Proslavery Millennialism: Social Eschatology in Antebellum Southern Calvinism

Abstract

Where there is no vision, people perish. Despite their pietistic tendencies, most them took a comprehensive eschatological view world's future. The ancient expectation millennium-a thousand years societal bliss-animated their hope for social progress. Most made expectation an affirmation, not a denial, their society. They were not millenarians who longed for a cataclysm to erase a they rejected, but progressive millennialists who hoped that gradual development would convert the kingdoms this world into those of our Lord and his Christ.'I The deepest faith they could invest in their social system was to believe that God was shaping it into form future millennial society. The future society was precisely issue in slavery controversy. The political contests about slavery focused question national goals-whether slavery or wage labor would eventually be American system. Historians have shown that a free-labor Christian millennialism contributed much to antislavery cause.2 Teaching that emancipation would advance millennium, Northern churchmen attested their faith