Cardinal Newman: pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy

One of many comforting tales the British informed themselves within the Nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that they have been implacably against slavery.

Britons had determined “that the shame of slavery shouldn’t be suffered to stay a part of our nationwide system”, or so Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary in the intervening time of abolition, maintained. It was a declare willingly accepted by later generations. The 1833 Act that abolished slavery in Britain’s Atlantic empire mirrored the undivided nationwide will.

However current scholarship casts doubt on that verdict. The West Indian planters, who held lots of of hundreds in bondage, have been well-connected and influential. The releasing of their captive employees didn’t appear to them inevitable. Many abolitionists thought the identical, despairing on the entrenched energy of the slave masters.

When slavery went, it went as a result of a sequence of political crises in Britain splintered the pro-slavery Tory coalition that had dominated politics for many years. It ended too as a result of resistance by the enslaved within the Caribbean satisfied legislators in London that slavery was now not sustainable. However not all commentators have been persuaded that slavery needed to go.

Newman and the Oxford Motion

Certainly one of them was John Henry Newman (1801-1890), fellow of Oriel Faculty Oxford and the vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford’s college church.

Newman was some of the vital churchmen of the age. Finally obtained into the Roman Catholic church in 1845, he turned probably the most influential English Catholic of the Nineteenth century. He was made a cardinal in 1879, and in 2019 he was canonised. For that cause, Newman’s identify is connected to dozens of Roman Catholic colleges and faculties in Britain, in addition to a college within the West Midlands.

However earlier than his conversion, he was a number one determine within the Oxford Motion, a excessive church group that wished to resume the institutional authority of Anglicanism by emphasising its rootedness within the early church. Interesting to scripture, the trail favoured by Evangelical Anglicans, was dismissed as inadequate.

There have been political penalties. Evangelicals of the time tended in the direction of anti-slavery. The clergymen who made up the Oxford Motion didn’t. Certainly, notes ready by John Henry Newman for a sermon at Oxford in 1835 reveal that he was profoundly hostile to the concept of emancipation.

Preaching in opposition to emancipation

Abolitionist rhetoric about human brotherhood was brushed apart. “It’s a very straightforward factor,” Newman informed his congregation, “to speak of loving all males”. However may his congregation, have been they to be whisked from their cloistered lives in Oxford to the West Indies, achieve this in follow? Newman thought not:

It’s stated to be some of the tough duties of our Ministers to steer white males to obtain the Holy Communion with blacks. I don’t say such reluctance is a lightweight sin – it’s a severe one – but maybe we must always really feel strongly tempted to it if we lived within the international locations the place they’re to be discovered. I don’t doubt we must always.

An aversion to communing with black folks was, Newman prompt, fairly comprehensible. It could require white folks to hurdle an insurmountable racial barrier.

Having established, in his personal thoughts a minimum of, that racial repulsion was instinctual, Newman turned to the matter of slavery. As was ordinary with clerical defenders of slavery, Newman reached for the epistles of St Paul. Taking Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians as his textual content, the vicar of St Mary’s got here to this conclusion:

Now we discover in these phrases a doctrine said, very startlingly and unpalatable to males of today, however which is most clear and sure and contained in different elements of Scripture – viz that slavery is a situation of life ordained by God…

Modern abolitionists who drew upon the gospel when criticising slavery did so with out warrant. They have been responsible of uttering “idle and false phrases”. Warming to his theme, Newman went on to rail in opposition to reformers extra usually. Their discuss of “liberty, equality, rights, privileges, and the like” was offensive to God.

Assessing Newman

Historic figures, it’s typically stated, must be assessed by the requirements of their very own time. But John Henry Newman’s venomous sermon, coming little greater than a 12 months after the tip of slavery within the British sugar islands, reminds us that the “requirements of the time” have been plural.

Many Britons of the 1830s gloried in abolition, however there have been many others who have been content material with slavery and racial subjugation. And there have been some, like Newman, who have been prepared to say so in provocative methods.

Newman’s phrases from 1835 have been forgotten, however John Henry Newman has not. College students and educators at these establishments that bear his identify may wish to contemplate whether or not it ought to proceed to be so connected.