In the years before the American Civil War, slavery was not only defended by politicians and slaveholders. Some Christian ministers also built theological arguments around it, using the Bible to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity. One of them was George D. Armstrong, a Presbyterian pastor in Norfolk, Virginia.
Armstrong was born in New Jersey in 1813 and graduated from Princeton College in 1832. He later studied at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia before entering the Presbyterian ministry. In 1851, he became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, where he remained for several decades.
During his years in Norfolk, Armstrong wrote The Christian Doctrine of Slavery, which was published by Charles Scribner in 1857. The 148-page book was his most extensive defense of slavery, arguing from the Bible that the institution was compatible with Christianity. In the preface, he said he hoped the book would bring Christians in the North and South to “see eye to eye” on the question of slavery.
Armstrong’s central argument was that if slaveholding itself were a sin, the New Testament would have clearly identified it as one. His first chapter was titled “Slaveholding Not in Any Catalogue of Sins or Offences Given Us in the New Testament.” He examined lists of sins in the New Testament and pointed out that slaveholding did not appear among them.
Armstrong also relied heavily on passages in the New Testament that instructed slaves to obey their masters.
He pointed to Ephesians 6:5 and Titus 2:9, where the apostles told slaves to obey their masters and to please them in all things, while also reminding masters of their own duties. Armstrong argued that the apostles’ instructions to slaves about their duties, without any command to Christian slaveholders to free them, showed that Christianity itself did not condemn slaveholding.
Armstrong also confronted the argument that American slavery was fundamentally different from the forms of servitude mentioned in Scripture. His answer was to divide slavery into what he called its “essential” and “incidental” elements. The essential part, he argued, was not condemned by God’s law. Abuses could be condemned without condemning slavery itself. This distinction allowed him to acknowledge cruelty while preserving the institution.
He took a similar approach when discussing the church’s role in slavery. He argued that the church’s task was not to attack slavery as an institution, but to bring both masters and slaves into the Christian faith. His proposed approach was to preach the same Gospel to both, allow them to attend the same church, and have them worship together. In his view, a master and an enslaved person could be equal as Christians while the master still legally owned the enslaved person.
Armstrong Was Not Alone
Armstrong was not the only Christian pastor who used the Bible to defend slavery. Baptist pastor Thornton Stringfellow published A Scriptural Defence of Slavery, while Richard Furman wrote in 1822 that the right to hold enslaved people was “clearly established in the Holy Scriptures.” Presbyterian pastor Benjamin Morgan Palmer likewise used biblical arguments to defend slavery.
These men did not all make exactly the same arguments. They did, however, share the belief that slavery was compatible with Christianity.
Their disagreement with abolitionists reveals one of the central contradictions in the religious history of American slavery: Christians could read the same Bible and reach opposite conclusions about what it demanded. Abolitionists appealed to Christian principles to attack the institution of slavery, while ministers like Armstrong argued that Scripture allowed it to stand.
George D. Armstrong continued as pastor in Norfolk for many years and died in 1899, long after slavery had been abolished in the United States. His 1857 book remains a primary example of how a Christian minister used biblical interpretation to defend slavery at a time when the institution was becoming one of the most bitterly contested moral and political issues in America.
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Sources:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/590be125ff7c502a07752a5b/t/59c5dc9f37c58193140b510c/1506139307268/Armstrong%2C+George+D+-+The+Christian+Doctrine+of+Slavery.pdf
https://www.loc.gov/item/11007586/
https://confessional.org/authors/george-dodd-armstrong
