Slavery and Divisiveness in the US in the 19th Century

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Slavery and Divisiveness in the 19th Century
The issue of slavery is central in US history. It is impossible to eliminate slavery and its effects when describing America's progress. In the 19th century, calls for abolition intensified as blacks sought their freedom. The slaveholders felt disadvantaged since losing enslaved people meant a more expensive labor source. The enslaved people, on the other hand, felt that it was time to gain their freedom. This paper will demonstrate why7 slavery became increasingly divisive in America as the 19th century progressed.
Division on Religious Basis
While religion provided bonds among the dicers groups in the southern society, it also caused sharp divisions among enslaved people and their owners. In the early 1800s, Evangelical Protestantism had been critical in opposing slavery among some poor white whites. It also was instrumental in fueling resistance by both free blacks and enslaved people. In the late 1700s, a renewed evangelical movement emerged and became known as the Second Great Awakening. The movement emphasized, “the equal brotherhood of believers” (Chapter 5: Revolution, Constitution, and the People 249). Evangelicals belied that slavery violated the teaching of Christ on the essence of brotherhood. They advocated that slavery violated scriptural teachings on how people should treat one another. In Christ, all were equal since there was no slave or free. Such teaching was popular among the slaves, who saw Christianity as a way out of their predicament. The slaves saw the Evangelical Church as a vehicle they could use to reclaim their freedom from their masters.
However, in the 1830s, slaveholding elites gained more powerful positions within the evangelical churches. The churches, which had earlier included blacks and whites, started erecting racial barriers. Planters tried to utilize religion as a means of binding slaves tightly to the southern system. The owners increasingly controlled their slaves’ attendance at church to ensure that the latter could not use Christianity to advocate for their freedom. However, some enslaved people like Fredrick Douglas were frustrated by the idea that God required blacks to submit to slavery and “wear their chains in meekness and humility” (Chapter 9: Part Two: Free Labor and Slavery, 1970-1850 436). Blacks started resisting messages that called for servility. For instance, Robert Rayland, a white pastor in Virginia, was a defender of slavery. In the 1840s, he started preaching that a black man had once proclaimed that God had given the whole continent to the whites and that it was the duty of the blacks to submit. As a result, blacks started lingering after Ryland’s services to listen to the sermons of blacks. At one point, Rayland noted that some black preachers got more attention from the blacks than he did.
The opposition to the new form of Christianity advocated by evangelical churches angered the free and black slaves. On the one hand, the slaveholders worried that slaves might get dangerous ideas from preachers the whites had already sanctioned. Most white southerners worried that prayers, songs, and sermons filled with connotations of human freedom a...