How Christians Ended Slavery
Christians awoke to the fact that no race deserved to be enslaved. No race had the right to enslave. Were some Christians slow to join the revolution? Regrettably. Did others even actively resist it? Tragically. But that’s not the miracle. That’s humanity’s standard operating procedure. The miracle was that some people, namely Christians—serious, devout Christians, most of them with their roots deep in the Puritan movement—ended slavery. To them, the world owes an immense debt.
One side of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s collection box, quoting 1 Corinthians 16:1. Circa 1850. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Nobel laureate Robert Fogel, during an after-class chat, told me that he was astounded to discover that Christians ended slavery. He said something along the lines of, “I was a professor in some of America’s top universities, and I had no idea that Christians had” ended slavery. Fogel discovered that it was not economic forces that led to the abolition of slavery but a revolution in morality rooted in Christianity.[1]
“Christians ended slavery.” This statement has been met with offense by some Christian professors, as if it were the propagandistic ravings of a fundamentalist homeschool student or the mock-worthy bombast of a conservative simpleton. But it was the considered conclusion of a Nobel laureate, arguably the foremost expert on American slavery.
Documented data drove Professor Fogel. He pioneered a historical approach known as cliometrics that relied on quantifiable evidence. Cliometricians sought concrete information, like government records or the business ledgers of plantations, not merely the biased accounts of abolitionists or the anecdotal observations of random observers. For example, to ascertain how strong slave families were, a traditional historian would look to Fanny Kemble’s (1809–1893) journals. Fogel would consult such sources for the color they provide but would base his economic conclusions on concrete data about slave households. Not that Fogel dismissed literary evidence. He wrote, “The worst of all errors is to assume that either literary evidence by itself or quantitative evidence by itself is sufficient.”[2] But quantifiable data—like business ledgers and government statistics—was the skeleton. Literary evidence was the dressing.
The Data on Slavery
Fogel’s bean-counting approach revealed that plantations, with their division of labor through a “gang system,” gave slave-based agriculture an assembly-line-like efficiency. Hence, Southern slavery was fantastically profitable. Initially, he calculated that Southern slavery was 35 percent more efficient than free Northern farms, despite the generally superior soil in the North. When critics attacked this, he garnered more data, recalculated, and confessed that he had erred earlier. Actually, Southern Plantations were 36 percent more efficient! Fueled by slavery, from 1840 to 1860, Southern per capita income grew at 1.7 percent, while the North’s was growing at 1.4 percent.
Further, and even more controversially, the superior efficiency of Southern slavery allowed slaves to have some material advantages over free, white farmers. Slaves worked about 10 percent fewer hours per week than Northern farmers. By 1860, slaves consumed an average of 4,200 calories per day, with a higher meat consumption than 1873 Massachusetts textile workers. Adult male slaves had a higher BMI (body mass index) than white males and identical rates of morbidity.[3] However, slaves had double the rate of infant mortality. Although not good by modern standards, the material conditions of slaves compared favorably with those of free workers. For example, families were usually kept together; most slave sales were either of entire families or of individuals who were at an age when leaving the family was typical. Eighty-four percent of slaves moving west moved as part of an entire plantation.
“Economic forces alone would not have brought an end to slavery. Indeed, if the Civil War had not broken out when it did, if the South had another decade or two to develop, it could have been unconquerable.“
While both rewards and punishments were used to encourage work, the stereotypical horror of masters routinely whipping slaves was less common than usually believed. Nearly 50 percent of all slaves were never whipped. Unlike the picture in Gone with the Wind of the indolent plantation owner, aloof from the practical functions of his business, delegating it all to a cruel “overseer,” most plantations did not have hired managers. Even in the largest plantations, only an average of 30 percent of plantations employed managers. Usually, the owners managed the plantations themselves, working directly with “slave drivers,” capable slaves who were trusted. The owners were capitalists.
With these findings, Fogel concluded that slavery was not a system irrationally sustained by plantation owners who were indifferent to their best economic interests. Slave owners were profit-maximizers who generally understood that caring for the basic physical and psychological needs of the slaves was in their self-interests. Hence, businessmen in the South were already experimenting with marrying slavery to industrialization. Slave factory workers compared favorably with free workers in efficiency. Southerners could have and likely would have adapted slavery on a large scale for a slave-based industrial revolution. This fact is contrary to the expectation, even of the early nineteenth century, that slavery would whither because of its supposed inefficiencies. Northerners, even as late as the 1840s, especially Whigs like Abraham Lincoln, assumed that Southern slavery could not compete with Northern wage labor. “If legalized slavery was confined to the Southern states [. . .] Whigs had only to wait for economic asphyxiation to solve the problem of slavery.”[4] That was fundamentally mistaken. Slavery was thriving by the mid-nineteenth century. Hence, crucially, slavery was not in economic decline on the eve of the Civil War. Economic forces alone would not have brought an end to slavery. Indeed, if the Civil War had not broken out when it did, if the South had another decade or two to develop, it could have been unconquerable.
The Necessary War
Some of my fellow Southerners—I’m a true son of Confederate veterans—claim that even if economics hadn’t doomed slavery, politics would have; that Southerners would have peacefully turned against slavery and abolished it at the ballot box, and so the enormous costs in blood and treasure to end slavery by 1865 could have been spared if only a little more time had been given; that Lincoln needlessly started the war when slavery would have wilted on the political vine. This is fantasy. The objective fact is that Lincoln was a moderate on slavery who sought only to constrain it to states where it already existed and we Southerners were such hotheads we couldn’t tolerate even that potential limitation on “the peculiar institution” and so reacted violently, starting a war to protect slavery by firing, unprovoked, on a US army base on April 12, 1861. Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, described explicitly what the South was fighting for in his shameless “Cornerstone” speech (March 21, 1861). He noted that the founders, like Jefferson, assumed “that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution [of slavery] would be evanescent and pass away.” Stephens said they were “fundamentally wrong” because “they rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” which he rejects as “a sandy foundation.” Slavery and the “assumption of the equality of the races,” Stephens’ insisted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” (i.e., the insurrection of racist enslavers). That the South was willing to fight for slavery, as they admitted themselves in secession statements, and maintained racial suppression for nearly a century after the Civil War, into my lifetime—I shook hands with George Wallace who proclaimed in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”—suggests that slavery would not have ended politically either. It was not going away without a fight. Hence, the Civil War was necessary to abolish slavery.
Therefore, if slavery was so profitable, how did it end? We know it ended immediately because of the war, but how did America get to the position in which a moderately anti-slavery candidate could win a presidential election, thus setting off the chain of events that brought down the institution? The working assumption of many economists is Darwinian economic survival of the fittest. The most productive practices survive and thrive. But race-based American slavery was economically efficient and yet it was destroyed. Why? Why didn’t Northern farmers incline toward it, or Northern factories prefer free labor? Slavery’s demise was never inevitable.
The End of Slavery
Fogel, himself a confessed “secular Jew,” found one group responsible: Christians. He even wrote a book, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, in which he predicted that American evangelicals would continue to push moral progress forward. I read a draft of that book as his student at the University of Chicago. I wrote a paper arguing that he was wrong, that evangelicals had lost something of the holistic, prophetic spirituality that had characterized the Puritans who eventually planted the seeds of abolitionism.[5] He called me into his office and plied me with questions. I did not change his mind, but he hired me as his teaching assistant the next year when he tasked me with the lecture about slavery.
Slavery was ascendant. It wasn’t stopped by the “arc of history” bending inevitably toward justice. It was stopped by Christians. Though economically efficient, Christian abolitionists objected that slavery was evil because it was based on the God-like domination of one group of people over another, Without Consent or Contract. No amount of pragmatics excuses that. Slavery was, for Fogel, a Time on the Cross. Slavery may have worked in this world, but Christians belonged to another and so brought their other-worldly ethics to bear on history.
Slavery was a default feature of society, a normality throughout human history, even in America at its founding. Each of the original thirteen states was originally a slave state. This changed as Christians increasingly agreed and vociferously proclaimed that slavery was evil. It was primarily Christian abolitionists who transformed what had been a nearly total slaveholding country into a house divided. Only those who looked beyond “what works” and the status quo for millennia could move society to aspire to the ideals of universal freedom that a transcendent source of authority beckoned them to. That vision, that transcendent authority, is found in Christianity. To be precise, it was Puritanism that propelled Puritans across the Atlantic, caused them to flourish in New England, provided the tinder for the Great Awakening, and produced a culture and a movement of churches that would inspire the abolitionist cause.
While the Puritan quasi-theocracy dissolved from the Glorious Revolution (1689) to the American one (1776), Puritan values were spread further and deeper into American culture by what George Marsden calls “culturally aggressive New England Yankees,” namely, Puritans. Both Fogel and Marsden sketch a confluence of movements in the first half of the nineteenth century in which Northern Protestants eventually coalesced, joining Northern Baptists and Methodists in the new Republican Party. “The result,” says Marsden, “was that the Republican party had a strong Puritan-evangelical component.”[6] It was bent on molding society according to Christian principles, with the abolition of slavery being its primary goal. The war that became necessary to achieve that goal is largely responsible for forging the American identity as a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as it sees itself today.
While working for Professor Fogel, I heard vaguely about those who abused his findings to justify slavery. As his on-staff evangelical, I didn’t dream any of those abusers would be evangelicals. But since then, I’ve encountered them. I told one author who used Fogel’s findings to paint an idyllic, Gone-With-the-Windesque picture of Southern slavery that if he had written such for me, I would have failed him. Using Fogel’s findings to claim that slavery was a net ethical good entirely misses the point of Fogel’s findings. Fogel found that slavery was evil not because it underfed, or constantly abused, or raped, or mutilated, or deprived its victims of family life, a future, and property. It was evil because exercising God-like dominion over other human beings is evil; depriving them of the rewards of their labor or of their choices in how to invest their lives is theft, a violation of the eighth commandment. Terrorizing them with the threat of harsh lashings or, even, potential summary execution, even if rarely practiced, was dehumanizing. Forcing them to live at the arbitrary whims of another man was cruel. That their material lives were not as scarce as commonly believed does not mitigate slavery. Indeed, it highlights that the main error was spiritual, not economic.
Fogel’s work on slavery demonstrated that economics did not kill the peculiar institution—Christians did, particularly in the USA, where the spiritual descendants of the Puritans played a central role. They achieved this through a revival of Puritanism known as the “Great Awakening,” which inspired evangelical expansion through nineteenth-century America, sowing the seeds of abolitionism along with the Gospel.
We have to admit, as our critics are quick to remind us, that there were professed Christians who defended slavery to the end. Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898), an otherwise orthodox Presbyterian theologian, wrote a defense of slavery so robust that Confederates were embarrassed by it. There is no excuse for such complicity with the peculiar institution so late in history when it was on the cusp of destruction. Over a century earlier, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) owned up to four slaves. That is regrettable, but he did so in the mid-eighteenth century, before the rise of the abolition movement and before universal emancipation was possible.
When critiquing a Christian’s stance on slavery, we have to ask where in the context of emerging abolitionism they were and how they helped or hindered its ascent. We can wish that Edwards had been ahead of his time, but he was too early in history (still at a time when Europeans came to America as indentured servants—appearing, superficially, to be in a similar position as African slaves), to see what race-based, perpetual slavery (largely derived from “man-stealing”) was. We wish Edwards was as prescient about slavery as he was theologically. But Edwards’s theology contained the seeds of emancipation. We see that in the fact that his disciple, Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), and his son, Jonathan Edwards (1745–1801) the younger, were both pioneers of the abolition movement.[7] His “New Divinity” was largely committed to abolition.
Slavery was the status quo. The conservative temperament reflexively defends the status quo. Then, a bolt from the blue struck: abolition. From whence? Professor Fogel proved that it was not inevitable. It came from Christians reading a Bible, which told them of a Jesus who said, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
Christians awoke to the fact that no race deserved to be enslaved. No race had the right to enslave. Were some Christians slow to join the revolution? Regrettably. Did others even actively resist it? Tragically. But that’s not the miracle. That’s humanity’s standard operating procedure. The miracle was that some people, namely Christians—serious, devout Christians, most of them with their roots deep in the Puritan movement—ended slavery. To them, the world owes an immense debt.
Endnotes
[1] For more on Professor Fogel and his findings, see “A Secular Jew Makes a Surprising Discovery About Christians and American Slavery,” Acton Commentary, April 17, 2019.
[2] Robert W. Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? (Yale University Press, 1984), 48.
[3] This is confirmed by Richard Sutch, The Care and Feeding of Slaves (Oxford University Press, 1976).
[4] Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans, 1999), 131.
[5] That paper was eventually developed into an article published as “The Fourth Great Awakening or Apostasy?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 4 (December 2001).
[6] George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1991), 89.
[7] John B. Carpenter, “7 Christian Men or Movements Who Helped End Slavery in America,” The Christian Post, June 19, 2023.
