Description
This study examines how the separation of church and state created a new political space for women's benevolent work, including a system of public schools and a scheme for gradal emancipation of slaves (colonization). Driven by the imperatives of evangelical faith, women used "time and property from heaven" to establish black and white Sunday schools, and groom slaves for manumission and missionary work in Liberia. This project bridges conventional fields of women's history, religious history, and politics of slavery, suggesting that women's reform efforts had a decisive civil impact during a time of limited state government. Two influential church-ordained initiatives included a Sunday school system and auxiliaries for the American Colonial Society. Slaveholding women were lay leaders: teaching literacy and numeracy to poor whites and occasionally slaves. Converted slaves faced further grooming as future colonists and missionaries bound for west Africa. Some slaves, in contrast, created their own political agenda from the colonization plan, by pressing planters for immediate freedom or simply disappearing with newfound skills. This reform agenda, based on charitable contributions and volunteer labor, had political implications, as state legislators took notice in the 1830s. Black schools broke the law, and colonizationists received heavy-handed public criticism for inciting blacks, and undermining the stability of slavery in the antebellum era.
