Robert W. Fogel (1926-2013) won the Nobel Prize for his research into slavery. He once told me that he was surprised to learn, as an academic in some of America’s most elite universities, that Christians ended slavery. Last year, I wrote a brief description of seven of them here. Here’s seven more:
Jacob Green (1722-1790)
Green, originally a Puritan Congregationalist transformed through the Great Awakening, became the pastor of Hanover Presbyterian Church, in New Jersey. From there, he “put republican language to use in order to attack slavery.” During the American Revolution, Green wrote,
“It is demonstrable that . . . slave holders are friends of slavery, ergo are enemies to liberty, ergo are enemies to our present struggle for liberty, ergo are enemies to the United States.”
Isaac Backus (1724-1806)
Backus, followed a similar path as Green – from Puritanism, converted through the Great Awakening – but became a Baptist, a key early American Baptist leader. He called on America to put an end to “the practice of making merchandise of slaves and souls of men.” In 1788, he declared to the Massachusetts Ratification Convention, “No man abhors that wicked practice [of slavery] more than I do, and would gladly make use of all lawful means, towards the abolishing of slavery in all parts of the land.”
David Barrow (1753–1819)
Barrow, living in Virginia, was baptized in 1770 and ordained two years later. He had owned two slaves whom he freed in 1784. He then often denounced the evils of slavery. He migrated to Kentucky, where, in 1808, he founded the Kentucky Abolition Society. To Barrow, and other Baptists, slavery violated the Lord Jesus’ second-greatest commandment: love your neighbor (Mark 12:30-31).
“That innocent, unoffending persons and their posterity should suffer the most degrading kind of slavery to perpetual generations, only because some of the fellow creatures, through covetousness, imprudence, or ignorance, had paid inconsiderable sums of money for their parents several generations past, has no foundation in reason and justice.”
George Bourne (1780–1845)
Bourne, a Presbyterian pastor in Virginia, authored The Book and Slavery Irreconcileable (sic) (1815). He called for “immediate emancipation without compensation” in America, thus credited as the first (literal, immediate) abolitionist. He supported William Lloyd Garrison’s and Arthur Tappan’s founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) included illustrations of whippings and a slave auction.
Presbyterians
The Reformed Presbyterian Church, founded in 1738, declared, by 1800 that it would not permit church members to hold slaves. “No slaveholder should be allowed the communion of the Church.” In 1806, it declared:
“The holding of human beings, of whatever race or color, as slaves, being in every respect opposed to the word of God, and inconsistent with the principles of the gospel of Christ, a gross infringement upon the rights of man, and so a sin against God, should be held and treated by national authorities as a crime.”
Members were active in the Underground Railroad.
The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, organized in Philadelphia on Nov. 1, 1782, declared, in 1811, slavery a “moral evil.” By 1830, it barred slave-holders from communion. Some of their members in the South were pressured because of their church’s embrace of abolitionism. They migrated to Eden, Illinois, where there was a “station” (safe house) on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves.
In 1818, the Presbyterian General Assembly, adopted a bold anti-slavery statement: “We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another, as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature; [and] as utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” Jacob Green’s son, Ashbel Green, chaired the Assembly’s committee on the issue. It resolved unanimously that all Christians should work “to obtain the complete abolition of slavery throughout Christendom.”
Ashbel Green 1783 (1762–1848, president 1812–22), who had established the Princeton Theological Seminary, owned at least three slaves while he was president: teenagers John and Phoebe, whom he promised to free at the age of 25, and Betsey Stockton, whom he freed in 1817 (she later became the country’s first unmarried female missionary abroad). Green opposed slavery as a moral abomination…. (Princeton and Slavery: Who Was Who.)
Baptists
During Revolutionary era abolishing slavery was a common cause among Baptists and Methodists, even white ones. Although much is made of the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention originally began in order to allow for slave-holding missionaries, the Baptist too played a significant role in opposing slavery. In 1773, the Ashfield Baptists of Massachusetts became the first Baptist church to officially denounce slavery. The Baptists’ Rhode Island College, which became Brown University, became a base for opposing slavery. James Manning (1738-1791), the college’s first president, joined the abolitionist movement.
Francis Wayland (1796-1865), the fourth president, became prominent for his anti-slavery writings, like his book Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845). He called for civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Law (1850).
The Triennial Board of Foreign Missions, founded in 1814, American Baptists’ first de facto denominational organization, resolved not to allow slave-holders to serve as missionaries. Elon Galusha (1790 –1856), vice president of the convention, advocated immediate emancipation. Galusha also served as the founding president of the American Baptist Antislavery Society.
Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882)
Garnet was born a slave in Chesterville, Maryland. As a boy, he escaped with his family to New York via the Underground Railroad with the help of a Quaker. There he pursued an education and then entered the Presbyterian Oneida Theological Institute, becoming a Presbyterian minister. In his famous 1843 “Address to Slaves,” a speech he gave in Buffalo, New York, Garnet’s encouraged slaves to “Let your motto be Resistance!” He recruited Black soldiers for the US army in the Civil War. On February 12, 1865, celebrating the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, he preached in the US House of Representatives chamber, becoming the first Black minister to do so. In 1881, he was appointed the US ambassador to Liberia, where he died.
For further reading:
John B. Carpenter, “A Secular Jew Makes a Surprising Discovery about Christians and American Slavery”
Obbie Tyler Todd, “Baptists, Slavery, And the Road to Civil War”
R. Scott Clark, “Some Reformed Churches Rejected American Slavery from The Beginning”
Thomas Kidd, “A Baptist Abolitionist Appeals to Thomas Jefferson”
Eric Michael Washington, “From the Margins to the Margins: African Americans in the Reformed Tradition,”
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).