comments:
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." John Brown and other Christian abolitionists took this as the "Constitution" part of the Bible that superseded individual laws (equivalent in this analogy to local laws). There is also "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" from Exodus 21:16, which actually is "following the bible to the letter" as you said. To Brown, setting aside the morality of owning a slave as a result of war, the only condition for slavery in the US by the 19th century was purely commercialism, heightened and accelerated beyond what the Bible's authors could have ever imagined. To Brown, every slave in the US was a product of kidnapping and commerce. Sith slave owners in the US cast as systemically-enriched monsters, following the Bible literally meant carrying out the orders of the Old Testament in executing them for their highest of crimes. Brown also saw that southern slavers used the Bible as justification for slavery—but not any laws about slavery. Instead they supported their own sense of racial hierarchy with cherry picked passages of the Bible. So to them, slavery was legal and right not because "slavery is legal" but because "the Bible tells us that these are not even human beings." Brown also read Acts 17: 24 God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; 25 Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; 26 And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; And found that acts like enslavement were blasphemy against god, as it is equivalent to trying to enslave god himself. And speaking of going directly against the Bible, the Fugitive Slave Law went directly against the Old Testament which forbids anyone from returning an escaped slave to back to their master. Not to mention that in general slaves of the Bible had various protections—I mean, it's slavery still, so obviously still shitty, but...—the slaves of the United States weren't slaves as much as they were property. I think of the book They Were Her Property as a source explicitly laying out that terminology and outcomes that emerged from it. No one fully uses the Bible literally, and slavers from the South were as much "see, it says so right here!" about topics of the day as the guy in the OP's video. But if anyone did, John Brown was more literal in his interpretation of what mattered most.