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Connecticut Ministers and Slavery, 1790–1795
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
No fanfare or stirring resolves marked the founding of Connecticut's first antislavery organization. Quietly instituted late in the summer of 1790, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage soon betrayed a lack of direction and purpose. Upon reading the newly-drafted constitution of the Society, one Connecticut minister decided, “It does not appear that the Society is of much importance as it respects its influence in this State, as there is here scarcely a claim for its exertions.” And yet, during the five uneventful years of its existence, the organization attracted a large contingent of hyper-Calvinist ministers like Benjamin Trumbull, moderate Calvinists like Yale's Ezra Stiles, and unrepentant liberal clergymen like James Dana. All of the ministers involved were Congregationalists. The Society also included a number of prominent and pious laymen and even a sprinkling of prominent and openly irreverent ones. If the Society's work is compared to the ambitious programs of sister organizations in New York and Philadelphia, however, it appears that the Connecticut Society did not do much more than enlist the moral support of religious, political, and social leaders in the state.
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References
James Essig is an Assistant Professor of American Historyat Western Maryland College,Westminster, Maryland, 21157.This article forms part of a larger study on American evangelicals and antislavery work in the eighteenth century. The larger study, still in manuscript, was awarded the Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church History.
1 H. Channing to Simeon Baldwin, 22 Nov. 1790, Box 6, Baldwin Family Papers (Yale University Library). All quotations from the Baldwin Family Papers, the Roger Sherman Collection, and the Benjamin Trumbull Papers are used by permission of the Yale University Library.
2 See Moseley, Thomas R., “A History of the New York Manumission Society, 1785–1849” (Ph.D. diss., New York Universityy, 1963)Google Scholar, and Zilversmit, Arthur, The First Emancipation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 162–65Google Scholar. In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975)Google Scholar, David Brion Davis noted that organized anti-slavery activity in New Haven was “weak and short-lived” (p. 218n).
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16 Ibid., I, 243–46, 18; I, 154–57, 15.
16 Ibid., “Notes to Part I,” 170.
17 Ibid., II, 193–94, 36–37; II, 205–06, 37.
18 Ibid., II, 209–12, 37; II, 204, 37.
19 Ibid., II, 247–48, 38; II, 253–60, 38.
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30 Ibid., p. 127.
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42 The membership has been reconstructed from lists in the following collections: 20 Oct. 1790, Box 6, Baldwin Family Papers; 13 Sept. 1792, Box 7, Baldwin Family Papers; 12 Sept. 1793, Box 4, Benjamin Trumbull Papers; 11 May, 1791 in Ford, Emily E. F. and Skeel, Emily E. F., Notes on the Life of Noah Webster (New York: Kathleen Turle, et al., 1912), 2, 480Google Scholar.
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45 Theodore Dwight, Chauncey Goodrich, and Zephaniah Swift would all one day attend the Hartford Convention. Purcell, p. 292.
46 Minutes of 31 Oct. 1791, Box 6, Baldwin Family Papers; H. Channing to Simeon Baldwin, 22 Nov. 1790, Box 6, Baldwin Family Papers.
47 Elnathan Beech to Jonathan Edwards, Jr., 7 Dec. 1791, Box 6, Baldwin Family Papers; William Law and Elnathan Beech to Simeon Baldwin, 26 April 1792, Box 7, Baldwin Family Papers; Benjamin Trumbull to John Lewis, 19 March 1792, Box 7, Baldwin Family Papers.
48 Minutes of 10 Jan. 1791, Box 6, Baldwin Papers.
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60 Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 344, 373Google Scholar.
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