Slavery and sacred texts : the Bible, the Constitution, and historical consciousness in antebellum America

Resource Information

The work Slavery and sacred texts : the Bible, the Constitution, and historical consciousness in antebellum America represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Slavery and sacred texts : the Bible, the Constitution, and historical consciousness in antebellum America

Title remainder

the Bible, the Constitution, and historical consciousness in antebellum America

Statement of responsibility

Jordan T. Watkins

Creator

• Watkins, Jordan T

Subject

• Slavery -- Religious aspects
• Slavery -- United States -- History -- 19th century
• Bible
• United States, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
• Slavery and the church -- United States -- History -- 19th century

Language

eng

Summary

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.--

Member of

• Cambridge historical studies in American law and society

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

• Cambridge historical studies in American law and society
• Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks