Baptists, Gradualism, and Azem

From the first suggestion from the editors that I should place Humanity in Algiers in the context of regional Baptist publications of the early 19th Century, I have only been able to read this account as a lapsed Baptist reader looking for some historical insight into what it used to mean to be Baptist.  What it means to be Baptist now often carries associations with racism, sexism (resistance to women in ministry), homophobia (as in Westboro Baptist Church), moral legalism, and a noted preoccupation with the afterlife at the expense of present human suffering.  Aside from the often overlooked distinction among contemporary Baptist denominations--some of which ordain women and even openly affirm gay church members--one must note the historical differences between the roughly “Northern” and “Southern” traditions galvanized in the 19th century; while northern congregations (now historically the American Baptists) would not ordain missionaries who owned slaves, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 partly on the grounds of the Biblical affirmation of slave ownership.  Over 40 years earlier, an anonymous writer submitted Humanity in Algiers for publication with Robert Moffit for a Baptist, even interracial, readership, and suddenly the question of slavery among Baptists in the 19th century becomes explicitly transnational.

Two aspects of Azem’s approach to slavery stand out to me in light of the Baptist response: faith in God’s providence and gradualism.  Lemuel Haynes, the influential African American Baptist minister noted in the introduction to Humanity in Algiers, was known, in addition to his staunch abolitionism, for his Calvinism.  According to several sources (including an early collection of Haynes’ writings collected by a Timothy Mather Cooley in 1836), many Baptists in the tri-state area were committed to the notion that God’s providence would ultimately end slavery in the US, and this theological emphasis perhaps accounts for the lack of political advocacy among Baptists sympathetic to abolition in the early 19th Century.  At various points in Humanity in Algiers, we see the characters, particularly in consideration the process for buying a slave’s freedom, say “in accordance with the laws of this country.” There is no mention of actually changing those laws, and so it often goes with a providential framework that is prone to place more emphasis on faith than action.  This is further reinforced by Azem’s decision, at the urging of Omri, not to run away from his master and “To have patience, and thou shalt be free.”

As the editors of the story note, Baptist abolitionists largely advocated for a gradualist approach to ending slavery, and we certainly see this reflected in the text.  Perhaps the most notable example comes when Omri, the architect behind Azem’s freedom, suggests that Azem serve each of Sequida and Selictor’s children for one year each in order to earn his manumission.  After Omri interprets Sequida’s dream and the family relents, the narrator underscores the speed at which Azem perceives his freedom coming: “The five years seemed to him but a day.”  One of the reasons I find the emphasis on gradualism so interesting involves the analogous debates, particularly among Baptists, during the US Civil Rights Movement in response to Jim Crow segregation.  Probably the most famous Baptist of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, Jr. intentionally focused his rhetoric against the gradualist argument in both Why We Can’t Wait and the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was in itself a specific response to the publicized advocacy for gradualism among clergy in Birmingham in 1963.  Theologically, King found the license for his political advocacy from, among others like Reinhold Niebuhr and Gandhi, the Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbush, whose idea of the “social gospel” emphasized the need for social action as opposed to an inactive commitment to providential prayer.  Humanity in Algiers, while still evidencing a detached and gradualist approach to abolition, provides evidence for the more nuanced approach to the horrors of slavery than historical Baptists are often given credit for, and I am thankful for the archival research that went into the recovery of this lost piece of literature that was undoubtedly consumed by US Baptist Christians as they discerned how to respond to the most pressing expression of human suffering in their time.