George B. Cheever And The Biblical Argument Against Slavery

By Michael E. Weaver

[Michael E. Weaver is Associate Professor of History at the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the United States government, the Department of Defense, or Air University.]

Abstract

Presbyterian pastor and American abolitionist George B. Cheever (1807–1890) argued persuasively just prior to the Civil War that the Bible did not sanction slavery but in fact outlawed it as the equivalent of perpetual manstealing, an act the apostle Paul explicitly prohibited in 1 Tim 1: 9–11. This article analyzes Cheever’s 1860 book The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding, Demonstrated from the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, and contrasts it with pro-slavery arguments put forth by theologians, particularly James Henley Thornwell. Cheever addresses translation and usage of words such as doulos “servant,” often translated as “slave.” Cheever also points out that ancient Israel could not have been a slave-owning society as there were no fugitive slave laws. There were instead sanctuaries from abusive employers. Cheever’s philological approach casts doubt on pro-slavery interpretations and presents anti-slavery exegesis as more consistent with specific passages of Scripture as well as more logical.

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The great question which arises in discussing the slavery of the African population of this country is this: Is the institution of domestic slavery sinful? The affirmative assumes that an immense community of Southern people, of undoubted piety, are, nevertheless, involved in great moral delinquency on the subject of slavery. For nothing is more certain than this, that if it be sinful, they either know it, or are competent to know it, and hence are responsible.… No plea of necessity can justify an enlightened man in committing known sin.[1]

In the years prior to the Civil War, abolitionists asserted that slavery was a sin, thereby accusing the South of institutionalizing an act God condemned. Southern Christians, like the Methodist William A. Smith quoted above, knew the implications of this argument. If true, they would have to abolish slavery or face God’s judgment. Most Southern theologians believed the Bible endorsed slavery, and wrote extensive treatises with the Bible as the foundation for their defense of slavery. Abolitionist Christians responded with biblical arguments against slavery. Although the Southerners cut some abolitionist arguments to pieces, such as William Wayland’s, others were more formidable. George Cheever, a Presbyterian pastor from New York, devised arguments that have been advocated as “perhaps the most scholarly expression of the abolitionist assertion that the Bible did not sanction slavery.”[2] The arguments from both sides were detailed, deep, and occasionally vicious. Cheever and his adversaries discussed not only verse by verse arguments, but the implications of the arguments. This made for a complex discussion, in which a debate over one issue could spread out into a labyrinth of interconnected arguments, much like examining a tree by moving from the trunk to the branches. This article will discuss and analyze how well Cheever responded to the main scriptural arguments of the leading Christian defenders of slavery, especially Thornton Stringfellow and James Thornwell.

George Cheever was born in Hallowell, Maine, in 1807.[3] In 1821, he entered Bowdoin College with, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as classmates.[4] Though an upright person, he did not become a Christian until three years later.[5] Upon graduation, he entered Andover Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution of the Hopkinsian school, which emphasized that man was completely unregenerate, and that salvation could only be received by grace.[6 ]The faculty ordained him in 1830, and he pastored his first church in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1833.

A reformer for the next thirty years, temperance became his first crusade in 1833. Gaining nationwide notoriety, he served a month in jail for slandering a deacon who owned a distillery.[7] The following year he served as secretary of the Salem Anti-Slavery Society, continuing until beginning a three-year sabbatical in 1836. Returning three years later, he accepted a pastorate at Allen Street Presbyterian Church in New York, then transferred to the middle-class Church of the Puritans in 1845.[8] An association with the American Anti-Slavery Society was short-lived due to the Garrisonians’ heretical religious views. However, Cheever returned to the antislavery controversy in 1850, speaking out against slavery, writing books, tracts, and magazine articles for the New York Independent, and rose to become a nationally known antislavery advocate.[9]

Cheever advocated disobeying the Constitution if it ran counter to biblical teaching. Furthermore, he saw religion in politics as the only means for protecting America from God’s wrath, and was certainly not the only Christian to believe so.[10] In a series of issues of the Biblical Repository in 1855–1856, he called slavery a sin, and as a result got in trouble with his parish for his outspokenness, which went as far as announcing “a very warm reception in hell” for President Franklin Pierce. As his stance became firmer, he associated more with the AASS, and his relationship with his church soured. He then incurred the wrath of the AASS after he co-founded the Church Anti-Slavery Society in 1859.[11] The following year, he wrote The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding, Demonstrated from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, a vital and lasting contribution to Christian antislavery scholarship.[12]

Cheever was a New School Presbyterian. This movement, which began in 1795 at Yale, was a reaction against heresies advocated by persons as disparate as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. This evangelicalism was linked to nationalism. Lyman Beecher, for one, believed Christianity was critical to the very survival of America.[13]He illustrated one vital reason why viewing slavery as a sin became so important to people like Cheever; they believed God literally punished countries for sinning. An uncompromising reforming attitude characterized New School Presbyterians, and would continue in their antislavery actions. Intellectualism, particularly against heresies and Roman Catholicism, also characterized the evangelicals; therefore, the fact that biblical antislavery’s best work was written by one of their legion made sense.[14]

Old School Presbyterians were uncompromising as well, forcing adherents of the New School to go their separate way at the General Assembly meeting in 1838. The New School argued that strict adherence to the Westminster Confession undermined biblical authority. Old School doctrinaires were concerned that conversions at emotional revivals were often not genuine, and that the reliance on a person’s decision, often under peer pressure, denied the Holy Spirit a role in conversion.[15] More relevant to the reform and antislavery movements was the New School belief that once a person became regenerate, he was then open to being morally reformed.[16] Thus, evangelistic Presbyterians actively attempted to alter the world by convincing people to come to Christ, and, in more specific instances, trying to demonstrate that behaviors such as drinking, dancing, and owning slaves were sins. More extreme Presbyterians began trying to pass resolutions at their assemblies in the late 1840s that slavery was a sin.[17]

George Cheever was among the most hardline of the New School abolitionists, teaching that slavery was a sin, in contrast to another New School Presbyterian, Albert Barnes, who argued that the apostles had admitted slaveholders into the church.[18] Cheever was in agreement with Louis Tappan and the leading Presbyterian abolitionist, John Rankin, on this issue.[19] In contrast to pastors such as the Baptist Francis Wayland, who wrote that the Hebrews had owned slaves, Cheever argued that they had not.[20]

Thornton Stringfellow, on the other hand, was a Virginia Baptist preacher who believed that slavery was completely consistent with biblical teaching. He published “A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery” in 1841, which became the preferred work on the biblical defense of slavery.[21] He claimed that God decreed slavery, and referred to Noah and Abraham. Since two of the most praiseworthy patriarchs owned slaves, Christians followed their example by doing the same.

Stringfellow began by citing Gen 9:25–27, in which Noah declared, “Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” God also said, “Blessed be the LORD, God of Shem. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”[22] Stringfellow argued that it followed that slavery was appropriate for Christians to practice. He also claimed that the persons Abraham and Lot had acquired were slaves (Gen 12:5), and noted that ancient Jewish scholars and modern Christian commentators agreed that that was what the verse meant. In v. 16, Abraham had “menservants and maidservants,” from which Stringfellow deduced that they were slaves since they were mentioned with a list of property. Furthermore, he added that Abraham was rich in slaves (Gen 13:2).[23] When Hagar, the servant of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, ran away, one of God’s angels ordered her to return to Sarah “and submit to her.” One would only order a slave, not a hired servant to return. In Gen 20:14–17, Abimelech gave slaves to Abraham. With this act, Stringfellow strengthened his case, for God healed Abimelech after Abraham prayed for him. Why would God heal a sinner?[24] In answer to the contention that these servants were hired servants, not slaves, Stringfellow quoted Gen 24:35–36, 26:13–14, and 17:12–13. These last two verses were particularly strong because they referred to persons bought, not hired, saying, “He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised.”

Proslavery pastors took the bulk of their evidence for slavery from the Mosaic law. They interpreted it as containing laws for getting and keeping slaves in perpetuity. To begin with, Exod 12:44–45 referred to two distinct forms of laborer—the hired servant and the slave.[25] The foundation of the scriptural proslavery argument was Lev 25:39–46, particularly vv. 44–46. Stringfellow saw several important implications from this passage. Slaveholders from other countries could settle in Israel, breed slaves, and then sell them. Hebrews could sell themselves if impoverished, but they were to be treated as hired workers, not slaves. Again, Stringfellow pointed out that the Bible described two different conditions of servitude. Exodus 21:21 explicitly states that “he is his money.”[26] He further showed slavery’s primacy with the first four verses of this chapter. If a Hebrew slave gets a wife from his master and she has children, she and the children remain with the master, although the husband may go free after seven years. The husband’s only recourse is to become the master’s slave for life. From this, Stringfellow drew the slavemaster’s authority to break-up families and sell them. He added to his case that slavery existed among the Hebrews with Job 7:2. In this verse, the hireling looked forward to his wages, but the best a slave could long for were the shadows at the end of the workday.[27] Antislavery pastors pointed to the year of Jubilee as institutionalized emancipation, but Stringfellow interpreted it as applying only to “voluntary slavery.” In his view, it did not apply to “involuntary slavery,” nor did any of the pronouncements of the prophets. He strengthened his argument further by pointing out another patriarch, Joseph, who bought all of the people in Egypt for Pharaoh during the famine.[28]

Even though these statements were abhorrent to abolitionists, Stringfellow reminded his readers that the Holy Spirit had given these laws to Moses and were therefore consistent with God’s character and values. He contended that to say otherwise was to blaspheme God.[29]

According to Stringfellow, Jesus said nothing to abolish slavery. As for the contention that Matt 7:12, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets,” abolishes slavery, he said that God never intended the verse to have that meaning. God would not have stipulated the master-slave relationship as he did in the apostolic letters, and then add that they were to treat each other according to the Golden Rule. Indeed, that application “will for the same reason, level all inequalities in human condition.”[30] Stringfellow showed one of his core values with that statement, that a level society was undesirable, and that he wanted a stratified society.

He believed that through the apostles, the Holy Spirit demonstrated that slavery was a part of society that the church should continue. Slaves were to set an example of obedience in order to bring honor to the church. The proof was in the orders the apostles gave concerning relations between masters and slaves. In Eph 6:5, Paul exhorted slaves to obey their masters: “Servants be obedient to them that are your masters, according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” Paul repeated this instruction in Col 3:22, 1 Tim 6:1–2, and Tit 2:9. Stringfellow understood 1 Cor 7:17–24 to mean that individuals, including slaves, should be content with whatever station they had in life.[31] Peter repeated this theme in 1 Pet 2:13–18, in which he called slaves to submit to masters, whether those masters were good or bad.[32] The apostle’s purpose for this submission was to gain respect for the church through obedience. Besides, a slave uprising would have provoked the Roman army to slaughter rebellious slaves.[33] Abolitionists said that Jesus never spoke of slavery. Stringfellow denied that, claiming that Paul would have certainly asked Jesus for his wisdom concerning slavery.[34]

In An Essay on Liberty and Slavery, Albert Taylor Bledsoe refuted the scriptural antislavery arguments of William Wayland. He immediately stated that God sanctioned slavery among the Hebrews; therefore, it was not wrong. However, God did not sanction slavery for all people at all times. That would open up the possibility of white slavery, which no Southerner would support. Instead, slavery was appropriate for the “ignorant and debased.”[35]

Citing Lev 25:44–46, Bledsoe wrote, “Now these words are so perfectly explicit, that there is no getting around them.” He saw additional evidence for slavery in Mosaic Law, particularly slave regulations. From Leviticus, they were property. In Exod 21:20–21, they were called money, and there was no punishment for killing a slave. The Ten Commandments referred to slaves. Since Exod 21:7–8 placed restrictions on selling maid-servants, they could be sold; therefore, they were slaves, not hired servants. From the verse “… he shall serve him forever,” he asserted that slavery was perpetual and hereditary.[36] Deuteronomy 23:15–16, which prohibited handing runaway slaves back to their owners, troubled his case. Bledsoe countered it with the argument that it only applied to slaves who escaped from heathen masters. Keeping the runaway, presumably also a heathen, was the only way to introduce him to God. If the runaway had been a Jew, he would have had to be returned.[37]

To begin his NT argument Bledsoe asked, if slavery was so evil, why was it not condemned in the NT? He also wrote that abolitionists had to say that slavery violated “biblical principles,” because there was no verse to which they could refer for a refutation of slavery.[38] He made use of the same NT verses Thornton Stringfellow had, which all exhort servants to obey their masters.[39] Bledsoe did not deny that Paul’s condemnation of “manstealing” was linked to slavery. He interpreted it as a prohibition against going to war and taking captives as slaves. The South, he contends, never did that, never tried to turn a free man into a slave, so it was not guilty. Furthermore, he asserted that the argument was about slavery, not manstealing.[40]

Bledsoe wrote that Onesimus in the book of Philemon was a slave, and cited several lexicographers who agreed.[41] The translation of the Greek word δοῦλος, doulos, translated “servant” in v. 16, was pivotal, and each side of the controversy disagreed with the other.[42] Albert Barnes wrote that it could mean either “slave,” “hired servant,” or “apprentice”—one could not determine which meaning was appropriate from the context. Bledsoe contended that scholars had never found a case where doulos was used to mean servant. He also believed that the phrase, “thou shouldst receive him forever,” meant that Onesimus was a slave, as did Paul’s request to keep Onesimus for himself. He scoffed at Barnes’s assertion that Paul meant for Philemon to receive Onesimus as a Christian brother.[43]

Finally, he countered the abolitionist interpretation of 1 Cor 7:23, “be ye not the servants of men,” by writing that it had been taken out of context, that it meant that people were not to blindly follow other people.[44]

While his contemporaries considered Stringfellow’s defense of slavery to be the best, James Henley Thornwell’s was the most philosophically formidable, as well as being rigid and conservative, even among Southerners.[45] A Presbyterian professor of theology at the Theological Seminary of Columbia, South Carolina, he did not put forth a verse by verse argument, but dealt more with interpretations of scriptures and the implications of the antislavery argument for society and the church. Thornwell believed the important questions were man’s relationship to man, and the state’s relationship to man.[46]

Thornwell held a strict, narrow view of the church’s role in society and of interpreting Scripture. First of all, the church had no business trying to improve man’s physical condition, reconstruct society, or alter a country’s political systems. To him, the Bible was the final and only authority on moral and spiritual questions. He was adamant that unless the Bible said something was permitted, that it not be done; if the Bible said nothing about a moral question, the church may not make a decision on it.[47] He wrote that he could not find any specific condemnation of slavery in the Bible, nor was there any tone of alarm over the relations between masters and slaves, which one might expect if slavery was against biblical teaching. Therefore, the Bible permitted slavery—“It is not sinful.”[48]One could argue that he assumed slavery was permitted, since he wrote that there were no Bible verses calling for emancipation, rather than demonstrated it to be permitted and challenging abolitionists to prove it was wrong.

Thornwell criticized abolitionists for drawing their arguments from “human rights” doctrines instead of the Bible. Furthermore, he accused them of first forming their opinions on slavery, and then making the Bible conform to them. Those who based their arguments on the Bible, he accused of stretching their interpretations of particular passages, and of letting their doctrines dictate how they interpreted the Bible. He warned that “rationalism” was at the root of this sort of reasoning, and that it would spread until people denied the divine inspiration of the Bible.[49] He agreed that there was much truth that was revealed outside of the Scriptures, but the church was not to have anything to do with those sorts of truths. It was to restrict itself to biblical truth alone. If the Northern church would restrict itself to that criterion for truth, the church in America would not have been ripping itself apart.[50] Thornwell believed that since Paul and the other apostles accepted slaveholders into their church without reservation, Northern Christians should do the same. He also wished the antislavery Christians would correct their own vices instead of condemning slavery. Ultimately, abolitionist agitations were undermining the very existence of the Republic.[51]

He believed Col 4:1, “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven,” could sum up God’s view of slavery. He sidestepped the abolitionist argument that the servants mentioned were not slaves—the word always used in the King James NT was “servant”—by writing that proving that they were slaves was a “useless waste of time.” Thornwell ridiculed their contention that Jesus considered slavery wrong but kept quiet about it, deciding to affect social change by changing each individual rather than bring about revolutionary action by condemning slavery as a sin, by reminding them that Paul accepted slaveholders as brothers.[52] Concerning the right to one’s own labor, he asked where the Bible said that a master was robbing a slave by benefiting from the slave’s labor.[53]

Thornwell believed that the idea of a person being property was absurd. What really mattered in defining a person was his mind, and especially his soul. No one could own or control that. A master only had a right to the slave’s labor. Indeed, a free laborer was different from a slave laborer only in that he had to look for a master. Each was a man with the same moral responsibilities.[54] Moral perfection was the primary duty, and a person could achieve holiness no matter what their circumstances. Ultimately, Thornwell argued that circumstances, whether slavery or freedom, did not matter, for what one did as a Christian within those circumstances was how one measured one’s quality of life.[55] Furthermore, government existed to help the individual glorify God, not himself, and slavery in no way impeded a person from achieving this highest duty. “The servant of men may be the freeman of the Lord.” Under slavery, a person could develop himself morally and religiously.[56]

Thornwell interpreted Matt 7:12, love your neighbor as yourself, as a call to masters to treat slaves the way in which they would want to be treated if they were slaves. It was not a call to overturn set social relations. He summed up his views thus:

The Christian beholds in him, not a tool, not a chattel, not a brute or thing, but an immortal spirit, assigned to a particular position in this world of wretchedness and sin, in which he is required to work out the destiny which attaches to him, in common with his fellows, as a man.[57]

William A. Smith argued that since slavery was a part of government, and God sanctioned government, God sanctioned slavery. He defined slavery as “the general principle of submission or subjection to control by the will of another.” A master was someone who governs, making use of his own will, and a slave was a person who is governed, even if he submits to authority voluntarily.[58] If this principle of submission is used, it is slavery, no matter the name or the form it takes. Control by an authority “is the abstract principle of slavery, and all governments make use of the slavery principle.[59] Since God ordains all governments, God has ordained slavery.”[60]

George Armstrong, pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Norfolk, published a biblical defense of slavery, The Christian Doctrine of Slavery, which was similar in slant to Stringfellow’s work.[61] Beginning with “presumptive evidence,” he wrote that Jesus and the apostles accepted slavery, but not any incidental evils. Citing lists of sins, he pointed out that slavery was never listed in any of them. Not only was the Bible written in slave societies, it was even written to slaveholders. Jesus frequently referred to and spoke of slavery. Paul’s passage condemning manstealers referred only to kidnapping a free person and selling him as a slave. Armstrong assumed that kidnapping and slavery were distinctly different.[62]

Armstrong demonstrated that the biblical Greek used two distinct words for “servant” and “hired servant.” Abolitionists routinely claimed that the Greek word doulos meant “servant,” not “slave.” The words misthios and misthotos were Greek words for “hired servant,” as opposed to doulos, meaning slave.[63] Another of his arguments was that the early church welcomed slaveholders. Paul called Philemon “dearly beloved,” and he spoke of the slaveholders in 1 Tim 6 as “believers, brethren, faithful,” and “beloved.” Believing masters were “brethren—beloved of God.” If slavery was so wrong, how could Paul have spoken so well of Philemon?[64] Armstrong believed that the apostles endeavored to correct evils committed by slave and master, husband and wife, and parent and child. They did not intend to alter any institutions, including slavery.

George Cheever replied to the proslavery pastors with a barrage of counter arguments. One of his strengths was that he restricted his arguments to the Bible. No one could accuse him of arriving at his conclusions through human rationalism. He did not base his arguments on the Declaration of Independence or higher law arguments derived from philosophers. To Cheever, the Bible was the only and supreme higher law.[65] In this, he agreed with Thornwell, who could only criticize Cheever’s conclusions and the ways in which he arrived at them, not his source. Cheever challenged the proslavery conclusions by repeatedly demonstrating how one could arrive at different interpretations from the Bible that did not sanction slavery. He took four different tacks against the biblical proslavery argument. Foundational was his philological method, in which he found different meanings of particular Hebrew and Greek words, and concluded that a consistent antislavery theme ran throughout the Scriptures.[66] He did not limit himself to a word study. In his historical investigation, he asked if the Bible’s presentation of Hebrew society and theology was consistent with what one would expect to find of a slave society and a religion that supported slavery.[67] Cheever examined the legal argument the Bible put forth on slavery, and claimed to have found none of the statutes a slave society would have had.[68] Finally, he combined the philological, historical, and legal evidence and developed a moral argument “against the relation itself, as intrinsically unjust, cruel, and wicked.”[69] He believed slavery was a sin imperiling the country, and assumed that it was oppressive.[70] What follows will describe and assess his answers to specific proslavery arguments, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the additional scriptural citations and inductive reasoning he made against the proslavery stance, as well as his broader case that the Bible outlawed slavery.

Cheever’s first disagreement with proslavery pastors concerned the status of Abraham’s herdsmen in Gen 14:14. Stringfellow had said that they were slaves.[71] Cheever believed that was an assumption, and wrote that there was no evidence of compulsion on the part of Abraham or Lot. The “servants, born in his own house,” were not slaves. The phrase “born in his own house,” yelidhi betho, יְלִידֵי בֵיתוֹ, was a common Hebrew term for free persons used to distinguish families under Abraham’s jurisdiction from those people born abroad. Cheever cited examples of this usage in, for example, Lev 22:11 and Eccl 2:7. In Gen 14:24, those whom Abraham had armed were called “young men.”[72] Coming from a society that considered arming slaves tantamount to starting a slave revolt, Cheever believed that because Abraham did so, they could not have been slaves.[73]

Genesis 17:12, 13 were more troubling passages.[74] The Hebrew words miqnath keseph, מִקְנַת־כֶּסֶף, from which the English translators got “bought with money,” were more accurately translated “obtained.” He pointed out that in English idioms, one could say, “I have procured, at a good bargain, twenty hands for the farm during the summer,” and not mean that you had bought them as property.[75]

Both Bledsoe and Stringfellow made use of Exod 21 in their arguments.[76] The second verse was the key, “If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.” Cheever argued that a person bought for six years, then set free, could not be a slave. Implicit to his understanding of slavery was that a slave was a thing, bought and sold as a piece of property, and owned permanently. Since the service was not permanent, it was not slavery. Furthermore, the proper English word was “obtain,” not “bought.” The Hebrew word translated “bought” was commonly used to describe getting a wife or a servant. Here, he and Thornwell would have talked past each other, for Thornwell did not consider a slave to be property. A master only owned the slave’s labor.[77]

If this transaction was from a third party, then one would have strong evidence of some form of slavery. However, the Hebrew verb is reflexive, implying that the transaction was solely between two people. Cheever cited a similar situation from Lev 25:39, 47, in which a poor man in need sold himself to another. After six years, the master would have to renegotiate this work relationship with the person, but could do so only if that person wanted to do so.[78] A Hebrew servant under this arrangement had the right to freedom if his master so much as broke his tooth.[79] One would certainly not see that on a Southern plantation.

Cheever frequently had to answer the proslavery contention that Lev 25:44–46 justified perpetual slavery. He argued that a close look at it would show that it stipulated voluntary servanthood for a limited amount of time. In order to prove that these verses did not sanction slavery, he tried to show that the word “servant” could not mean “slave,” that “bought” meant “obtain,” that “forever” meant “only until the year of jubilee,” and that the Hebrew laws dictated that the same laws applied to both Jew and Gentile and gave jubilee jurisdiction over all inhabitants of Israel. His trump card was the law giving refuge to mistreated servants. He began by stating that the Hebrew word for a heathen servant was the same as for a Hebrew servant. Therefore, the sojourners with them got the same treatment.[80]

Ordinarily, the Hebrew word for servant was evedh, עֶבֶד. Cheever traced its meaning and use, beginning with its root, avadh, עָבַד, meaning “to labor.” Verbal evedh meant to labor for one’s self, or for another. One could be subject to another, politically or personally. Evedh could mean serving God or idols. As a noun, evedh could mean work under contract or compulsion. It could also mean a servant of another person or of God. According to Cheever, it did not mean slave, nor could he cite any examples from the OT which he interpreted its meaning as “slave.” The verb form of evedh was used in Lev 25:46, which he translates, “on them ye shall impose service.” The word used to describe the Hebrews’ bondage in Egypt was not evedh. Cheever argued that there was no Hebrew word for slavery because there was no slavery in Israel, and vice versa.[81]

For Cheever’s argument to work, he had to show that the year of jubilee was a supreme law, terminating all debts, contracts, and working arrangements. He had a case, for during jubilee “ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”[82] “They shall be your bondmen forever” has to mean “They shall be your bondmen until jubilee.” First of all, the Hebrew contains no word for “bondmen”; instead Cheever translated, “forever on them ye shall lay service.”[83] He interpreted the clause “and they shall be your possession” to mean that a person or family who contracted with someone for fifty years would not get out of the contract if the master died. Instead, the servants would owe their remaining allegiance to his children for as many years as were left on the contract.[84]

Could jubilee have only applied to Hebrews and not to foreign servants? No, Cheever wrote. Leviticus 24:22 stipulated one law for everyone, “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for one of your own country.” One of these many laws forbade abuse of servants by masters.[85]

Deuteronomy 23:15 and 16 ordered the Israelites to offer refuge to any servant who escaped from his master. Cheever believed that this made slavery impossible, for it annulled any coercive power a master would have to have in order to keep a person in bondage. According to Exod 22:4, stolen property, such as livestock, had to be repaid double. If these workers written of were slaves and not servants, one would have to return them as well.[86] In answer to the argument, “Yes, this applies to servants, but not to slaves,” Cheever would have replied, “How can the person be a slave if you cannot make him stay, and you cannot make people return him?” Deuteronomy 24:14 did not clear up the disagreement.[87] While it forbade oppression of a servant, whether Hebrew or not, it specifically says “hired servant.” Cheever had another strong argument from Exod 21:16 and Deut 24:7: stealing a person was a capital offense.[88] As for a slaveholder who had inherited slaves, he was just as guilty, for receiving anything that had been stolen was a sin. For this powerful argument to stand, slavery could not be distinct from kidnapping. One also has to interpret slavery as a continual act of manstealing. The Mosaic law made a clear distinction between stealing property and stealing a person. Slaveholders countered that this law only made it a sin to steal a slave. If the law only outlawed stealing servants or slaves, why did it say “a man” and not “a servant”? Cheever believed that a person owned himself and that slavery was abrogating that relationship. In addition, he argued that by their logic, it was fine for a person to be stolen and put into slavery, but it then became a crime to steal that person as a slave. “With what sublimated essence of cruelty and compound wickedness these moral chemists charge the word of God!” He fortified his case by describing in detail how God, as the prophets wrote, condemned Israel for slavery. Proslavery advocates avoided these passages.[89]

The NT debates over slavery centered around what Jesus and the apostles did or did not say about it. Thornton Stringfellow argued that Jesus said nothing to abolish it, and therefore there was nothing wrong with it.[90] Cheever picked apart this sort of reasoning. Jesus was also silent about sodomy, infanticide, and idolatry—were they now permissible? “By this method of reasoning, not only is the law of God against these crimes abolished, and the crimes themselves made innocent by such silence, but he that speaks against them, when Christ did not, is himself guilty of a presumptuous sin, and may think himself happy if he is not struck with some divine judgment.”[91] Furthermore, if an act is justified just because Jesus and the apostles happened to not specifically prohibit it, then one could justify almost any crime in some form.[92] Cheever argued that since slavery had been prohibited in the OT, there was no need to mention its sinfulness in the NT. He asked for evidence that the Jews of Jesus’ time owned slaves. He also claimed that there had never been a slave society in which the slaves had not increased in number. Where were their slaves?[93]

Cheever returned to his philological argument, this time over Greek words. Beginning with Matthew, he discussed every verse in the Gospels that contained a word for some sort of worker or servant, and asserted that the Greek word doulos meant “servant” and not “slave.” The theme of employer-worker relationships throughout the Gospels is that of hired servants, not slaves. He repeatedly offered alternative interpretations to the arguments that these words meant “slave.” He did this by showing that the workers were neither treated as nor behaved as slaves. For example, in the parable in Matt 20:1–16, the householder went to a market to hire wage laborers, not buy slaves.[94] From Luke 10:7, “for the laborer is worthy of hire,” he claimed that Israel was a free labor society. He went on to quote Jer 22:13, “Woe to him that uses his neighbor’s services without wages, and giveth him not for his work.”[95] In the parable of the servant dismissed by his master in Luke 16:1–13, Cheever said it was obvious that he was not a slave, because his master fired him. Therefore, the word used for service could not mean the service of a slave. Indeed, the word used was generically used for all kinds of servants.[96] His argument in the Gospels was over whether or not certain words translate into servant or slave. What he asserted was that Jesus frequently spoke of hired labor and service, as opposed to slave labor.

“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.”[97] As the apostles repeated this directive throughout their letters, so did the defenders of slavery. They assumed that because the apostles ordered obedience and hard work by servants, the apostles therefore were sanctioning slavery, or at least not condemning it. Cheever countered by again disputing that the Greek words should be translated “servant,” not “slave.” If the verses were more accurately rendered “Servants, obey your masters,” there could not be an implicit endorsement of slavery. This was exactly how the King James Bible rendered all of these NT verses; it used the word “servant,” not “slave.” For these verses to support the proslavery argument, one would have to assume that “slave” could be substituted for “servant” without altering the divine meaning. Because Jesus used the word doulos in regards to his apostles’ relationship to him, Cheever argued that it had to refer to free persons. Voluntary submission and service were basic to following Jesus. He would not have used a word that signified compulsory submission to describe his disciples’ relationship to himself.[98] Cheever went through each verse that spoke of master-servant relationships and presented alternative translations and interpretations to those of the proslavery theologians.

Cheever believed that the slavery advocates were applying modern conditions to words that did not mean then what they may have implied during the antebellum period. Instead, he argued that the conditions Paul put on masters for the treatment of their servants made slavery impossible. Citing Col 4:1, he believed it was impossible to give a servant “what is just and equal” and the person still be held in slavery. His case was strong, since slavery was by nature unequal. Furthermore, Cheever saw no hint of slavery in the language.[99] He cited Christians from antiquity, such as the Abbot Isidore of Pelusium, who believed slaveholding was incompatible with Christianity: “I did not suppose that a man who loves Christ … could still hold a slave!”[100]

To counter Armstrong’s argument that slavery had never been listed as a sin, Cheever cited 1 Tim 1:9–11, which reiterated Mosaic law.[101] It linked manstealing with severe sins such as matricide. Again, for this verse to condemn slavery as a sin, manstealing had to be the same as slavery. The Greek word for menstealer could be translated as “one who kidnaps freemen or slaves, to sell them again.” The verb form meant to be sold into slavery. He countered the Southern slaveholders’ argument that they had stolen no one, that they had merely inherited their slaves, by calling them accomplices to the crime. Even if one received a stolen person third- or fourth-hand, one was still guilty: “Any man who has anything to do with the crime, either as go-between, or buyer, or seller of a man, or holding him as property, is implicated in the guilt of manstealing.” According to Cheever, this passage is the most damning of all against slavery.[102] He was right. His argument equating slavery with a continual act of manstealing was logical. One must ask how they could be distinct. Even if one sets Paul against Moses, a theologically dangerous thing to do, to say that the Bible contradicts itself, one should err in favor of Paul, for slaveholders themselves admitted that slavery was prone to abuses of people.[103] With this argument, Cheever put advocates of slavery in a position where they would have to assume that manstealing and slavery were distinct from the first time a person was enslaved through his getting sold to the time a Christian bought him.

Paul did not write his letter to Philemon with the American slavery controversy in mind, but that did not stop both sides of the debate from making use of it. Slavery advocates argued that if Philemon was a slaveholder, then at the very least, Paul was not overtly condemning slavery. They also asserted that if Paul had meant for Onesimus to go free, he would have given Philemon a direct order.[104] Paul greeted Philemon as “our dearly beloved.” Would he have spoken that way to a sinner?[105] Cheever presented an alternative interpretation, that from the book, one could glean principles for the treatment of slaves by Christians living in the Roman Empire. Christians were to shelter runaways, not turn them in, try to convert them to Christianity, and if he had a Christian master, write the master and enjoin him to receive the runaway as a Christian brother, emancipated, not as a slave.[106] He contradicted himself with this argument because he would have had to concede that Onesimus was a slave. However, Cheever believed one could interpret the book in a much more antislavery way. Fundamental to its interpretation is remembering Deut 23:15–16, which forbade one from returning a servant to an oppressive master.[107] Why would Paul violate this law? Assuming that he, of all people, would not, Onesimus must not have been a runaway slave, because Paul was most certainly sending him back to Philemon. He further asserted that Paul never called Onesimus a runaway slave. Instead, he said that he had “departed,” the same word used of the disciples in Acts 1, 4, and 8. He may have done something wrong, it was not clear, but whatever might have been done, Paul volunteered to pay for it. Besides, Paul did ask Philemon to receive Onesimus “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.”[108]

Paul did not behave consistently with someone holding a runaway slave. He claimed the right to keep Onesimus with him as a helper. Cheever believed that if Onesimus had been a slave, this would have been theft on Paul’s part. If the word translated servant, doulos, was more correctly rendered “slave,” it would have only strengthened Cheever’s argument, for v. 16 would have said, “Not now as a slave, but above a slave, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord?” One could then interpret that verse as an emancipatory order to Philemon.[109] Cheever again offered an alternative interpretation, with which, even when it agreed with the proslavery philology of doulos, he was able to reasonably cast doubt upon a proslavery interpretation.

He deftly made use of Revelation to conclude his arguments. Revelation 18:13, 15, condemned merchants of slaves, among other things, to “the fear of torment, weeping and wailing.” A later verse, Rev 19:18, mentioned slavery during the end times. A slaveholder had concluded that since slavery would still exist then, that it was the will of God, a divine institution. By this reasoning, Cheever countered, the idolatry and murder existing at the end of the world, from Rev 21:8, would have to be considered the will of God, and that no effort be made to eliminate them before that time.[110]

When assessing how well Cheever countered Thornwell’s arguments, one is struck by how much they agreed on foundational theological issues. Both said that legitimate authority rested on the Bible, both politically and morally.[111] Cheever would certainly have agreed with Thornwell that if slavery impeded a person’s spiritual growth, then it had to be abolished.[112] However, their points of disagreement on the role of the church in society, how to interpret the Bible, and assumptions concerning property rights and oppression led to their disagreement on whether or not slavery was a sin.

Thornwell believed that the church had no authority in a social matter like slavery.[113] Cheever, on the other hand, believed the church had every responsibility to address the issue, for if it was a sin, then the country stood condemned. He believed that Christians had no choice but fight and conquer anything that opposed God’s will, and alluded to 2 Cor 10:4–6 as justification.[114] Thornwell assumed slavery was permissible until proven wrong. Cheever assumed it was wrong and oppressive unless the Bible proved it right. Furthermore, he believed that one should enter the debate on the side of arguing for the slave’s freedom from the outset, since legal traditions had always favored the oppressed.[115]

Thornwell’s narrow interpretation of applying Scripture to moral questions, “where the Scriptures are silent, she must be silent, too,” was not far off from Cheever’s view. The point of contention was how one defined the Bible being “silent.” Thornwell believed that unless the Bible explicitly commented on a certain issue, then it was silent.[116] Cheever, on the other hand, applied logic and looked for meanings one could interpret from a summation of Scripture. Cheever argued well against Thornwell on Thornwell’s strict terms when he cited 1 Tim 1:10 as an explicit biblical damnation of slavery.[117] Cheever stuck by the Bible as his authoritative source. The only outside scholarship he made use of was from biblical commentators, and those he used only after he had made his case from Scripture.[118] With this consistent method, he beat Thornwell at his own game, for Thornwell cited philosophical arguments in “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery.” Arguing that true slavery was a slavery within, a moral slavery to sin, he cited Jesus only once, then quoted “fruitful and eloquent declamation among the ancient moralists, philosophers, and poets,” such as Seneca, Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, and Claudian, none of whom based their arguments on the Bible, or were even Christians.[119] This was a careless mistake for one trying to defend slavery using the most respected book in the land, the Bible, especially considering that deliverance from slavery to sin was a theme of NT writings, and there were plenty of examples from that source to support his case. Finally, though advocating a strict reading of the Bible, Thornwell hurt his argument by assuming that the people repeatedly called “servants” in the King James translation were slaves; dismissing any call to provide philological proof that doulos meant slave was a clarion call for abolitionist counterattacks.

Both pastors agreed that a master had the right to the services of a laborer, or in Thornwell’s case, a slave, and that this did not equate with owning the person.[120] Their agreement ended there. Cheever qualified the arrangement by adding that according to the Bible, this was a contract the worker initiated, he was free of the contract at the year of jubilee, and he could not have been a slave in the first place.[121] Sticking with his axiom that the Bible had to state something explicitly for it to be true, Thornwell asked where it said that a man had the right to payment for his labor, and that a master was robbing a slave by not paying him.[122] Cheever turned to Jer 22:13, “Woe unto him … that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” He added that if it was wrong to take a person’s labor, or his property, it was even worse to take the person himself as property. If it was a sin to take some of a person’s rights, it was worse to take all of them.[123]

One of Thornwell’s arguments had to do with his values concerning social mobility, and Cheever’s reply was rooted in opposite values. Each could support his position with Scripture. Thornwell argued that God had arranged society, and therefore a person’s place in society, whether slave or free, was the will of God according to 1 Cor 7:17–24.[124] Cheever valued freedom, and cited v. 21 from the same passage as a counter-argument for freedom: “Art thou called being a servant? Care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.”[125] Thornwell’s interpretation of Matt 7:12 demonstrated his value of keeping one’s station in life. Slaveholders were not to treat slaves according to the wishes of the slaves, for then the desires of an individual would become laws. Instead, slaveholders were to treat slaves the way they would want to be treated if they were slaves themselves. He saw no call for changing a person’s social status when treating him as he would want to be treated.[126] Cheever saw slavery as completely inconsistent with Matt 7:12, and would respond with Luke 4:18, where Jesus said, “He hath sent me to preach deliverance to the captives.”[127]

Returning to Thornwell’s belief that slavery did not hinder spiritual growth, Cheever countered with the argument that since slavery distorted a slave’s perception of godly authority, it kept slaves from full spiritual maturity. First, it made it impossible for slaves to obey Eph 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Under slavery, a wife owed submission to her master. Indeed, according to slave laws, slaves were not able to marry, thus were prevented from participating in one of God’s ordinances. Furthermore, the licentiousness Cheever perceived as inevitable on plantations made slavery an enemy of obedience to God. Just as bad, slavery prevented children from truly honoring their parents. Again, they had to honor their master. A slave child may not have even known who his father was, which would distort his understanding of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven.”[128] Slavery put relationships between people and God out of order.

Both Thornwell and Cheever were open to criticism that they might have been hiding their fundamental values underneath their Bibles. Order was a fundamental value to Thornwell. It arose frequently enough in his writing that one wonders if he used a proslavery argument from the Bible to support a more precious value. Emphasizing Southern sovereignty, he quickly stated that Southern Christians had the right to judge whether or not slavery was expedient or not. He added that using the Golden Rule to eradicate slavery would lead to chaos, and that taken to an extreme, the antislavery reasoning would lead to the redistribution of income. Thornwell praised the Scriptures for their moderation, and accused advocates of emancipation of being enemies to mankind’s dearest values, “the safeguards of life and property.” He linked abolitionists with communists and atheists, and pitted them against “the friends of order and regulated freedom.”[129] Stringfellow was of a like mind. He warned that abolition would lead to a leveling of society.[130]

Personal freedom was a fundamental value to George Cheever. No doubt obedience to God’s statutes as put forth in the Bible was vital to him as well, as a reading of his insistence on its obedience in his writing reveals. He made, however, a couple of tactical mistakes with which his opponents could have discredited him. For example, he wrote that if the Bible’s instructions for husbands and wives did not belong to servants as well, then “Christianity is demonstrated not to be from God.” The context of his statement was that people were trying to find sanction for sin within the Bible. Later, he slipped in a bit of Jefferson by writing that every servant had the “right inalienable to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[131] Thornwell would have replied that a person had the duty to pursue holiness. These two slips out of 470 pages should not be used to “deconstruct” his argument, but his adversaries certainly could have used them against his position.

Neither side “won” the argument over the sinfulness or lack thereof of slavery with mathematical finality. Each side had to do some linguistic twisting and contortions in logic to support its position. The proslavery side had to show that stealing people was not the same thing as putting someone into slavery. They also had to insure, somehow, that slavery was not oppression. The antislavery polemicists had to convince that “forever” in Lev 25 was overridden by the authority of the year of jubilee, and that evedh did not mean “slave.” Cheever had an advantage when he made use of the Common Law tradition of giving the benefit of the doubt to the oppressed (assuming slavery was oppression, which Thornwell et al. strictly denied). With the alternative interpretations he put forth of Lev 25, 1 Tim 1:9–11, and Philemon, in particular, he cast doubt on the plausibility of the proslavery interpretations. If one then took the attitude that wage labor was not displeasing to God, but slave labor might be displeasing to him, Cheever could then make a case that one should try to keep from doing wrong by inclining his actions away from owning slaves, instead of trying to see what one could get away with. In other words, do not risk sinning when a known righteous option is available.

One has to wonder if the assumptions of each side predetermined the outcomes of their arguments. In a sense, they inevitably talked past each other, for from the beginning they lacked a common ground of understanding—as with the two different views of how to interpret the Bible. Their underlying views of what society should be—a Christian republic, with each person accountable to God through a Christian government in Cheever’s case—and an orderly, stratified, safe republic of “regulated liberty” in the proslavery person’s case, may also have predetermined the outcomes of the arguments. The South, after all, would still have undergone traumatic change had Cheever persuaded the planters with his argument.

In the end Cheever made the better argument because two of his basic assumptions, that slavery was oppression, and manstealing was the same as slavery, were easier to demonstrate to be consistent with biblical teaching than their counterpoints, that slavery was not oppression and that it was permissible to forcibly take a person from Africa and compel him to work. With the biblical laws against oppression of strangers and manstealing, one could then defeat the biblical proslavery argument.[132]

Notes

1. William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, as Exhibited in the United States: With the Duties of Masters to Slaves (Nashville: Stevenson & Evans, 1856), 11, 12.
2. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 137. For additional examinations of the slavery discussion among religious intellectuals of the antebellum era, see George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); James Oscar Farmer Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); Victor B. Howard, The Evangelical War against Slavery and Caste: The Life and Times of John G. Fee (Selinsgrove, PA: Suquehanna University Press, 1996); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008).
3. Robert M. York, George B. Cheever: Religious and Social Reformer, 1807–1890 (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press, 1955), 4.
4. York, Cheever, 21.
5. York, Cheever, 29, 31.
6. York, Cheever, 35, 37; Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 37.
7. York, Cheever, 45, 47, 70, 73–79.
8. York, Cheever, 82–89, 99, 123–24.
9. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 137.
10. York, Cheever, 135–36; Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 17.
11. York, Cheever, 142–44, 157–65.
12. York, Cheever, 170.
13. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 9, 12, 15, 18.
14. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 22–23, 28–29.
15. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 64–68, 78.
16. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 37.
17. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 169.
18. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 102.
19. McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 136, 31.
20. Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York: Louis Cally, 1845), 49; McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 30.
21. Thornton Stringfellow’s work “A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery” can be found in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
22. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 140. All biblical quotations in the present article are from the KJV, since it was the translation that preachers of both sides used.
23. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 140–41.
24. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 143.
25. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 145.
26. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 152; William S. Jenkins, Pro-slavery Thought in the Old South (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1960), 202.
27. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 146–47.
28. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 148, 151.
29. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 153.
30. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 155.
31. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 156–57. 1 Cor 7:20: “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.”
32. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 158–59.
33. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 161–62.
34. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 163–64.
35. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 139–41.
36. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 146–49.
37. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 153–56.
38. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 162–64.
39. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 173; Eph 6:5, Col 3:22, 1 Tim 6:1–2, Tit 2:9–10, 1 Pet 2:18.
40. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 180–82.
41. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 185–95, 203.
42. Modern scholarship contends that doulos has different meanings depending on the context. It can mean “a male slave or servant.” In Rom 6:17, 20, 1 Cor 7:23, and 2 Pet 2:19, for example, it means “in a good sense, ‘a devoted servant or minister’” (William D. Mounce, The Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993], 153).
43. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 185–95, 203.
44. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 220.
45. Faust, Ideology of Slavery, 138; Jenkins, Pro-slavery Thought, 207; Eugene Genovese, lecture at the University of Georgia, October 31, 1994.
46. James Henley Thornwell, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. B. M. Palmer (1875; repr., Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1974), 405.
47. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 382–85.
48. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 385, 86.
49. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 388, 392.
50. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 389, 386.
51. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 395, 401, 407.
52. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 407.
53. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 393.
54. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 413–14.
55. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 423–24.
56. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 425–26.
57. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 429–30.
58. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 39–41.
59. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 46–48.
60. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 56.
61. George D. Armstrong, The Christian Doctrine of Slavery (New York: Charles Scribner, 1857).
62. Armstrong, Christian Doctrine of Slavery, 8–16.
63. Armstrong, Christian Doctrine of Slavery, 19.
64. Armstrong, Christian Doctrine of Slavery, 21–32.
65. George B. Cheever, The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding, Demonstrated from the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1860), 21.
66. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 388, 392, 393, ix.
67. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, xiii.
68. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, xi.
69. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, xvii.
70. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 21–23.
71. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 141.
72. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 40–42, 44.
73. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 142.
74. “… he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.”
75. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 45, 46.
76. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 152; Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 148.
77. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 66–67, 175; Thornwell, Collected Writings, 413–14.
78. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 73–75.
79. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 93.
80. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 68.
81. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 108–15, 117.
82. Lev 25:10.
83. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 304, 308.
84. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 302–3.
85. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 213.
86. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 94–97. Deut 23:15–16: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.”
87. Deut 24:14: “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy bretheren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within they gates.”
88. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 97, 222–31. Exod 21:16: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” Deut 24:7 restricts this to “bretheren of the children of Israel.”
89. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 223–30. Cf. Joel 3:2–8, and Ezek 26:13.
90. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 155.
91. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 332–33.
92. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 337.
93. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 348–52.
94. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 359–60. Matt 20:1, 2: “For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the laborers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.”
95. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 368.
96. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 373.
97. Eph 6:5.
98. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 384.
99. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 403, 407–8, 411.
100. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 403.
101. 1 Tim 1:9–11: “Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine.”
102. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 416–17.
103. Jenkins, Pro-slavery Thought, 153, 217.
104. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 431.
105. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery, 179.
106. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 433–34.
107. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 442.
108. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 442–45
109. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 435–38.
110. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 457–58.
111. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 383; 
112. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 21.
113. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 408.
114. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 382–85.
115. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, xx. 2 Cor 10:4–6: “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnel, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exhalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; and having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.”
116. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 385; Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 22–23.Thornwell, Collected Writings, 385.
117. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 415.
118. See, for example, Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 389–90.
119. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 417.
120. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 303; Thornwell, Collected Writings, 413.
121. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 302–3.
122. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 389.
123. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 360, 330.
124. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 421. 1 Cor 7:17: “But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called everyone, so let him walk.” Verses 18–24 both assisted and hurt this argument.
125. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 388.
126. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 428–29.
127. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 334.
128. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 398–99.
129. Thornwell, Collected Writings, 388, 390–91, 394, 405.
130. Stringfellow, “Brief Examination,” 155.
131. Cheever, Guilt of Slavery, 399, 27, 411.
132. I would like to thank Randall C. Bailey for his kind assistance with Hebrew words, and I would also like to acknowledge special appreciation for Eugene D. Genovese’s helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.