Slavery Ordained of God

by F. A. Ross

This, sir, is the second result you have gained by your agitation. You have brought a thousand Northern ministers of the gospel, with yourself, to the verge of the same denial of the word of God which they have made, who are only a little ahead of you in the road you are travelling.

A Third Result of Agitation.

3. Meanwhile, many of your most pious men, soundest scholars, and sagacious observers of providence, have been led to study the Bible more faithfully in the light of the times. And they are reading it more and more in harmony with the views which have been reached by the highest Southern minds, to wit:--That the relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible;--that it is a relation belonging to the same category as those of husband and wife, parent and child, master and apprentice, master and hireling;--that the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were ordained in Eden for man, as man, and modified after the fall, while the relation of slavery, as a system of labor, is only one form of the government ordained of God over fallen and degraded man;--that the evils in the system are the same evils of OPPRESSION we see in the relation of husband and wife, and all other forms of government;--that slavery, as a relation, suited to the more degraded or the more ignorant and helpless types of a sunken humanity, is, like all government, intended as the proof of the curse of such degradation, and at the same time to elevate and bless;--that the relation of husband and wife, being for man, as man, will ever be over him, while slavery will remain so long as God sees it best, as a controlling power over the ignorant, the more degraded and helpless;--and that, when he sees it for the good of the country, he will cause it to pass away, if the slave can be elevated to liberty and equality, political and social, with his master, in that country; or out of that country, if such elevation cannot be given therein, but may be realized in some other land: all which result must be left to the unfoldings of the divine will, in harmony with the Bible, and not to a newly-discovered dispensation. These facts are vindicated in the Bible and Providence. In the Old Testament, they stare you in the face:--in the family of Abraham,--in his slaves, bought with his money and born in his house,--in Hagar, running away under her mistress's hard dealing with her, and yet sent back, as a fugitive slave, by the angel,--in the law which authorized the Hebrews to hold their brethren as slaves for a time,--in which parents might sell their children into bondage,--in which the heathen were given to the Hebrews as their slaves forever,--in which slaves were considered so much the money of their master, that the master who killed one by an unguarded blow was, under certain circumstances, sufficiently punished in his slave's death, because he thereby lost his money,--in which the difference between man-stealing and slave-holding is, by law, set forth,--in which the runaway from heathen masters may not be restored, because God gave him the benefits of an adopted Hebrew. In the New Testament:--wherein the slavery of Greece and Rome was recognised,--in the obligations laid on master and slave,--in the close connection of this obligation with the duties of husband and wife, parent and child,--in the obligation to return the fugitive slave to his master,--and in the condemnation of every abolition principle, "AS DESTITUTE OF THE TRUTH." (1 Tim. vi. 1-5.)

This view of slavery is becoming more and more, not only the settled decision of the Southern but of the best Northern mind, with a movement so strong that you have been startled by it to write the pamphlet now lying before me.

This is the third result you have secured:--to make many of the best men in the North see the infidelity of your philosophy, falsely so called, on the subject of slavery, in the clearer and clearer light of the Scriptures.

Another Result of Agitation.

4. The Southern slave-holder is now satisfied, as never before, that the relation of master and slave is sanctioned by the Bible; and he feels, as never before, the obligations of the word of God. He no longer, in his ignorance of the Scriptures, and afraid of its teachings, will seek to defend his common-sense opinions of slavery by arguments drawn from "Types of Mankind," and other infidel theories; but he will look, in the light of the Bible, on all the good and evil in the system. And when the North, as it will, shall regard him holding from God this high power for great good,--when the North shall no more curse, but bid him God-speed,--then he will bless himself and his slave, in nobler benevolence. With no false ideas of created equality and unalienable right, but with the Bible in his heart and hand, he will do justice and love mercy in higher and higher rule. Every evil will be removed, and the negro will be elevated to the highest attainments he can make, and be prepared for whatever destiny God intends. This, sir, is the fourth result of your agitation:--to make the Southern master know, from the Bible, his right to be a master, and his duty to his slave.

These four results are so fully before you, that I think you must see and feel them. You have brought out, besides, tremendous political consequences, giving astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of God and to speak it to the land. I rejoice that all the South now know that God gives the right to hold slaves, and, with that right, obligations they must fulfil. I rejoice that the day has dawned in which the North and South will think and feel and act together on the subject of slavery. I thank God for the agitation. May he forgive the folly and wickedness of many who have gotten it up! May he reveal more and more, that surely the wrath of man shall praise him, while the remainder of wrath he will restrain!

Declaration of Independence.

I agree with you, sir, that the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence contains five affirmations, declared to be self-evident truths, which, if truths, do sustain you and all abolitionists in every thing you say as to the right of the negro to liberty; and not only to liberty,--to equality, political and social. But I disagree with you as to their truth, and I say that not one of said affirmations is a self-evident truth, or a truth at all. On the contrary, that each one is contrary to the Bible; that each one, separately, is denied; and that all five, collectively, are denied and upset by the Bible, by the natural history of man, and by providence, in every age of the world. I say this now. In a subsequent communication, I will prove what I affirm. For the present I merely add, that the Declaration of Independence stands in no need of these false affirmations. It was, and is, a beautiful whole without them. It was, and is, without these imaginary maxims, the simple statement of the grievances the colonies had borne from the mother-country, and their right as colonies, when thus oppressed, to declare themselves independent. That is to say, the right given of God to oppressed children to seek protection in another family, or to set up for themselves somewhat before twenty-one or natural maturity; right belonging to them in the British family; right sanctioned of God; right blessed of God, in the resistance of the colonies as colonies--not as individual men--to the attempt of the mother-country to consummate her tyranny. But God gives no sanction to the affirmation that he has created all men equal; that this is self-evident, and that he has given them unalienable rights; that he has made government to derive its power solely from their consent, and that he has given them the right to change that government in their mere pleasure. All this--every word of it, every jot and tittle--is the liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, Garrison, or Barnes.