Gloria
Puritan Board Sophomore
The Rev. Alexander McLeod was among the earliest American Presbyterians in opposing slavery. In 1802 he refused to serve a congregation where there were slaveholders. His stand prompted the Reformed Presbyterians to excommunicate unrepentant slaveholders. Upon receiving word of the Synod's decision, the RP congregation in South Carolina freed their slaves, with their obedience costing them about $500,000 in today's money (and this was probably a small congregation of just 4-6 families).
McLeod's treatise against slavery is online at The Practice of Holding Men in Perpetual Slavery Condemned. This same work is sometimes titled Negro Slavery Unjustifiable.
Obviously, it is extremely difficult to defend certain aspects of Southern slavery, but was excommunication justifiable? Slaveholders appear to have been members in good standing in the Apostolic Church. I'll look over the link at a later time, but I'm curious to see what, in McLeod's mind, was different. My first thought is that it would have been far better for slaveholders to be encouraged to train and prepare slaves to live as free men, with a goal toward them earning their freedom, and admonished to treat them with the respect due to one created in God's image in the mean-time.
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