Early American Christianity

  In the decades leading up to the Civil War, American Christianity grappled intensely with the moral status of slavery. Christian denominations increasingly fractured over whether to condemn or defend the peculiar institution. The Methodist Episcopal Church provides an illuminating example of these debates. From its origins, Methodism held an antislavery position, but this weakened over time as it expanded in the slaveholding South. By the 1850s, tensions erupted in calls for separation by Southerners. Examining Methodist discourse on slavery and secession reveals how religion shaped conceptions of slavery and sectionalism in the antebellum period.   Early Methodism officially opposed slavery. John Wesley, Methodism's founder, called it "execrable sum of all villainies," and American Methodists largely shared this view. [1] As Methodists proselytized across the new nation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they "bore public testimony against slavery&quo