How Did Francis Wayland Contribute To Antislavery?

Nineteenth-century Brown University president Francis Wayland has been celebrated for his contribution to antislavery arguments on the basis of the Bible. His arguments amount to a “signal moment in American moral history” (Noll 2006) because, more than simply providing a biblical articulation of the injustice of the slave racial regime, they entailed a practical method for its gradual, civil, and nonviolent abolition (Marsden 1996). Taking Francis Wayland’s arguments as a historical case study, this paper shows how his antislavery writings contributed to the production of racialized difference by mapping race as the criteria of tolerable and intolerable violence. This paper therefore aims to complicate the reception of Wayland by attending
to how his optimism about the potential of dialogical reform, and gradual abolitionism generally, depends upon the moral illegibility of persistent racialized violence in US slave society.

One of the lasting achievements of nineteenth-century Brown University president Francis Wayland was his contribution to antislavery arguments on the basis of the Bible.
Amid proslavery theologians leveraging biblical traditions for the justification of racial slavery, Wayland provided a principled argument for abolition which gave the Bible back, so to speak, to the antislavery cause. These arguments were noteworthy because, more than providing reasons for the injustice of the slave regime, they entailed a practical method for its gradual, civil, and safe abolition. Wayland set out to perform his hopes for a yet civilized society in his debate with proslavery advocates like Richard Fuller, believing in the powers of dialogue and pedagogy to reform US slave society. As a “prophet of practical orientation” who made these arguments in the context of political enmity and strife (Marsden 1996), Wayland has been celebrated for his unique contribution to the moral canons of US antebellum society, which, according to Mark Noll, amount to nothing less than the “signal moment in American moral history” (Noll
2006). Taking Francis Wayland’s arguments against slavery as a historical case study, this paper shows how his antislavery writings participated in the production of racialized difference by mapping race as of marker of tolerable and intolerable violence. It therefore aims to complicate the celebrationist reception of Wayland by attending to the subtle yet pernicious racialization that underwrites his moral case for slave society’s gradual abolition and its transformation to a true civil society. Specifically, Wayland emphasizes the indirection of the Bible’s witness against slavery, a move which conceptualizes abolition as a form of moral pedagogy and dialogue. Ane indirect prohibition is different than a direct prohibition, and, for Wayland, this difference has everything to do with violence. If slavery is directly undermined by the Bible, according to Wayland, this could imply that slavery must be abolished immediately, according to what Anthony Reed calls “freedom time,” and thus legitimate any (violent) means necessary (Reed 2014). For Wayland, the indirect prohibition makes possible the slow time of gradual abolition so that a nonviolent horizon of slavery’s resolution comes into view, for such slowness procures room for the powers of pedagogy and dialogue to reform the moral imagination of the slaveholding regime without the need for violent means. Or, put another way, Wayland’s gradualist position pivots on separating the ethical critique of slavery from the temporal protocols of immediate abolition. Wayland’s coupling of the ethics of nonviolence with extended, slow time, however, betrays a distinction between the kinds of people for whom violence is tolerable.
That is to say, Wayland’s argument for nonviolence depends upon the temporal persistence of enslavement—a kind of slow violence (Nixon 2011)—since this temporal extension procures the slaveholding regime’s conversion from moral malformation to moral enlightenment. This position coheres to the extent that enslaved peoples are excluded from ethical considerations of non/violence. Just so, Wayland’s gradualist antislavery ethics imply a racial analytic; his antislavery ethics are articulated within a “metalanguage” of race (Higginbotham 1992). The case of “antislavery men” like Wayland (Sinha 2016) displays the racialization of the ethics of gradual abolitionism, particularly how arguments for the gradual abolition figure racial difference in terms of the visibility of non/violence, and therefore also displays the structural limits of pedagogy and dialogue as an antebellum abolitionist theory and
practice. This argument is made by tracing two specific moments in Wayland’s antislavery writings. First, it attends to Wayland’s writings to William Lloyd Garrison in the early 1830s on the publication of the Liberator. Wayland writes to Garrison in 1831:
“I believe as strongly as any other man that slavery is very wicked, and very destructive to the best interests both of master and slave. But this does not seem to me to decide that immediate emancipation of all slaves in the U.S. should be either wise or unjust…Should [an insurrection] ever occur, I am sure that you or I would rather have lost our right hand than have written a word which should have contributed in the least degree to hasten it” (as quoted in Hill 2011).
Wayland’s interaction with Garrison is significant in two ways. First, it stakes Wayland’s early position that registers the wickedness of racial slavery without agreeing to the need for immediate abolition. Second, it shows that Wayland does not recognize the legitimacy of black abolitionism, as indicated by his fear of resistance and insurrection (Robinson 1997). A second critical moment is found in his debates with proslavery theologian Richard Fuller in the mid-1840s. These debates showcase the most sophisticated versions of Wayland’s gradual abolitionist arguments, and thus reveal a subdued, but no less determinate, racialized rhetoric of white supremacy in the form of an antislavery moral argumentation. Together these two moments allow for the identification of continuity in Wayland’s ethics with regard to the Bible, gradualism, and abolitionism, as well as an enduring optimism in pedagogical and dialogical means of overcoming the racial regime of slavery, despite the changing political context. While religious historians have praised Wayland for just these virtues, sustained attention to the logic of non/violence discloses how racialization governs Wayland’s justification for making time for pedagogical reform and civil dialogue in hope of reforming the slaveholding class.