How Did Francis Wayland Contribute To Antislavery?

Nineteenth-century Brown University president Francis Wayland has been celebrated for his contribution to antislavery arguments on the basis of the Bible. His arguments amount to a “signal moment in American moral history” (Noll 2006) because, more than simply providing a biblical articulation of the injustice of the slave racial regime, they entailed a practical method for its gradual, civil, and nonviolent abolition (Marsden 1996). Taking Francis Wayland’s arguments as a historical case study, this paper shows how his antislavery writings contributed to the production of racialized difference by mapping race as the criteria of tolerable and intolerable violence. This paper therefore aims to complicate the reception of Wayland by attending
Amid proslavery theologians leveraging biblical traditions for the justification of racial slavery, Wayland provided a principled argument for abolition which gave the Bible back, so to speak, to the antislavery cause. These arguments were noteworthy because, more than providing reasons for the injustice of the slave regime, they entailed a practical method for its gradual, civil, and safe abolition. Wayland set out to perform his hopes for a yet civilized society in his debate with proslavery advocates like Richard Fuller, believing in the powers of dialogue and pedagogy to reform US slave society. As a “prophet of practical orientation” who made these arguments in the context of political enmity and strife (Marsden 1996), Wayland has been celebrated for his unique contribution to the moral canons of US antebellum society, which, according to Mark Noll, amount to nothing less than the “signal moment in American moral history” (Noll
That is to say, Wayland’s argument for nonviolence depends upon the temporal persistence of enslavement—a kind of slow violence (Nixon 2011)—since this temporal extension procures the slaveholding regime’s conversion from moral malformation to moral enlightenment. This position coheres to the extent that enslaved peoples are excluded from ethical considerations of non/violence. Just so, Wayland’s gradualist antislavery ethics imply a racial analytic; his antislavery ethics are articulated within a “metalanguage” of race (Higginbotham 1992). The case of “antislavery men” like Wayland (Sinha 2016) displays the racialization of the ethics of gradual abolitionism, particularly how arguments for the gradual abolition figure racial difference in terms of the visibility of non/violence, and therefore also displays the structural limits of pedagogy and dialogue as an antebellum abolitionist theory and