The Enlightenment View Mistakenly
Saw Slavery At The Heart
Of The Constitution’s Defects

There is a vast difference between the Enlightenment view of slavery and the Biblical position. The impact on the history of the United States has been enormous.

The Hypocrisy Of
American Slavery

Many have criticized the United States Constitution for its assessment of a slave as 3/5 of a freeman when calculating representation in the House of representatives. For that reason some of the abolitionists described it as the covenant with death. That conclusion is a symptom of the Enlightenment philosophy of human rights.

The Bible assumes the existence of slavery and provides laws for its humane regulation. In fact, the Bible requires a mild form of household slavery (indentured servitude) as the mechanism for dealing with theft and debt.

New England had received much of the profit from the African slave trade because New England merchants owned most of the slave ships. The Southern states, which ended up in possession of the slaves had sought to outlaw the trade for years, but the North refused. Prior to the Civil War, New Englanders and abolitionists began to point a hypothetical finger at the institution of slavery in the South. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator was especially provocative.

The Nature Of
American Slavery

Biblical law requires justice and kindness of masters (Col. 4:1; Eph. 6:9). This was the rule among Southerners as individuals, but state law permitted abuse. Nevertheless the Bible does not call for armed force to abolish slavery, nor is a slaveholder condemned in the same manner as an abortionist, for example, is condemned. Paul sent the bondman, Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, without apology.

In the 1930s the federal government compiled over 10,000 pages of interviews with former slaves in its 40-volume Slave Narratives. Eighty-six percent of the former slaves described their masters as “good masters,” according to Steve Wilkins in America: the First 350 Years. Ten percent described their masters as “hard masters,” and only four percent said they had “cruel masters.”

No more than 20 percent of Southern families ever owned any slaves. Furthermore, public opinion served to keep most abuses in check and the vast majority of slaves were, in fact, well treated.

Although the Southern system of slavery has been grossly misrepresented, it was nonetheless unbiblical. The slaves had few rights or protections under the law. They had the legal status of commodities. Thus, slave families were on occasion split apart, and physical punishment was not subject to biblical restraints. And obviously the slaves were not released after seven years or provided the opportunity to earn their freedom, as specified by Scripture.

On the contrary, masters and slaves or household servants are exhorted to live together in social harmony. Biblical servitude is limited to six years and husband and wife may not be separated (Ex. 21:2,3). A slave might choose to remain permanently with his master (Ex. 21:5,6).

In the South, the idea of gradual emancipation was becoming more and more the ideal in the mid-19th Century. Britain had recently abolished slavery without firing a shot. But, the abolitionists – mostly northern Christians – wanted immediate emancipation, or war. They turned a blind eye to the persecution, racial bigotry, and Black Codes that pervaded the North (8).

Abraham Lincoln’s
Pointless War

The Enlightenment spirit refused to tolerate a variety of Southern proposals to phase out slavery gradually. This spirit insisted on the sacrifice of over 600,000 American lives as brother took up sword against brother. There were for example, almost as many men killed at Gettysburg in three days as died in the entire Vietnam War.

Throughout his long political career Abraham Lincoln repeatedly affirmed his belief that the Negro race was inferior and that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the southern states. Nonetheless, in 1861 Lincoln invaded the South -- whose statesmen had long resisted the centralizing impulse -- skillfully utilizing the slavery issue as political cover.

Unitarian, Julia Ward Howe, penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic to inspire federal troops with a religious motive for war. The “watch fires of a hundred circling camps” seems to envision the armies of the North poised to execute the judgment of God on a South that had rejected the blessings of the Enlightenment and Unitarian centralization. Even as the battles of the great War raged, crews of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were laying the transcontinental railway with Federal funds (9).

Slavery was abolished by the thirteenth Amendment, including indentured servitude, the biblical requirement for dealing with debt and property crime. For example, Exodus 22:104 requires that if a thief is unable to pay double restitution “he shall be sold for his theft” in order to work off the debt.”

In addition, it should not be forgotten that the system was used by God to deliver the slaves from African paganism into a generally Christian culture. Further, the practitioners of African voodoo were just as culpable in ensnaring their black countrymen as were the slave traders.

The Fundamental Issue

“Covenanters opposed the Constitution primarily because it forgot God and did not acknowledge Christ, and secondarily because it had pro-slavery provisions. They saw slavery as the manifestation of the root problem of godlessness.” (Explicitly Christian Politics, p2,p3).

The forerunner of the National Reform Association met in Xenia, Ohio in the midst of the Civil War and drew these conclusions, “We regard the neglect of God and His law, by omitting all acknowledgment of them in our Constitution, as the crowning original sin of the nation, and slavery as one of its natural outgrowths. Therefore, the most important step remains yet to be taken – to amend the Constitution so as to acknowledge God and the authority of His law….”

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