Author: Frederick Augustus Ross Reverend

Frederick Augustus Ross Reverend served as a Presbyterian minister in nineteenth-century Kingsport, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama. He became known for defending slavery through biblical argument during the intensifying American dispute over the institution. Slavery Ordained of God, issued by J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia in 1857, gathers speeches delivered before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and related letters and commentary. The volume belongs to controversial religious literature and is valuable today as primary evidence of how a proslavery clergyman tried to give a political and economic system theological legitimacy. Its arguments should be read critically within the debates that preceded the Civil War, not as neutral religious instruction. Ross’s public role shows how ministers participated directly in national arguments over scripture, authority, and human bondage. Abolitionist writing and modern scholarship on churches and slavery provide essential counterpoints to this revealing record of religious advocacy.