Rev. Thomas Witherspoon, Presbyterian, of Alabama, said: “I draw my warrant from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to hold the slave in bondage.”
Said the Rev. Mr. Crawder, Methodist, of Virginia: “Slavery is not only countenanced, permitted, and regulated by the Bible, but it was positively instituted by God himself.”
You say that this is the testimony of interested parties, that the South was interested in perpetuating slavery. True, but where did your Northern theologians stand?
Rev. Dr. Wilbur Fisk, President of Wesleyan University, thus wrote: “The New Testament enjoins obedience upon the slave as an obligation due to a present rightful authority.”
The Rev. Dr. Nathan Lord, President of Dartmouth College, wrote: “Slavery was incorporated into the civil institutions of Moses; it was recognized accordingly by Christ and his apostles. They regulated it by the just and benevolent principles of the New Testament. They condemned all intermeddlers with it.”
Professor Hodge, of Princeton, said: “The Savior found it around him, the Apostles met with it in Asia, Greece, and Italy. How did they treat it? Not by denunciation of slave-holding as necessarily sinful.”
Said the Rev. Dr. Taylor, Principal of the Theological Department of Yale College: “I have no doubt that if Jesus Christ were now on earth, he would, under certain circumstances, become a slaveholder.”
It is now half-forgotten that the North as well as the South once practiced slavery—that New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all held slaves. Christian New England, which made the Bible both its legal and moral code, for more than one hundred years, held Negroes and Indians in slavery, and even sold Quaker children into bondage. “Parish ministers all over New England,” says the Rev. William Goodell, “owned slaves” (American Slave Code, p. 106).
Clerical slaveholders in the South trampled under foot the relations of wife and mother; and clerical slaveholders in the North did the same. Mr. Goodell says:
“Even in Puritan New England, seventy years ago, female slaves, in ministers’ and magistrates’ families, bore children, black or yellow, without marriage. No one inquired who their fathers were, and nothing more was thought of it than of the breeding of sheep or swine” (Ibid., p. 111).