumph of Christianity in the world; and in the same way it should be approached in our religious literature… (I)n this respect it should have a place, just as anything else has that hinders the progress of the gospel of Christ’ (A. Barnes, The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1857), 156).

[58] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 134-5.

[59] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 189.

[60] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 197. The behaviour of slave holders who professed a Christian faith acutely embittered Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous freed slave of the 19^th century. He wrote ‘Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.’ (F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself (London: H.G. Collins, 1851), 71).

[61] Roe, ed., Preaching Deliverance to the Captives, 197.

[62] B. Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1990), 90.

[63] Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, 90.

[64] J. H. Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb: Missionary in Jamaica (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1849; repr., Forgotten Books, 2018), 147.

[65] The stance taken in the 18^th century often was linked to apparently millennial hopes for the future of the Gospel. I have not explored this beyond the implications within the material quoted. Carey, in his characteristically contemporary way, links this to technological progress in his day, such as the invention of the mariners’ compass (Carey, An Enquiry, 67), though he emphasises that even ‘the longest intercourse with Europeans’ by itself would never achieve ‘happy effects’ for the gospel (Carey, An Enquiry, 68).

[66] Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FEwjhqSGj4 [Cited 13^th January 2025].

[67] J. Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957); G. W. Knight, The Pastoral Epistles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); Douglas Kelly, “Robert Louis Dabney” in David Wells, ed., Reformed Theology in America.

[68] McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable.

[69] Strange, Empowered Witness.