Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible

Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible is an antislavery tract by Isaac Allen (1817-1903), an American Congregationalist clergyman who entered the long mid-nineteenth-century pamphlet debate over the biblical defence of American chattel slavery. The book engages with the arguments that proslavery writers drew from the Old Testament Hebrew slave codes and from the New Testament passages on slavery, and argues that the biblical material does not sanction the system of race-based hereditary chattel slavery practised in the American South. Allen’s tract belongs to the body of Northern Protestant antislavery writing that ran alongside the political abolitionist movement in the years before the Civil War. The piece is a primary source for nineteenth-century American religious debate over slavery. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.