Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield

This is an important book. It is not a work of history, either in style or content, though it is informed by extensive historical reading. McGever himself describes it in his first chapter as the fruits of a process of ‘historical retrieval’—‘the easy part’, he suggests—leading to a call for the reader to respond (3). It offers a lively narrative about the lives, work, and beliefs of three key figures in eighteenth-century religious history, focusing on their engagement with slavery: these are John Wesley (1703–91), George Whitefield (1714–70), and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). McGever starts from the reasonable proposition that collectively these three preachers offer valuable insights into the varying ways in which eighteenth-century Christians reacted to the system of enslavement.The book is well structured, its four parts forming a broadly chronological sequence. In part one, McGever introduces the three men in his second chapter, while chapter 3 offers useful context in discussing the ubiquity of slavery in many different times and places, though I would have welcomed some mention of the Indian subcontinent, where the scale of slavery exceeded that of the American South. Chapter 4 rounds off this introductory section of the book by discussing the theological concepts and understandings that surrounded enslavement and permitted its continuance. The author rightly starts with the centrality of providence in this framing (though does not use the term), but I was surprised that the ‘curse of Ham’, a perverted interpretation of Genesis 9 that Wesley cited in his seminal 1774 pamphlet Thoughts upon Slavery, is not considered.In part two of the volume, McGever addresses successively how his three subjects encountered slavery, and how they responded. The stories may not be new, but they are told with verve and colour, and the author draws insightful contrasts between his three principals. Both Whitefield and Edwards became enslavers; Wesley did not. But this section sets up what is for Wesleyan readers the key conundrum about Wesley’s behaviour, which McGever then considers in a chapter entitled ‘Wesley’s Thirty-Seven-Year silence’ (chapter 8).Historians often struggle to understand why figures in the past did what they did; in this chapter McGever sets himself the even more challenging task of trying to understand why Wesley did not do what we might well think he ought to have done. He offers two plausible explanations for the long delay before Wesley took action against slavery. First, when he encountered enslaved Africans in 1730s Georgia: ‘His enthusiasm for evangelism blinded him to the evil institution in front of him’ (74). And second, for Wesley but not for Whitefield or Edwards, the system of enslavement was for decades not a daily reality with which he had to engage. In McGever’s provocative chapter conclusion: ‘Wesley had no plantations in America. If he had in this era—up to around 1772—I believe he would have purchased slaves’ (120).In part three, McGever recounts how first the Quakers and then Wesley came to adopt the anti-slavery cause, offering the useful insight (which he credits to Randy Maddox) that Wesley’s changed stance reflected his ‘maturing eschatology’ (138) as well as his reading and observation of the eighteenth-century world.In part four, the author first discusses (chapter 11) the longer-term legacies that the three men left from their responses to the system of enslavement. For both Edwards and Whitefield, he describes the relatively modest impact that their ambiguous views had over time, considering the discomfort of some librarians in holding Edwards’s works, and the changing use of the site of Whitefield’s Bethesda orphanage. It is at this point in the argument that the overall structure of the book is perhaps less helpful, as Wesley’s position inevitably demands more extensive treatment. For Wesley, in contrast, the legacy ‘is magnified through the growth and checkered history of early Methodists’ varied approaches to slavery’ (160). Here (as elsewhere) McGever concentrates on the American experience, though the internal struggles of British Methodism in reaching a coherent strong stance against enslavement, culminating in the agonies surrounding the pro-slavery ‘Jamaica Resolutions’ of 1824, is also a story worth the telling.The book concludes with a chapter (12) labelled ‘Ownership today’. This is unusual and thought-provoking in seeking to draw out some lessons for the present-day reader, including lists of questions to prompt self-analysis. It is, however, somewhat disconcerting to realize, from the book’s final sentence, that its intended readership is highly specific: ‘Fellow White American evangelicals’, the author appeals, ‘may we own our past and let it shape how we own our lives and legacies’ (184).McGever is unusually present in the book; he is no shy academic. Sometimes I found this obtrusive, as in this opening to chapter 5, ostensibly about ‘Wesley in Georgia’: ‘I woke up in Savannah, Georgia, early one Sunday morning to drive to a small church at the end of a back road. I stopped at a Waffle House for their famous All-Star Special [which British readers would recognize as a ‘full English’]. Stuffed, I drove farther and farther’ (67).While McGever, unlike many commentators, is careful to distinguish between opponents of slavery and those who attacked only the slave trade rather than the institution, he understates the complexities of contemporary thinking on enslavement. Many people of the period, such as the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, the leading Methodist missionary Thomas Coke (himself briefly a slaveholder), and arguably Wesley himself, saw the case for the scientific and relatively humane management of slave plantations, through which the enslaved populations of the Caribbean would become demographically self-sustaining, and the costly transatlantic trade in kidnapped Africans would wither away. And there are occasional lapses: thus, theologian Matthew Henry drops a ‘t’ on page 52, while the Methodist ex-mariner Silas Told features as Silas Todd (112).But these are minor blemishes. McGever’s book addresses a topic of huge interest; is easy to read and engages the reader; is written in a spirit of sympathy and generosity that eschews easy condemnation of our forebears; and provokes reflection while also nudging the reader toward personal action. These are significant virtues indeed.