THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND SLAVERY IN AMERICA.

WILLIAM STUART NELSON,

Howard University.

THE BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN SLavery.

The enslaving of Africans was not native to American soil. Not only was it practiced abroad but it was rooted in the political, economic, social, and indeed, the religious backgrounds of European states. It had been found profitable economically, it was not unwelcome socially, and it was nurtured politically and religiously. To consider, first, the political situation

"England had always held her sceptre over slaves of some character, villeins, in the feudal era, stolen Africans under Elizabeth and under the house of Tudors; Caucasian children, whose German blood could be traced beyond the battle of Hastings in her mines, factories, and mills; and vanquished Brahmans in her Eastern possessions."1 Further, the English had followed the example of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators who a half century before America was discovered had introduced African slaves into Europe. Thus was she well prepared, remarks Wilson, "to introduce slaves and to prosecute the African slave traffic with vigor and on a large scale."2 Evidence of Queen Elizabeth's approval of the traffic is seen in the fact that she knighted that disreputable slave trader, John Hawkins, and "gave him for a crest the device of a Negro's head and bust with arms securely bound." Before the middle of the seventeenth century the British attorney general handed down the decision that “Negroes, being pagans, might justly be held in slavery even in England itself," and between 1672 and 1713 "Parliament declared that slave-trade was highly beneficial and advantageous to this Kingdom and to the plantations and colonies thereunto belonging."5 Queen Anne in 1702 directed that the people of New York "take especial care, that God Almighty be devoutly

1 Williams, George W., "History of the Negro Race in America," Vol. I, p. 120.

2 Wilson, Henry-"History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America," Vol. 1, p. 2.

8 Brawley, Benjamin G., "A Short History of the American Negro," p. 4.

4 Greely, Horace "The American Conflict," p. 30.

Hart, Albert Bushnell—“Slavery and Abolition,” p. 52.

5 Spears, John R.-"The American Slave Trade," p. 16.