Slavery's Holy Profits: Religion and Capitalism in the Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley
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University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2018 Slavery's Holy Profits: Religion and Capitalism in the Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley John Lindbeck University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Lindbeck, John, "Slavery's Holy Profits: Religion and Capitalism in the Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1424. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1424 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SLAVERY’S HOLY PROFITS: RELIGION AND CAPITALISM IN THE ANTEBELLUM LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History The University of Mississippi by JOHN LINDBECK May 2018 Copyright John Lindbeck 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley, a place in which white Americans identified the commercial progress of the slave-based cotton kingdom with the manifestation of God’s will. It reconciles the two different “Souths” described by recent historians of slavery and capitalism and scholars of antebellum southern evangelicalism. The dissertation begins with the early years of white settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley, when the connection between commercial prosperity and God’s providence was not clear. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, these twin ideals merged as one. In those decades, churches and ministers provided stable centers of faith and confidence in the years of high prices for land, cotton, and slaves. Despite their faith in God, however, white southerners’ doubts about the market and roving peddlers often morphed into doubts about the intentions of itinerant preachers. Still, evangelical denominations played a crucial role in providing reliable credit networks when few methods of examining the character of distant planters and merchants existed. With confidence in their economic system restored in the 1840s, evangelical slaveholders began to connect plantation efficiency with God’s will. They believed that maximizing productivity, whether through violence or prizes for enslaved people, increased prosperity and aided in the spread of the Gospel. In this way, white southerners in the lower Mississippi Valley believed race-based slavery was a holy institution, not just for its supposedly Biblical endorsement, but for its economic advantages over free labor. Spreading God’s kingdom necessitated driving ii slaves harder. By the 1850s evangelicals in the lower Mississippi Valley were increasingly confident that their economic and social system would ultimately prove to be the perfect will of God. With belief in God’s providence sanctifying their social system and their use of denominational institutions to facilitate financial transactions, this dissertation shows how the lower Mississippi Valley’s evangelicals helped create the cotton kingdom and slavery’s capitalism. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………….ii INTRODUCTION: “JEHOVAH SHALL BE THY CONFIDENCE”: THE COTTON KINGDOM AND GOD’S PROVIDENCE……………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE: EVANGELICALS IN CAPITALISM’S COTTON KINGDOM…………...7 CHAPTER TWO: CIVILIZING THE WILDERNESS: EVANGELICALS AND INDIAN REMOVAL……………………………………………………………………………..56 CHAPTER THREE: PREACHERS AND PEDDLERS: CREDIT AND BELIEF IN THE FLUSH TIMES…………………………………………………………………………93 CHAPTER FOUR: REBUILDING CREDIT NETWORKS: MINISTER-MERCHANTS AND TECHNOLOGIES OF FAITH………………………………………………………...136 CHAPTER FIVE: CAPITALIZING ON BELIEF: PUSHING SLAVES AND GOD’S WILL…………………………………………………………………………………..169 CHAPTER SIX: COMMERCIAL PROGRESS AND THE BUSINESS OF RELIGION…….202 EPILOGUE: THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND GOD’S POLITICAL ECONOMY…..234 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..245 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………..263 iv INTRODUCTION “JEHOVAH SHALL BE THY CONFIDENCE”: THE COTTON KINGDOM AND GOD’S PROVIDENCE In the last pages of Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, an anonymous “cosmopolitan,” aboard the steamboat Fidèle heading south from St. Louis to New Orleans, walks into a gentlemen’s cabin late at night and strikes up a conversation with an old man reading the Bible. Sitting at a small table lit by a lamp, their discussion turns to whether distrust of fellow men meant a distrust in the Creator. As the two speak of confidence in general and its implications for faith in God, a barefoot boy dressed in rags straggles into the cabin hawking passenger locks and money belts for security against thieves aboard the boat. When the old man decides to purchase the products, the boy throws in a book for free. The book is a counterfeit detector, a guide that divulges the minute characteristics of every kind of bank note from banks around the country. Since nineteenth-century Americans did not have a universal currency, state- chartered private banks printed their own paper notes redeemable in gold and silver from the bank’s vaults. The old man decides to test his three dollar bill on the Vicksburgh Trust and Insurance Banking Company, but the counterfeit detector says, “among fifty other things,” that a good bill must “have a kind of silky feel, being made by the lint of a red silk handkerchief stirred up in the paper-maker’s vat.” As the old man obsesses over his bill, the cosmopolitan dismisses 1 the counterfeit detector, arguing, “Believe me, the bill is good,” and that the detector is a sham meant to gin up people’s natural distrust of each other.1 Soon the cosmopolitan shifts his attention to “the book before him.” Without Melville immediately clarifying that this book was the Bible, not the counterfeit detector, the cosmopolitan wishes that “more confidence was put in” the Bible by “the travelling public.” The old man, “with an expression very unlike that with which he had bent over the detector,” replies that “in all our wanderings through this vale, how pleasant…to feel that we need start at no wild alarms, provide for no wild perils; trusting in that Power which is alike able and willing to protect us when we cannot ourselves.” In agreement with the old man, the cosmopolitan leans forward and quotes approvingly “that passage of Scripture which says, ‘Jehovah shall be thy confidence.’” Although they had previously debated the validity of the counterfeit detector’s description of genuine bank notes, both men assume that the other book before them, the Bible, is a genuine guide to be trusted for truth in this world and the next.2 In deliberately mixing up the counterfeit detector and the Bible, Melville points out the underlying similarities between antebellum evangelicalism and capitalism. Both depended on faith, either in unknown people or unknown sources of information. Both involved risk but promised some kind of reward. Even if paper bank notes and counterfeit detectors might be shams, the old man and the cosmopolitan agreed that the Bible must be true—if not, then what could be trusted? Despite its poor reception by literary critics when it was published, The Confidence-Man has been discussed at length by scholars in recent years, including American historians. Stephen Mihm and Walter Johnson have both used The Confidence-Man as a useful introduction to 1 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990), 294. 2 Ibid., 295-296. 2 understanding the culture of antebellum capitalism. Mihm, in A Nation of Counterfeiters, emphasizes the problem of confidence in American paper money in the age of independent wildcat banks. Johnson sees Melville’s novel as a metaphor of slave-racial-capitalism, with various individuals vouching for each other’s reputation and confidence, and an economic system that ultimately rests on slave labor. Although Mihm and Johnson point out important themes of the book, neither mentions one that is at least as pervasive as what they discuss: religion.3 From beginning to end, The Confidence-Man features Methodist preachers, evangelical missionaries raising money for missions and benevolent societies, Bible-reading passengers, and frequent philosophical discussions about God, Providence, and confidence in God’s will. Ignoring these themes throughout the book, as Mihm and Johnson do, blinds them to the importance Melville placed in them as well as religion’s broader significance in American history. The historiographical implications of this omission are significant: to each of these historians, as for many historians of nineteenth-century capitalism in recent years, religion and the rise of evangelical denominations have no importance in the larger narrative of America’s transformation from a yeoman republic to a capitalist empire. Although historians have discussed the confluence of evangelicalism and a market- oriented society in the nineteenth century at great length in the American North, they have virtually ignored those connections in the South, and to their detriment. By splitting religion and economics, they have missed Melville’s observation that faith in God and faith in a slave-based capitalist system fed off each other. 3 Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007),