Basil Manly Sr. was more than a Southern preacher, he was one of the most vocal and influential theological defenders of American slavery. A prominent Baptist minister, university president, and the author of the infamous Alabama Resolutions, Manly’s beliefs helped forge a religious foundation for the Southern Baptist Convention and bolstered the Confederacy’s moral justification for owning human beings.
Born near Pittsboro, North Carolina, on January 28, 1798, Basil Manly Sr. was the son of Revolutionary War veteran Captain John Basil Manly and Elizabeth Maultsby. In 1816, Manly entered the Bingham School and was baptized that same year at the Baptist Church of Christ in Chatham County. He quickly pursued a path into ministry, receiving his license to preach in 1818 and graduating valedictorian from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) in 1821.
Manly was ordained in 1822 and began his pastoral career at Little Stevens Creek Church in Edgefield County, South Carolina. In 1824, he married Sarah Murray Rudolph, with whom he had eight children.
A Life Built on Slavery
In 1837, Manly moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he became president of the University of Alabama, a position he held until 1855. During this time, he amassed significant wealth and status through the ownership of at least 40 enslaved Africans. But Manly did not simply benefit from slavery, he dedicated his life to defending and institutionalizing it.
Manly was not alone. During the 19th century, Christian ministers across the American South developed elaborate theological arguments to justify slavery. They frequently turned to the Bible, to claim divine approval of human bondage. Passages such as Leviticus 25:44–46, which speaks of purchasing slaves from surrounding nations, and Ephesians 6:5, where Paul tells slaves to obey their masters, were wielded as sacred proof that slavery had God’s blessing. Southern pastors argued that if slavery existed in biblical times, it could not be considered a sin in theirs.
To further justify the brutal system, these ministers framed slavery as part of a natural, God-given order. In sermons, and seminary lectures, they taught that Black obedience and white dominance were not only necessary for social stability but were essential to salvation itself. This religious framework helped millions of white Christians sleep soundly at night, believing their cruelty was a form of righteousness.
For Basil Manly Sr., slavery was not just tolerated, it was sacred. He repeatedly preached that slavery was part of God’s eternal design. While some pastors in the South tried to frame slavery as an unfortunate economic necessity, Manly went further: he declared slavery a divine institution, part of God’s ordained social order.
Manly’s theological arguments were not subtle. In his sermons and writings, he insisted that God had deliberately designed a social hierarchy in which white people were destined to rule, and Black people were destined to serve. He taught that this “divine order” naturally led some people “to labor, some to plan, and to direct the labor of others.” In this worldview, the African race had been divinely assigned a position of permanent servitude.
To Manly, slavery was not only acceptable, it was holy. He believed that enslaving Africans was a benevolent act, especially under Christian masters. He preached that if enslaved Africans simply accepted their God-ordained role in life, they would be rewarded both in this world and in the afterlife.
In one of his arguments, Manly suggested that the only reason enslaved Africans longed for freedom was because they had been captured too late in life. He proposed that it would have been better for traders to abduct them as babies, before they could remember what freedom was.
Manly’s theological support for slavery extended to defending brutal practices. He justified whipping and the forced separation of enslaved families as necessary for maintaining the divine social order. In one lecture, he even likened the relationship between whites and Africans to that of slave-making ants that capture members of other species to do their labor.
His ideology wasn’t limited to Sunday sermons. Manly used his influence to shape generations of Southern clergy, helping establish ministerial training institutions that perpetuated his brand of proslavery theology.
During the Civil War, Manly aligned himself with the Confederacy. His proslavery beliefs and writings helped provide a moral and religious justification for secession and for the continuation of slavery in the South.
Basil Manly Sr. suffered a stroke in 1864 and died on December 21, 1868, in Greenville, South Carolina. He was buried in Springwood Cemetery.
Today, Manly’s name is often left out of discussions of religious leadership in American history, but his legacy remains significant. His life and teachings are a perfect example of how religion was used not only to defend slavery, but to sanctify it, and to preach human bondage as the will of God.
Source:
https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/basil-manly/
https://cdm17336.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/u0003_0000900/id/15290
