Abraham's Servants.

In the case of Abraham, the language used in scripture is decisive of the fact that “he had servants bought with money of the stranger.” But with what mutual understanding they were bought, or what their condition in his family was, we are not particularly informed. The terms employed would not be inapplicable, we suppose, to the purchase of slaves in the sense you maintain ; as there is no word in the Hebrew peculiarly significant of one in that condition. But a possibility, and a certainty, that such was the nature of the purchase, are two things entirely distinct. The mere purchase of persons, as we have seen in the case of Hebrew wives, is no proof that those who were thus purchased were considered as property, or held as slaves. The language used in regard to Abraham's servants does not necessarily imply any more than that he, by paying down money, procured these persons to remain with and serve him, permanently. That their servitude was not constrained, but voluntary, and as really for their advantage as his own, is made highly probable by the consideration that no force whatever was required to retain them. They married; they were, with their children, incorporated into his great family; and all the males were, in the same way with himself and his own sons, dedicated to the service of his and their covenant God. Unprotected by any government on earth, he, with his wife, and immense herds and flocks, was safe under the guardianship of those brave and faithful men while surrounded by heathen tribes and removing from place to place.— They promptly followed him in arms, when his kinsman Lot had been plundered and led captive by hostile kings, and, by a decisive engagement, delivered him out of their hands. One of them was commissioned to contract, at his own discretion, with a damsel to become the wife of his young master, Isaac; while the parties were wholly unacquainted with each other; and, in case Abraham had died childless, was to have been his heir. They were Abraham's people, they looked up to him, not as their oppressor, but common friend; and were, evidently, not only voluntary, but happy in his service. We see not then with what propriety the example of Abraham can be so confidently quoted in defence of the American slave system. The contrast between the condition of his servants, and that of your Southern slaves, is not only manifest but immense.

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Continued from: Reverend Silas McKeen to Thomas C. Stuart, August 20, 1839

SOURCE: Cyrus P. Grosvenor, Slavery vs. The Bible: A Correspondence Between the General Conference of Maine, and the Presbytery of Tombecbee, Mississippi, p. 43-5