As Baptists spread throughout the American South in the early nineteenth century, so did slavery. Some white Baptists in the Revolutionary era had condemned Christian slave owning, but over time most white Baptists in the South made peace with the institution, whether they owned slaves or not. This trend accelerated as Baptists helped fashion a new kind of cultural and religious establishment, especially in the southern states of the Atlantic seaboard, and many Baptist elites came to own slaves. Yet the issue of human bondage festered as the small but boisterous antislavery movement won over
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