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The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865
Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout
| In his later years Edwards Amasa Park contemplated writing a biography of the great colonial American theologian Jonathan Edwards, but he never lived to carry out the plan. Park (1808–1900), a professor at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, was commonly known as "the last of the Edwardseans," the line of orthodox Calvinist theologians who subscribed to Edwards's thought. In notes made in 1903 describing the sources collected by his father for the biography, William Edwards Park wrote that Jonathan Edwards had "recognized African Slavery[.] He held much the same view which Professor Stuart afterwards adopted." "Professor Stuart" was Moses Stuart (1780–1852), the elder Park's colleague at Andover, an apologist for slavery, a colonizationist—that is, an advocate of exporting freed blacks back to Africa—and a defender of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. William Park's statement, it turns out, was essentially correct. Many nineteenth-century figures who claimed to be followers of Edwards were actually closer to him in their conservative support of slavery than they were to the first-generation followers of Edwards, whose theology was known as the New Divinity. Among the New Divinity's adherents was Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), who distinguished himself during the revolutionary era by calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.1 |
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Most research on religion and antislavery has followed a well-worn path pioneered by Gilbert H. Barnes, John L. Thomas, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Their studies emphasized "evangelical" and Unitarian reformers such as the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, the sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and William Lloyd Garrison. More recently, studies of African American figures such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth have revealed the indispensability of black voices for liberation. Over the last quarter of a century, important studies have focused on the religious convictions brought to the antislavery debate.2 Yet conspicuously absent have been reformers in the New Divinity and Edwardsean tradition. Although now largely unknown, that tradition represented a major intellectual and social force in antebellum American society, and it constitutes the primary focus of this essay.3 This study contributes to the histories of the antislavery debate and of religion by showing how a religious movement that started with radical antislavery principles in the revolutionary period gradually and largely, but never wholly, abandoned the principles of immediate emancipation and racial integration. |
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In American social and intellectual history, it has been common to use a "declension" model to describe the devolution of movements from primitive originality and genius to dissipation, imitation, and irrelevance. Scholars have thus long portrayed the adherents of Edwards as mere shadows of the founder who did not fully understand his ideas. By the early nineteenth century, scholars have often suggested, the New Divinity that Edwards founded was dead.4 Recently, however, scholars of religion have been reevaluating antebellum religious thought and culture and have found important Edwardsean continuities up to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, and in figures supposedly thoroughly hostile to Edwards. By focusing on the involvement of Edwards's followers in the debate over slavery, we show that here, at least, the declension model holds true, though the tradition reached its apex, not in the progenitor, but in his first-generation disciples. |
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