History of the United States I / Unit 13 USH1 1806 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Christianity and Slavery
The idea
Many slaveholders had opposed converting enslaved people, believing that Christians could not be enslaved and fearing that Christian principles would inspire resistance. By eighteen hundred Americans had established legal grounds for enslaving Christians, and slaveholders reversed themselves, deciding that proper Christian instruction would make enslaved people more obedient and hardworking. African Americans meanwhile built churches of their own. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the seventeen nineties, which the anchor calls the first independent Black Protestant church in the United States.
In practice
A doctrine reversed once it could be made to serve the institution it had threatened, and a church founded outside White Methodist supervision.
Where people slip
Notice that the argument did not change because anyone refuted it. It changed because the legal question was settled the other way, and once Christians could be held as property the objection cost nothing. Watch what the reversal produced. Enslaved people given the Gospel took from it a message about deliverance that no master intended.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States I