Since many white evangelicals derived (or hoped to derive) their economic welfare from black labor, they were unwilling to eliminate slavery, either. The middle course that Virginia whites chose, a massive state-sanctioned and privately funded effort to organize enslaved evangelicals into faith communities where they could be supervised by whites, largely replaced colonization. In simpler terms, control replaced stewardship. Turner thus failed to free the state's blacks, but he successfully chained whites-at least white evangelicals-to a
program of slave missions and to the conviction that
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