Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [210]
As Morse explained, the key to understanding slavery as an essential feature of divine governance is The Fall. Man was created in the image of God, partaking of the Divine Nature, but by his first Disobedience assumed the image of Satan. To help restore man to his original state, God arranged society as a “system of restraints” on man’s proud will. He instituted four relationships: civil government, marriage, parenthood, and servility. Each relation consists of a superior and an inferior party: ruler and ruled, husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. All four share “the one great central idea in Man’s Redemption, to wit, Obedience, the natural antidote to Disobedience.” The enslavement of blacks is no less legitimate or moral than marriage, a system of divinely decreed educational and disciplinary restraint: “God, in his wisdom and far-sighted benevolence, has ordained that despised and vilified relation as the means of bringing that race home to himself. This is the Bible theory.”
That this view of slavery did represent “the Bible theory,” Morse demonstrated by numerous citations of Scripture, and forays into philology and hermeneutics. For instance, against claims that the Bible spoke of “servants” but not of “slaves,” he argued that the Hebrew word ebed, often translated as “servant,” literally meant “bond slave.” So where the King James version of Genesis 25 rendered Noah’s words as “Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be,” a more correct translation would read “Cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall he be.” In a typical bit of hermeneutics, Morse offered scriptural evidence implying that God ordained the continuance of slavery until the end of time. Regarding matrimony, one of the four “servile relations,” Jesus says in Mark 12:25: “when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” Since the New Testament foretells no end to matrimonial servility until the Resurrection, there is likewise no reason to suppose that God contemplates an end to the servility of slavery before the Last Day: “The time when this relation [marriage] is to cease may I think be assumed for all the others ‘when they shall rise from the dead.’”
Morse tried to account for the acceptance in America of quite contrary, unscriptural ideas of human government. Much of the ideological corruption he traced to the Infidelity that had muddled Western thought since the French Revolution, had been fought by his father, and continued at present to inspire antislavery Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and other religious liberals—“the Christ rejecting humanitarian, the Bible spurning infidel, the pseudo merciful universalist, and the nothingarian.” They all spoke and acted as if man were not a fallen, degenerate being, but still innocent and obedient to God’s will. Atheists at heart, they secularized and thus debased the scriptural understanding of freedom as Freedom from Sin, “giving freedom & liberty an earthly, low, civil & political sense, as if an indiscriminate social & political liberty of every human being were the scope and end of man’s redemption.”
Despite his devotion to the cult of George Washington, Morse did not exempt the Revolutionary generation itself from fostering “the miserable delusion of negro freedom.” Some of its members had been contaminated by the rampant godlessness of the age:
I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the time, when that Declaration was made, favored the infidel views of some eminent minds who were parties to the promulgation of fundamental error …. The so styled self evident truths are not all truths. Some are self evident falsehoods.
The untruths included a supposedly inalienable