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By Root 1581 0

right to liberty, which actually had been lost to man by the rebellion in Eden. “Slavery, the subjection of one’s will to the will of another, since the fall of man, is the rule, and not liberty.” And having introduced into American culture ideas inconsistent with Scripture, the Declaration had now become enthroned as an idol: “the Gospel of Peace has been cast out of its proper temples, to give place to a religion, whose Bible is the Declaration of Independence.” Indeed the present crisis might be God’s way of humbling the country for deifying Liberty instead of Him.

Nature as well as Scripture warranted slavery, Morse observed, blacks being a “weak and degraded race.” The opinion was not recent; his earlier papers contain many such slurs. Lecturing on art in 1826, for instance, he told his New York audience that on the chain of being, blacks ranked with beasts: “witness the negro, the ouran outan, the baboon, the monkey by gradual and downward steps blending the human face divine, with the unseemly visage of the brute.” Now he defended the “cornerstone doctrine,” named after some much-quoted remarks in an address by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens said that the “corner stone” of the new Southern nation was racial superiority, “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Morse agreed. Divinely ordained physical differences, he said, dictated the domination of blacks by whites: “Nothing is clearer to my mind than that the status of the African in the compound of the Caucasian & the African, is that of subjection to the superior race, and this is best for both races.”

Morse emphasized this “best” in all his arguings, stressing the benefits of slavery to the slave. The institution had produced examples of domestic contentment rarely known in this fallen world: “Protection and judicious guidance and careful provision on the one part; cheerful obedience, affection, and confidence on the other.” The apostle Paul himself had advised a slave to prefer slavery to freedom, even given a chance to become free. And missionary experience confirmed the wisdom of Paul’s advice, Morse commented. After fifty years’ labor the American missionary churches overseas could count only about 44,500 conversions among free blacks. By contrast, churches in the South could boast more than 500,000 converts among enslaved blacks. The salutary message was dramatically clear: “CHRISTIANITY HAS BEEN MOST SUCCESSFULLY PROPAGATED AMONG A BARBAROUS RACE, WHEN THEY HAVE BEEN ENSLAVED TO A CHRISTIAN RACE. Slavery to them has been Salvation, and Freedom, ruin.”

Like Morse’s warnings of foreign conspiracy, his defense of slavery, summarized above, offered his readers few unfamiliar ideas. Pro-and anti-slavery writings of the time were a sort of community product, its authors taking different approaches but arriving at the same conclusions. Both sides cited Scripture. Pro-slavery biblicists often contended that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were slaveholders and that Paul in several of his epistles admonished slaves to obey their masters. Many writers also attacked the Declaration’s axioms about Liberty, antebellum experience having shown clearly enough that men were not born free and equal. And belief in the racial inferiority of blacks permeated American culture. It gained sanction from the claim of nineteenth-century ethnological pseudo-scientists that the various races constituted separate species, with blacks at the bottom of the scale.

What distinguishes Morse’s treatment of these common themes is his neo-Puritan vision of their historical connection and continuity, beginning with the rebellion in Eden. “My fundamental axiom,” he said, “is the degeneracy of man.” He had of course remained a pious Christian all his life. But the remark suggests that he steadied himself against the upheavals of war by embracing with new intensity the rigorous Calvinist-Federalist principles of his childhood. As he put it, “I have chosen to