Leonard Bacon
“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”
As “Yale, Slavery and Abolition” records, some graduates of Timothy Dwight’s Yale, such as John C. Calhoun and Samuel F. B. Morse, were in fact defenders of slavery. But giving Dwight credit for their opinions is a stretch, if for no other reason than that many of his students, and the students of his successors at Yale, were staunchly opposed to slavery.
Timothy Dwight foresaw that slavery would be eliminated in the United States, but the fulfillment of his vision tarried. Three years after his death, the 1820 decision to receive Missouri as a slave state proved that the “peculiar institution” was far from dead, and roused many northerners to oppose slavery publicly.
Jeremiah Evarts, Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and a graduate of Dwight’s Yale, published in 1820 a series of antislavery articles in his board’s journal, The Panoplist and Missionary Herald.
The student Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions at Andover Seminary held formal discussions on slavery, and assigned Leonard Bacon (Yale, 1820) to write a report on the subject. Bacon later testified that in doing his research, he found “nothing . . . . more helpful” than Evarts’s articles. He was also strongly influenced by Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s fiery 1791 sermon The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, and of the Slavery of the Africans.1
Bacon’s slavery report was printed and circulated, then published in revised form in New Haven’s Christian Spectator. In 1825, he returned to New Haven to become pastor of the Center Church. Later, along with Yale tutor Theodore Dwight Woolsey (later Yale President, 1846-1871), and three other young men, he formed both “The Anti-Slavery Association,” and a benevolence organization called the “African Improvement Society.” The Improvement Society helped organize schools, a library, and a savings bank for African Americans, and supported New Haven’s first black church, the Temple Street Church, then pastored by Simeon S. Jocelyn. The board of the Improvement Society included both blacks and whites, and thus constituted a direct challenge to racial prejudice in the city.2
Leonard Bacon continued to speak and write against slavery, and in 1846 he published a compilation of his work titled Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays. The Dictionary of American Biography says about Bacon’s book:
“This fell into the hands of a comparatively unknown lawyer in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. A statement in the preface made a profound impression on the future emancipator: ‘If that form of government, that system of social order is not wrong,—if those laws of the southern states, by virtue of which slavery exists there and is what it is, are not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ The sentiment reappeared in Lincoln’s famous declaration, ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’”
Lincoln credited the book with shaping his mind on the issue of slavery.
Some even in Leonard Bacon’s own congregation opposed his antislavery activities, but about this he said: “I make no complaint—all reproaches, all insults endured in a conflict with so gigantic a wickedness against God and man, are to be received and remembered, not as injuries but as honors.”3
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1. Robert Cholerton Senior, New England Congregationalists and the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830-1860, (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms Inc., [1954]), pp. 34-36.
2. Senior, New England Congregationalists, pp. 36-39. See also Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History, (New York, Arno Press, 1969), pp. 46-47. Authorities give varying dates for the foundation of "The Anti-Slavery Association" and the "African Improvement Society."
3. Dictionary of American Biography, (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), p. 481.
© 2002 The Yale Standard Committee