The Religious Roots of the Abolition Movement

How did American Christians in the nineteenth century come to see slavery as something that needed to be abolished? Christianity was a central feature of nineteenth-century American life for both slaveholders and anti-slavery activists. To argue persuasively against slavery, abolitionists had to find ways to use the Bible and Christian tradition, along with American patriotic and domestic ideals, to make their case.

 Carl Bernhard Wadström, although Swedish, was a central figure in the British abolition movement. He was born in Stockholm in 1746. He established a society in Norköpping, Sweden, in 1779, which worked to establish a colony in Africa built on agricultural trade as an alternative to slavery. This was continued by the Exegetical and Philanthropic Society, which Wadström co-founded in 1786.

The anti-slavery programmes pursued by the societies were partly predicated on central tenets in the writings of the Swedish mystic and seer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg held the belief that the "African race" was "in greater enlightenment than others on this earth, since they are such that they think more interiorly, and so receive truths and acknowledge them" (A Treatise concerning the Last Judgment, n. 118). Swedenborg had further declared that there existed a hidden African Church, whose members apprehended unmediated truth. These ideas provided intellectual fuel for the abolitionist cause and compelled several Swedenborgians to travel to Africa.

In 1787, the Swedish King Gustaf III subsidised a venture to establish a West African colony, which would blend investment with philanthropy by trading with the Africans. Wadström was sent as the head of an expedition to Guinea to find a suitable location. In the colonies he visited, he saw evidence of the brutality of the slave trade. 

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