Ham’s Children: How Scripture Was Made to Serve Slavery—and How the Enslaved Read It Otherwise
The same Bible that was used to command obedience in the fields became, in whispered prayer meetings, a text of liberation.
Image: Renty Taylor, an enslaved man from Columbia, South Carolina. Taken in 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy at the direction of Harvard anthropology professor, Louis Agassiz, this image stands not as a neutral portrait but as an artifact of slavery’s visual regime—an attempt to convert a human life into evidence for the lie of racial difference. Source: International African American Museum in Charleston
This is the second essay in a three-part series examining how sacred narratives, legal doctrine, and historical memory have been used to authorize claims over land, labor, and sovereignty.
If you missed Part I, read What God Hath Wrought: From Papal Bull to the Trail of Tears.
If you missed Part III, read The Lords of the Land: Israel in Caanan.
These histories are not identical, but each reveals how power seeks legitimacy through story.
In the low country of the American South, morning arrived slowly.
Mist rose from the river bottoms and drifted across fields of cotton and rice. Enslaved people moved toward the fields before sunrise, carrying sacks or tools, their bodies already trained to the rhythm that would govern the entire day: bend, pull, drop the cotton into the sack, step forward, bend again. The work continued until darkness.
From a distance the fields could look orderly, almost serene. But the order depended on constant supervision. Overseers rode along the rows on horseback. Patrols watched the roads at night. The plantation system—stretching across the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—was one of the most tightly controlled labor regimes in the modern world.
And yet, for the men who owned those plantations, force alone was never enough.
The problem confronting slaveholders was not only how to control enslaved labor but how to explain the system to themselves and to the society around them. By the late eighteenth century the Atlantic world had begun to debate the morality of slavery with increasing intensity. Enlightenment ideals, Christian reform movements, and abolitionist campaigns were spreading through Europe and North America. The contradiction between a republic that proclaimed liberty and an economy that depended on enslaved labor had become impossible to ignore.
Slaveholders needed a moral language that could reconcile those contradictions.
They found it in scripture.
Image: The so-called “Curse of Ham, a 19th-century oil on canvas by Ivan Stepanovitch Ksenofontov (-8-7-1875). Though Genesis places the curse on Canaan, later racial theology expanded the passage into a scriptural defense of Black slavery, converting a land-claim narrative into one of the central religious justifications for racial hierarchy in the Atlantic world. Source: State Buryat Republic Art Museum, Ulan-Ude.
The story’s original purpose
Across the American South ministers began constructing a systematic theological defense of slavery. Sermons and pamphlets circulated widely, arguing that the institution had been sanctioned by the Bible itself. The argument rested on several passages from the New Testament. In letters attributed to the apostle Paul, enslaved people were instructed to obey their masters. These verses were presented as evidence that slavery existed in biblical society and that the Christian scriptures regulated the institution rather than condemning it outright.
If the apostles had tolerated slavery, pro-slavery ministers argued, then modern Christians could not declare it sinful.
One of the most influential defenders of this view was James Henry Thornwell, a prominent southern minister whose sermons and writings circulated widely in the decades before the Civil War. Thornwell insisted that slavery was not merely a necessary economic institution but a social system consistent with divine order. God, he argued, had structured human society through hierarchies—parents over children, rulers over subjects, masters over slaves.
Another influential figure, Richard Furnan, produced an essay in 1822 defending slavery as compatible with Christianity. Furman argued that if slavery had existed among the ancient Israelites and within the early Christian world, it could not be inherently immoral.
But the most powerful theological claim emerged from a story in the Book of Genesis.
In that passage, after the flood, Noah curses the descendants of his son Ham through Ham’s son Canaan. The text itself says nothing about race. Yet pro-slavery writers transformed the story into a racial doctrine that linked African ancestry to divine punishment. The so-called “Curse of Ham” became a central pillar in the intellectual defense of slavery across the Atlantic world.
It was a distortion of the biblical text, but it served a clear political purpose. If African peoples were believed to carry a divine mark of servitude, then slavery could be presented not as a human crime but as the fulfillment of a divine decree.
These interpretations did not remain confined to theological debates among ministers. They moved outward into the daily life of plantation society.
Sunday services on plantations often featured sermons emphasizing obedience and submission. Passages from the Bible were carefully selected. The story of Moses confronting Pharaoh—one of the most powerful narratives of liberation in the Hebrew Bible—rarely appeared in the sermons delivered to enslaved congregations. Instead ministers focused on verses that reinforced hierarchy and patience in suffering.
Religion thus became part of the plantation’s system of discipline.
Meanwhile the economic machine of slavery expanded with extraordinary speed. The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s dramatically increased the profitability of cotton production. As global demand for cotton grew, enslaved labor became the foundation of one of the most lucrative agricultural systems in the world. By the middle of the nineteenth century the American South supplied the majority of the cotton used by textile mills in Britain and New England.
The wealth generated by that labor flowed far beyond the plantations themselves. Banks financed slave purchases. Insurance companies wrote policies on enslaved people. Northern merchants shipped cotton across the Atlantic. Railroads and ports expanded to move the harvest to market.
Behind that economic system stood millions of enslaved people whose labor had been confiscated through law and violence.
Yet even within this world of surveillance and coercion, the meaning of the Bible remained contested.
Enslaved people encountered the same scriptures used to justify their bondage, but they read them differently. In secret gatherings—sometimes called “hush harbors”—enslaved communities developed their own interpretations of Christian teaching. There the Bible became a source of hope rather than submission.
The story that resonated most deeply was the Exodus.
In that narrative the Israelites lived in bondage in Egypt until God raised a leader—Moses—who confronted Pharaoh and demanded freedom for his people. The story circulated through spirituals sung quietly in cabins and fields: songs about crossing the Jordan River, about leaving the land of Pharaoh behind.
For enslaved people, the Bible did not describe a fixed social hierarchy. It described a God who judged tyrants and liberated the oppressed.
This competing interpretation eventually surfaced publicly through abolitionist movements. Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass drew sharp distinctions between what Douglass called “the Christianity of Christ” and the pro-slavery religion practiced by many southern churches. In speeches and writings Douglass argued that slavery represented a corruption of Christianity rather than its fulfillment.
By the 1850s the conflict between these interpretations had become one of the central ideological battles in American society. Churches divided along sectional lines. Northern and southern denominations split over the question of slavery. Ministers on both sides of the debate quoted the same scriptures while reaching opposite conclusions.
When the Civil War finally erupted in 1861, it was not only a military conflict over the future of the Union. It was also, as historian Mark Noll later observed, a profound theological crisis.
For decades slaveholders had insisted that their system was rooted in biblical truth. But the war forced Americans to confront a stark question: whether scripture had been used to reveal divine justice—or to defend a system built on the forced labor of millions.
The cotton fields remained where they had always been, stretching across the southern landscape.
But the meaning of the Bible within that landscape had changed forever.
Read Part I:
What God Hath Wrought: From Papal Bull to the Trail of Tears
Image: Tenskwatawa, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief. Portrait by George Catlin, 1830/1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum.Thanks for reading 400 Years! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Read Part III:
The Lords of the Land: Israel in Canaan
Image: Hajj Mahmoud, 84 years old, in his olive grove. Source: Electronic Intifada at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/olive-harvest-palestine-photos-and-videoThanks for reading 400 Years! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Intellectual Map
Primary sources
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855.
https://archive.org/details/mybondagemyfree00doug/page/n8/mode/1up
Furman, Richard, “Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States in Communication to the Governor of South Carolina,” Charleston, 1823. Reprinted in Rogers, James A. Richard Furman: Life and Legacy. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985. 274-286. December 24, 1822
https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc/exposition-views-baptists-relative-coloured-population
Helper, Hinton Rowan, and others, eds. The Impending Crisis of the South. New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html
Jones, Charles Colcock. The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States. Savannah, GA: Thomas Purse, 1842.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html
Thornwell, James Henley. The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell. 4 vols. Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1871–1873.
https://archive.org/details/collectedwriting04thor/page/n6/mode/1up
Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Boston: Printed for the Author, 1875.
https://archive.org/details/collectedwriting04thor/page/n6/mode/1up
Secondary works
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
https://archive.org/details/slavecommunitypl0000blas/page/n8/mode/1up
Daly, John Patrick. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
https://archive.org/details/ideologyofslaver0000uns
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene D. Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
https://archive.org/details/mindofmasterclas0000foxg
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
https://archive.org/details/rolljordanrollwo0000geno_i2q9/page/n6/mode/1up
Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Knopf 1997.
https://archive.org/details/southerncrossbeg0000heyr
Irons, Charles F. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-BON-912
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. https://archive.org/details/godraceinamerica0000noll
Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
https://archive.org/details/civilwarastheolo0000noll/page/n6/mode/1up
Putnam, Mary Burnham. The Baptists and Slavery, 1840–1845. Ann Arbor, MI: G. Wahr, 1913.
https://ia801705.us.archive.org/4/items/baptistsslavery102putn/baptistsslavery102putn.pdf
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. Updated ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.