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George Whitfield Persuaded to Oppose Slavery Before It's Legalised In Georgia

OwenM said:
An interesting scenario I saw proposed by Fred Clark on Slacktivist whilst catching up on my blogroll - does anyone think this could go anywhere?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slack...ampaign=Progressive+Christian&utm_content=491
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It’s an interesting PoD and I think there’s merit in exploring it further. Both of those men are crucial in the history of American slavery, and having something change between them could change the course American slavery dramatically once the years turn into decades.

We’ve tended to focus on 19th century abolitionism in the United States, or at least very late 18th century abolitionism as the prelude to the United States, but abolitionism was already spreading as an ideal within Christian - particularly Friend and Baptist - circles long before that. Shifting the Methodists in general toward an anti-slavery position like theirs - which this would, Whitfield’s influence going far beyond just the Georgia project - has a serious chance of weakening the position of Methodism in the South, but, given how powerful Methodism really was as a movement in the late 18th century U.S. (if we had adopted a state church for the entire country in 1789, it would have been Methodism), it also might lead toward a fundamental weakening of slave power at a moment when the cotton gin has not yet been developed, and might fatally weaken the power of the slavers when the 19th century comes around — if Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and, most urgently, Virginia end up with a tide against slavery by the early 19th century, combined with the fatal weakening of slavery in Georgia, the Deep South’s days as a slaving powerhouse could possibly be averted entirely.

Though that’s just one possible outcome.
 
It's a fascinating idea, certainly.
I don't know enough about Georgia in the period (apart from Clark's writings) to have much idea of who else might push for slavery - presumably it wasn't just Whitfield who saw potential advantages in it?
 
Incognitia said:
It's a fascinating idea, certainly.
I don't know enough about Georgia in the period (apart from Clark's writings) to have much idea of who else might push for slavery - presumably it wasn't just Whitfield who saw potential advantages in it?
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Georgia had been explicitly founded as slave free because of the habit of Spanish Florida to garrison their forts with escaped slaves.

But when nearby south Carolina was a slave state and a lot richer as a result, the temptation is always going to be there.
 
I think Ciclavex's idea is an interesting one - a slave power that is never great enough to seriously sustain itself or expand against ever-more-determined opposition - but I do wonder if the more likely path is Georgia becoming a slave state later rather than not-at-all.
Assuming that a *United States still eventually results, would abolitionism among Methodists as well as Quakers and (most)Baptists have much effect on the constitutional compromises behind the new nation? Or is that pathway sufficiently easily-butterflied that it's not really worth exploring?
Ahh, I wish I knew more about the late-colonial and early-US period, all I can do is raise more and more questions.
 
Ciclavex said:
if we had adopted a state church for the entire country in 1789, it would have been Methodism
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This leaps out at me.

Perhaps, if Britain's tolerance of French Catholics went further, and like how we promised slaves freedom we promised the Quebecois even further privileges or territorial expansion if they helped us defeat the revolutionaries, the Revolution takes on a whole religious dimension which obviously existed IOTL but was overshadowed, so when the Constitution is written, a Church of America is explicitly established on roughly Methodist lines (with an injection of Jeffersonian deism, no doubt) and reverence for the Constitution being what it is this strengthens the abolitionist cause very early on?
 
Mumby said:
This leaps out at me.

Perhaps, if Britain's tolerance of French Catholics went further, and like how we promised slaves freedom we promised the Quebecois even further privileges or territorial expansion if they helped us defeat the revolutionaries, the Revolution takes on a whole religious dimension which obviously existed IOTL but was overshadowed, so when the Constitution is written, a Church of America is explicitly established on roughly Methodist lines (with an injection of Jeffersonian deism, no doubt) and reverence for the Constitution being what it is this strengthens the abolitionist cause very early on?
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It’s not really practical for the United States to have a national established church at that stage in any timeline closely resembling ours; several of the states still had their own state churches, and they were not all the same state church. An attempt to impose a national church would have failed and probably brought down the union before it properly got going.

In a timeline just over that horizon, though, it would have been the Methodists, because the Methodist/Anglican split in the United States came to a great degree because the vast majority of the Anglican clergy in the United States were loyalist Tories, meaning that the clergy that Wesley created and sent to America were able to neatly step into the existing hierarchy’s place, which is a major part of what turned the proper hierarchy of the Church of England proper from disdain for Wesley into hostility and even hatred back in England.

The vast majority of Anglican churches and properties started ending up coming under Methodist control, and even when the Anglicans properly got themselves in order by getting a bishop authorized to create new bishops without a monarch’s blessing by the Scottish emissaries of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, who at that time was [checks notes] Bonnie Prince Charlie, and started to reestablish themselves, the Methodists had solidly taken their place as “the default sort of Christian” in the United States. Default, but not the majority, and not in OTL or any TL like OTL in position to impose themselves on the rest of the country, especially since they soon started to get into nasty fights with the newly rechristened Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States (the Methodists, at the time, were known as the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States — and both claimed to be the only true and proper successor to the Church of England as it had been in the former colonies, in every sense of the term, legal and ecclesiastical) over those churches and properties.
 
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