Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

Because they were evangelicals, the Baptists’ antislavery argument had to hinge upon Scripture. But antislavery activists had difficulty with a literal reading of the Bible, which seemed to tacitly accept the existence of slavery—at least in the forms that existed in ancient Israel and the Roman Empire of Jesus’s time. Slavery’s defenders often noted that the Bible never explicitly condemned slavery. Jesus was silent on the matter. Galusha explained this reticence by suggesting that the disciples were “too busy” with other pressing matters to address every conceivable sin. The Savior, likewise, had never “witnessed a scene of slavery . . . the chained coffle,- the naked gang of the cotton field,- the exposed female reeking under the lash,- the child torn forever from its mother’s breaking heart,—these, and worse acts of slavery’s tragedy, were not performed, so far as history, before the face of Jesus.” Human bondage was a modern crime to which Scripture did not speak directly, but one could intuit from Christ’s teachings and character that he would have deplored American slavery. Although Galusha and the antislavery evangelicals were as eager as proslavery Christians to cite Scripture, they indirectly acknowledged that the letter of Scripture alone did not supply a definitive word on slavery “in the abstract.”