What Hath God Wrought (70 page)

Dentistry provided a bright spot in the generally gloomy picture. Although the transportation revolution had harmful consequences in contagious disease, the spread of commercial society, advertisements in the printed media, and the widespread aspiration to a better life stimulated desire for dental care and products. Dental fillings, extractions, and prostheses (false teeth) improved in quality in response to consumer demand and competition among providers. The expanding middle class adopted tooth brushing, a major step in the improvement of health. A New Orleans dentist named Levi Parmly recommended his patients floss their teeth with silk thread as early as 1815, though flossing did not become common until after the invention of nylon in the twentieth century. In Europe dentistry had often been considered a trade rather than a profession, but in the United States its status improved. Leading dentists held M.D. degrees. In 1840 the first American dental school opened in Baltimore, and within a generation American dentistry had become recognized as the best in the world.
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One major medical innovation did occur in the United States: the demonstration of anesthesia in 1846. Until then, only alcohol and versions of opium mitigated the agony of surgery. In the absence of anesthesia, patients were reluctant to undergo operations for any but the most serious of reasons, limiting surgeons’ opportunities to learn new procedures. Nevertheless, amputation of limbs was tragically common, because in unsanitary surroundings, wounded extremities often developed septicemia or gangrene. Without anesthesia, surgeons placed a great premium on getting their procedures over with quickly, although their haste increased the risk of errors. About a quarter of amputees died from shock or infection.
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On October 16, 1846, William Morton (significantly, a dentist by profession) successfully administered ether during an operation by Dr. John C. Warren for the removal of a neck tumor at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Others had been engaged in parallel research on anesthetic, including Morton’s former dental partner, Horace Wells, and a Georgia surgeon, Crawford Long. Morton’s public demonstration at one of America’s leading hospitals brought anesthesia international attention, but his efforts to obtain patent rights brought him only litigation and controversy—especially with Wells and a Harvard chemistry professor named Charles T. Jackson, who had provided advice. A farmer’s son dreaming of riches and fame, Morton neglected his practice to pursue his court actions. He died twenty-two years later in embittered poverty. Meanwhile, ether, chloroform, and other varieties of anesthesia, despite justified concern about their safety, had gained applications in surgery, dentistry, and obstetrics throughout the Western world. Besides its medical impact, anesthesia stimulated philosophical and religious debate over the function of pain in human existence. With the invention of anesthesia, medical science intersected with the humanitarian reform impulse that sought to minimize the infliction of physical pain in a wide variety of contexts, including corporal punishment of schoolchildren, wives, convicts, slaves, and members of the armed forces.
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VI

The Bible occupied an even more prominent position in discussions of morality than it did in education and science. Pre–Civil War Americans debating moral issues almost always appealed to biblical authority. This practice extended to the most divisive of all arguments over social morality, the debate over slavery. In 1837, Theodore Dwight Weld published
The Bible Against Slavery
. Like other abolitionists, he quoted St. Paul’s great speech in Athens, that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). One did not enslave kinfolk. But the defenders of slavery answered by quoting Noah: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9:25). In rebuttal, Weld responded that no evidence showed Africans descended from Canaan. For abolitionists like Weld, slavery clearly violated a precept of Mosaic Law that Jesus had declared one of God’s greatest commandments: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:28–31). To this, the redoubtable Southern Baptist Thornton Stringfellow pointed out that many other passages in the Pentateuch indicate God’s Chosen People practiced chattel slavery and that God, far from issuing a blanket condemnation of the institution, prescribed legal rules for it (as in Exodus 21). Rabbi M. J. Raphall of New York City vouched for the legality of slavery under the Torah.
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Abolitionists retorted that the patriarchs practiced polygamy too, but this did not legitimate it for Christian men. When opponents of slavery appealed to the Golden Rule in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, proslavery writers pointed out that Paul’s Epistle to Philemon proved that the church of New Testament times, like the Israel of Old Testament times, had included slaveholders and recognized their rights.
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Although David Strauss published his
Life of Jesus
in Germany in 1835, on the western side of the Atlantic American Christians carried on their debates without reference to the “higher criticism” of the Bible that Strauss’s book exemplified. Nevertheless a difference marked the two sides’ use of biblical references. Southerners seized upon specific and literal textual examples, while the advocates of antislavery invoked the general tenor of the Bible, for example, that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). The abolitionist Angelina Grimké declared the real issue not whether Jesus had ever explicitly condemned slavery but whether one could imagine Him owning a slave.
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The debate over the scriptural status of slavery did not involve only the extremists on both sides. One of the most comprehensive exchanges on the subject occurred in a series of letters between two Baptist clerical moderates, Francis Wayland (president of Brown University and author of the most widely used American textbook on moral philosophy) and Richard Fuller (pastor of a large Baltimore congregation and a leader of the new Southern Baptist Convention).
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Who “won” the biblical debate depends on whom you ask. At the time, each side felt it had the better of the argument. Some American historians have ruled in favor of the proslavery controversialists, but most contemporary Protestant foreign observers found the antislavery side more convincing—as would most American Christians today. To Jesuit commentators in Rome, the debate demonstrated the chaotic consequences of Protestants’ lack of a single religious authority.
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After the great debate over slavery by the Virginia legislature in 1831–32 had concluded, Thomas R. Dew, a professor at William and Mary College, published a
Review of the Debate
(1832) that commanded great attention throughout the South. Demonstrating the broad intellectual range of the moral philosophers of his time, he drew upon classical economics and the demography of Malthus. Dew sought to prevent further agitation of the slavery question in the southern states because it would indicate to the slaves that insurrections such as Turner’s might pay off. He concentrated his fire on the colonization proposals that had been advanced by legislators from western Virginia and constituted the most widespread version of antislavery in the South. Compensated emancipation and/or colonization would add prohibitively to the tax burden, he argued; uncompensated emancipation he dismissed as manifestly unjust. Dew did not shrink from defending slavery on economic grounds as an efficient and profitable system. Colonization programs would create a labor shortage and deprive the state of its valuable export of surplus slaves to the Southwest, he warned. Dew did not go so far as to claim slavery superior to free labor, but he included philosophical and biblical defenses of slavery in his presentation to show that it was not necessarily an immoral system. Dew belonged to a generation that readily believed in the providential identity of morality and profitability. If at some future time slavery ceased to be profitable in Virginia (an eventuality he thought quite possible), then would be the just time to reconsider emancipation. Although not flawless, Dew’s arguments hurt the cause of colonization in the South at the same time it also came under fire in the North from abolitionists. In the first half century of independence, comparatively few intellectual defenses of slavery had appeared. Dew’s skillful and wide-ranging presentation commenced a new era of boldness on the part of slavery’s defenders. Not many of them, however, followed him in emphasizing the economic case.
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In the early years of the republic, critics of slavery had by no means all come from the North, nor were its few defenders necessarily southerners. Indeed, the existence of opposition to slavery within the South had reassured northerners that the task of emancipation could safely be left in state hands. By the 1830s, however, debates over slavery, often conducted between clergymen and highlighting the biblical arguments, had taken on an overwhelmingly sectional character, although northern biblical scholars like Moses Stuart and Charles Hodge occasionally supplied ammunition their southern colleagues could use to effect.
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Within the South, criticism of slavery was dampened down by the severe controls imposed in reaction against the abolitionist petition campaign of 1835. Dedicated southern abolitionists like James Birney and Angelina Grimké found they had to move to the North. Defying all threats, Cassius Clay (cousin of Henry Clay) managed to stay in Kentucky and maintain an antislavery movement there. Meanwhile, the increasing world demand for cotton made slavery ever more attractive economically, and the felt need to justify the system against its outside critics all the more urgent following emancipation in the British West Indies (1833). Southern intellectuals rallied to their section’s defense. Of possible arguments on behalf of slavery, they most often employed the biblical.
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The evangelical churches in the South had been a source of antislavery agitation in the eighteenth century. As late as 1818 the nationwide Presbyterian Church had declared slavery “utterly inconsistent with the law of God,” without any southern objection voiced. But southern evangelicals gradually made their peace with their section’s “peculiar institution” as the price for continuing undisturbed with their preaching and voluntary activities. By the 1830s, their clergy typically endorsed the biblical warrants for practicing slavery. They directed their reform efforts to temperance and combating the high level of violence in southern society, while providing religious instruction to slave and free alike and reminding slaveholders of their paternalistic responsibilities to their dependents. “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven” (Colossians 4:1). The very clergy who would quote scripture to defend the slave system against outside critics also admonished masters, sometimes in the presence of their slaves, against breaking up families or preventing slaves from hearing or reading for themselves the divine word. The most distinguished South Carolina theologian, James H. Thornwell, justified slavery from the Bible but advocated state legislation during the 1840s to protect slave marriages and repeal restrictions on slave literacy. The Georgia Presbyterian clergyman Charles Colcock Jones, owner of three plantations and one hundred slaves, devoted his ministry to
The Religious Instruction of the Negroes
(title of his 1842 book), sometimes working in collaboration with black preachers. Jones saw himself as a social reformer trying to humanize the institution of slavery.
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The South’s evangelical clergy did not usually claim that slavery was “a positive good” (as Calhoun and some southern Jacksonian politicians began to do), but they certainly denied its intrinsic immorality. Chiefly, they resented the imputation that slaveholders were necessarily evil people. In 1844, when the national Methodist Church refused to accept as a bishop a man whose wife had inherited slaves, the Southern Methodist Church seceded. The following year the Southern Baptists likewise created their own denomination. The Presbyterians, who had split along Old School/New School theological lines in 1837, split again on sectional lines just before the Civil War. Emancipation and colonization at some undefined future time allotted by divine providence, when “conditions are ripe,” remained a vague but not uncommon hope among antebellum southern evangelicals. The earthly millennium would bring deliverance from slavery.
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The Roman Catholic Church in the United States adopted a position not far removed from that of southern evangelical Protestants—if anything, more conservative. In 1839 the otherwise arch-conservative Pope Gregory XVI forbade Catholics to participate in the Atlantic slave trade (by then largely in the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese) but did not condemn slavery itself. Scripture and natural law (going back to Aristotle) sanctioned the institution so long as masters permitted slaves to marry and receive religious instruction. Even when masters did not live up to their obligations, the church taught it preferable to suffer the wrong than to risk social turmoil, perhaps even race war, by immediate emancipation. Abolitionist rhetoric invoked principles derived from Protestantism and the Enlightenment, and emphasized the urgency of the slavery problem; it conveyed little appeal to antebellum American Catholics. Their religion honored the spiritual discipline of patient suffering and submission more than Protestantism did, and valued individual autonomy less. Sometimes individuals had to sacrifice for the sake of public order or community welfare, even to the point of accepting enslavement. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church generally set its face against liberalism, modernism, and republicanism. It had not embraced the Enlightenment as Anglophone Protestantism had. Most of the American Catholic bishops who came after John Carroll were Europeans and shared that predominantly conservative outlook. Social engineering, such as planned colonization, seemed anathema to such men. Postmillennial expectations, which gave theological underpinning to Protestant Americans’ faith in progress, had no Catholic analogue. Anti-Catholicism among Protestants and anti-Protestantism among Catholics, both of them strong and mutually reinforcing, prevented cooperation in antislavery (or, indeed, any other enterprises).
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