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.24 His emotional, even passionate critique ofslavery rendered in an often-quoted section of his Notes revealed many of the early24T H E U P P E R S O U T H ’ S T R A V A I Lrepublican fears about slavery.Jeff erson worried about slavery’s tendency to cor-rupt the character of the virtuous (white) republican.“The whole commerce betweenmaster and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the mostunremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,”Jeff erson lamented.“The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners andmorals undepraved by such circumstances.” 25 Thanks to compelling genetic evidence,informed Americans now know that Jeff erson was not such a prodigy.Jeff ersonfathered at least one child by his slave Sally Hemings, and most historians now con-cede that Jeff erson’s reference to the “boisterous passions” encouraged and unleashedby slavery likely includes a measure of fi rst-person confession.26But Jeff erson’s rather sweeping indictment of slavery as antirepublican containedmany of the criticisms that reverberated throughout the upper South for the nextfi fty years.For Jeff erson, slaveholding schooled white Virginians in the most unre-publican character.Not just masters but all whites in a slaveholding society were“daily exercised in tyranny” and transformed into “despots” by the power of masteryand the potential, indeed the inevitability, of its abuse.Nor did slavery promote thespirit of self-sufficiency so admired by republican freeholders.Instead, it destroyedthe “industry” of whites.“In a warm climate,” Jeff erson argued, “no man will laborfor himself who can make another labor for him.” And Jeff erson’s observations con-vinced him that only a “very small proportion” of slaveholders were “ever seen tolabor.” The Sage of Monticello also worried about white safety.Either “a revolutionof the wheel of fortune” or a divine justice that “could not sleep forever” might com-bine with the “numbers” of slaves in Virginia to unleash a slave rebellion that wouldignite a larger civil war between whites and blacks that would end in the slaughterof one race.Jeff erson concluded by wishing, “under the auspices of heaven, for atotal emancipation” carried out “with the consent of the masters, rather than by theirextirpation.” 27With the exception of his reference to divine justice, however, Jeff erson’ssolilo quy on slavery’s incompatibility with republican ideals omitted any referenceto the other important moral code that nurtured post-Revolutionary doubts aboutslavery among whites in the upper South: the growing infl uence of evangelicalChristianity.Arguably, the teachings of evangelical Christianity and the activismof church leaders proved the single most powerful infl uence spurring upper Southwhites to question slavery in the late eighteenth century.28 Beginning with revivalsled by the evangelical Presbyterian Samuel Davies in the s, and expanded by theevangelical appeals of Methodists and Baptists to Virginians of both races, evangeli-cal Christianity gained infl uence in late-eighteenth-century Virginia and in someinstances off ered serious challenges to the moral and political authority of Virginia’slargely Anglican gentry.The new communities of faith created by the evangelicalmovement included both whites (even prominent and wealthy whites) and blacksO W N I N G S L A V E S , D I S O W N I N G S L A V E R Y25(slave and free).In the state’s Tidewater region, slaves often constituted the majorityof church members.In , Richard Courtney, pastor at Richmond’s First BaptistChurch, served a “large congregation of Negroes” there.These evangelical churches,which usually allowed only white males to participate in matters of governance,were hardly models of racial egalitarianism, but the practice of worshiping together,sharing faith, and calling members “brother” and “sister,” regardless of race or secularstatus, off ered a less hierarchical manner of racial interaction than was found in anyother Virginia institution.29Evangelical Christianity not only provided a key point of contact, and at least tosome degree shared cultural values, between the races but also mounted a seriouscritique of slavery based on the religion’s foundational teachings and values.Sincethe evangelical denominations were actively proselytizing in Virginia, this critiquehad the potential to reach a larger audience than the antislavery messages ema-nating from the Quakers.In fact, in , just as American Methodists severedtheir ties with Britain’s Anglican church, the newly independent denomination alsodenounced slavery, ordering local pastors and circuit riders to free their slaves or faceexpulsion, and issuing a similar warning to the lay members who bought and soldslaves.30 But the antislavery message of evangelical pastors often failed to fi nd recep-tive ears among the laity.British-born Methodist evangelist Thomas Coke, a sharpcritic of slavery, encountered violent opposition to Methodist antislavery teachingswhile preaching in Virginia’s southern Piedmont.His message, Coke wrote, onceprompted many who heard him to “combine together to fl og me
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